Judith MacDougall

Judith MacDougall is a filmmaker and photographer. She is internationally acknowledged as a defining figure in the development of Ethnographic Documentary Film. After graduating from San Francisco Art Institute and UCLA Film School Judith made documentaries in Uganda and the USA. In 1972 Judith resumed her stills photography at the newly established Rice University Media Centre in Houston Texas. Photographer and teacher Geoff Winningham invited numerous contemporary photographers to the Centre, including Garry Winogrand, Eve Sonneman, Lee Friedlander and Danny Lyon. It was within this artistic milieu that MacDougall applied a background in observational cinema to her photographic studies of 1970’s Texas. In the following decades Judith made over 20 ethnographic documentary films, including the prize-winning ‘Turkana Conversations’ trilogy (1972-73), The House-Opening (1977), Photo Wallahs (1991), Diya (2001) and The Art of Regret (2007). She has taught in Australia, Norway, Italy and China. Judith lives in Canberra, Australia.