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- Elisabeth Haviland James is an award winning film director, producer and editor based in Durham, North Carolina, where her company Thornapple Films is headquartered.
She is directing and producing the international documentary Overland (filmed on location in the American West, Scotland, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and South Africa). James was the head editor for the third and fourth seasons of the PBS Series, A Craftsman's Legacy. She was also commissioned in 2017 by the Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to write and curate a Full-dome production about the American South, currently in production. In 2015, James was named one of two film fellows in the state by the North Carolina Arts Council. She is the Producer and Editor of Althea, (dir Rex Miller), a feature documentary about pioneering tennis icon Althea Gibson, which was the season opener for PBS' prestigious American Masters series in September 2015, and has played to great acclaim in festivals around the county (DOCNYC, Full Frame, Athena, Palm Beach, American Black Film Festival), and was included in the Emmy Nomination for Best Arts Series. Her documentary hybrid feature-directing debut, In So Many Words, premiered at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and has screened at festivals, museums and conferences around the country. James was the Producer and Editor of The Loving Story (co-produced with HBO, dir. Nancy Buirski) for which she was short-listed for the Academy Award, winner of a George Foster Peabody Award and an Emmy Award (Best Historic Program) and nominated for two additional Emmy Awards (Best Documentary, Best Editing). The film has screened in festivals around the United States (Full Frame, TriBeCa, Silverdocs, Traverse City, Virginia, Hamptons, among dozens of others), and as a participant in the Sundance Film Forward program, with the US Department of State and with the American Film Showcase.
Her work as a consultant includes the Farmer Veteran Project, Untitled Ashe film, and Private Violence among many others. She was a consulting producer and pre-production researcher on location in the Dzangha-Sangha National Park in Central African Republic to the narrative feature Oka!. Other recent credits include Producer of The Good Fight and co-Producer of The Lord God Bird (both dir. George Butler). She served as Director of Photography and Editor on the 2003 documentary Brothers in Arms, featuring now Secretary of State, then Senator John Kerry. Her clients and collaborators include Revere La Noue, Rex Pix Films, Augusta Films, Roland Films, HBO, White Mountain Films, Paul Alexander, National Geographic, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Burt's Bees, and others.
James is a graduate of the M.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University, where she produced and directed four award-winning short documentaries, including Precipice, a national finalist for the 2002 Academy Award in the Student Documentary category. In 1999, she earned a BSFS with honors from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where she majored in Culture and Politics. She is fluent in French and speaks some Spanish, and has led tours for art museums, botanic gardens and cultural institutions around the world, including to France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. James has taught documentary filmmaking at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and as an artist in residence at the Oklahoma Arts Institute; she has also served as a guest lecturer for the State Department in Central Asia. She is a former board member of the Southern Documentary Fund. James is married to frequent collaborator, artist and filmmaker Revere La Noue; the two have a young daughter and a naughty dog.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Elisabeth James - Elisabeth Haviland James -Director/Producer/Editor (Overland, The Loving Story, Althea, Exposing Muybridge, Lincoln's Dilemma, In So Many Words). A passionate documentary storyteller, James is a Peabody and Emmy winning filmmaker whose work has screened theatrically, on television and in museums; her work includes historical, cinema verite, environmental and experimental films. Overland was the second documentary feature film she directed and produced, and it has won awards at festivals around the world, including Best Documentary, Cinematography and several special awards for stories that feature the relationship between man and nature. From the jungles of Central Africa to dusty basement archives, she loves the challenge of capturing the heart of a story. She is in development with Revere La Noue on a new series exploring endangered species and human/animal conflict around the world.
In 2021 James produced and edited Exposing Muybridge, which premiered at DOCNYC 2021. She also edited the third episode of the four-part Apple TV+ series Licnoln's Dilemma, which launched February 2022. She was commissioned by the Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina to write and curate a full-dome production about the American South, which premiered in October 2019. James was named one of two film fellows in the state by the North Carolina Arts Council in 2015. In addition to cutting, directing and producing, she frequently consults with documentary and narrative filmmakers in the edit room to hone their stories.
James has taught documentary filmmaking at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and as an artist in residence at the Oklahoma Arts Institute; she has also served as a guest lecturer for the State Department in Central Asia. She is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the MA program in Documentary Film at Stanford University. She is an active member of the Documentary Producer's Alliance.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Elisabeth Haviland James
- SpouseRevere La Noue(June 19, 2010 - present)
- She graduated from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. with a Bachelor's Degree and earned a Master's degree in Documentary film and video from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
- She is a documentary film producer in Durham, North Carolina and the founder of Thornapple Films, an independent production company there.
- Daughter of Marie Haviland and Jim James of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Daughter-in-law of Patricia La Noue and George La Noue of Baltimore, Maryland.
- Durham, North Carolina
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