Tia Lessin Trouble the Water

Tia Lessin

Tia Lessin is producer and director of the Academy Award-nominated film, Trouble the Water, winner of the Gotham Independent Film Award and the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. Lessin was a producer of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, winner of the Palme d’Or, and of Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine. In television, her work as producer of the series, The Awful Truth, earned her two Emmy nominations and one arrest. Lessin received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism for her documentary short, Behind the Labels. She line-produced Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and was Associate Producer of Charles Guggenheim’s Oscar-nominated film, Shadows of Hate. In 2006, Lessin received a Katrina Media Fellowship from George Soros’s Open Society Institute to promote a national conversation on racism and inequality in America with Trouble the Water, and in 2007, she was a Sundance Institute Fellow. Lessin is a graduate of Cornell University (1988) and she lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her filmmaking partner Carl Deal.

www.troublethewaterfilm.com,


Awards & Accomplishments

  • 2012

    Award

    Lessin & Deal receive Kindle Project Grant

  • 2012

    Award

    Lessin & Deal receive MacArthur Documentary Film Fund grant

  • 2009

    Trouble the Water

    Tia Lessin receives the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary

  • 2009

    Award Nomination

    Carl Deal and Tia Lessin are nominated for the Producers Guild of America Award for Feature Documentary for Trouble the Water

  • 2008

    Award

    Lessin receive Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award

  • 2008

    Award

    Lessin receives Kathleen Bryan Edward Award for Human Rights

  • 2008

    Award

    Lessin receives Full Frame/Working Films Award

  • 2008

    Award

    Lessin and Deal receive Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance Film Festival

  • 2008

    Award

    Lessin Receives L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth “Vision” Award

  • 2008

    Award

    Lessin receives Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film and Digital Media for her Creative Capital supported project Trouble the Water

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