Screening

About Irene Taylor Brodsky

Year Released:

2012

Genres:

Irene Taylor Brodsky will discuss her award-winning documentary Hear and Now, a memoir about her deaf parents and their decision -- in the twilight of their lives -- to get cochlear implants. She will discuss the challenges of making such a personal film and humanizing an often misunderstood medical procedure. Irene will also show recent footage of the newest member of her family to receive a cochlear implant -- illuminating the remarkable differences in one family's experience of learning how we hear.

Irene Taylor Brodsky's visit is being sponsored by the School of Optometry and IU Cinema.

More information on the screening of Hear and Now can be found here.

Irene Taylor Brodsky

Irene is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning, Oscar-nominated, producer, director, writer and cinematographer whose documentaries have shown theatrically, at film festivals and on television worldwide.  Irene's most recent film, The Final Inch, was nominated for a 2009 Academy Award®, three Emmy Awards, and won the International Documentary Association's Pare Lorentz Award for Outstanding Cinematography. Her first feature-length film, Hear and Now, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Audience Award and went on to receive a 2008 Peabody award and numerous Audience and Jury awards around the world. Hear and Now was also nominated for Documentary of the Year by the Producer’s Guild of America.

Irene has produced numerous television documentaries for HBO, A&E, The History Channel, and Fox, and worked as a producer for CBS Sunday Morning where she won a 2004 Emmy Award for her portrait of the architect Samuel Mockbee and his legacy in the American south. Irene’s passion for documentary portraiture began as a still photographer, with her landmark photography book, Buddhas in Disguise, about the lives of disabled people across the Himalayas.  Based out of Kathmandu, Nepal for five years, she made her first documentary for UNICEF in 1992 and returned to the U.S. to direct and produce films on topics ranging from polygamy, to bluegrass music, and the fragile state of American healthcare.

Irene graduated from NYU and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to filmmaking, she has led more than 10 Himalayan expeditions, and serves on the board of trustees of Rochester Institute of Technology.  

Vermilion Pictures