Julia Reichert

Julia Bell Reichert (June 16, 1946 – December 1, 2022) was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.

Reichert was a four-time Academy Award-nominated director, for Union Maids (1977), Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1984), The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2010) and American Factory (2020, for which she won an Oscar).  

She was a two-time winner of the Primetime Emmy, a two-time nominee of the Peabody Award, and director of two films on the National Film Registry.  

Reichert was the recipient of the award for Distinguished Service to Labor and Working-Class History from the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). She was professor emeritus in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Motion Pictures at Wright State University.

Reichert was honored with lifetime achievement awards from the International Documentary Association, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and the Hot Docs Film Festival.  She is a recipient of the Chicken & Egg Pictures 'Breakthrough Prize.' A traveling retrospective of her work was curated by the Wexner Center for the Arts, and was launched at the Museum of Modern Art in May 2019, before traveling to other US cities.

Julia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Princeton, New Jersey, and was brought up in nearby Bordentown Township, New Jersey. Her father Louis was a butcher and her mother Dorothy was a nurse.  Reichert was one of four children. The family spent summers on Long Beach Island, NJ, where her father ran a fishing charter business. Reichert had a youthful fascination with photography.

Reichert was a 1964 graduate of Bordentown Regional High School.

She enrolled at Antioch College in 1964, and dropped out in 1967 when she hitchhiked to California during the Summer of Love. She returned to Antioch in 1968 and graduated in 1970 with a degree in documentary arts.