Kira Akerman is a documentary filmmaker and educator. Her film Hollow Tree won a Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival, and an award for Best Documentary at Chicago’s International Children’s Festival. Kira’s essay, Filmmaking as a Classroom: A Documentary Practice for the Climate Crisis (Southern Cultures), describes her participatory filmmaking process. Her work has been supported by the International Documentary Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sundance Institute, the Redford Center, and others. Kira was selected for the 2019 PBS Wyncote Fellowship, the 2019 Sundance Talent Forum Fellowship, the 2020 Gotham Documentary Lab, and the 2021 Climate Story Lab. Kira’s short films have been featured in “The Atlantic,” The Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, the Ford Foundation Gallery, the Camden International Film Festival, MOMA, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, and others.
Kira has extensively collaborated with Ripple Effect, a water literacy educational nonprofit, and the former Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, an interdisciplinary, place-based institute that promotes the understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf South region. She teaches documentary filmmaking and speaks on the intersection of science and storytelling. Many of Hollow Tree’s screenings include accompanying learning experiences for audiences, which have been created in partnership with the Climate Museum, Columbia’s Climate School, the Museum of the Moving Image, the University of Mississippi, and the Small Center at Tulane University. Kira has a masters in Learning, Innovation, Technology, and Design from Harvard University, and is currently a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Contact: kiraperry8@gmail.com