Welcome New IDA Board Members

Judy Chaikin (Los Angeles, CA) is a graduate of the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women and is best known for writing, producing and directing the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary, Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist. She received her second Emmy nomination for the documentary Building on a Dream. Recently Chaikin directed and co-wrote the short romantic-comedy film Cotilllion '65, which won many festival awards including Best Short, Best Comedy, Best Director and Audience Choice. Chaikin was a producer/director on the ABC series FBI: The Untold Stories; co-producer of the CBS movie of the week Stolen Innocence; writer/director of the PBS documentary Los Pastores; and writer/director of the docu-drama Sojourner Truth: Ain't I A Woman, for which she won the Blue Ribbon at the American Educational Film and TV Festival. Other television directing credits include Nickelodeon's comedy series On The Television; Fox's American Families; episodes of America's Most Wanted; and the NBC Specials Too Good To Be True and The Horatio Alger Awards. Her stage directing work includes the comedy improv company The Groundlings; the musical True Romances, at the Mark Taper Forum; the All-Guild Commemoration, Hollywood Remembers The Blacklist; and two one-woman-shows, Excuse Me I'm Talking and Straight from the Mouth, starring Annie Korzen. Currently Chaikin is directing a feature-length documentary, The Girls in the Band, about women jazz instrumentalists. She is a member of the Director's Guild of America, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Independent Feature Project and the Actors Studio, and she sits on the board of directors of the Alliance of Women Directors.

Throughout her career in network and cable television, Sara Hutchison (Sylmar, CA) has worked in all aspects of production, but she is most often called upon for her skills in business development. Most recently Hutchison was both producer and vice president of development for Greystone Television & Films. In this capacity, she conceptualized and/or contributed to the sale of approximately 82 hours of programming for nonfiction television. Projects she has developed include First Ladies, for A&E; The Secret Life of..., a series for The Food Network; The Hitchhiker Chronicles, for FX; The Conquerors, for The History Channel; Drive-By-ography, for Comedy Central; Heir Hunters, for Court TV; and Breathing Room, for Fine Living. Hutchison has also lent her producing talents to the limited series President: To the Best of My Ability, for The History Channel, and Adventures in Time: The National Geographic Millennium Special, for NBC. After earning her master's degree in education from Stanford University, Hutchison taught English and drama to eight graders in the Glendale (Calif.) Area Unified School District. She also earned her BA in English from Stanford.

Thomas G. Miller (Santa Monica, CA) has worked on documentaries and in public television for the past 13 years. He associate-produced the Sundance award-winning film Licensed To Kill (P.O.V./PBS) and co-produced and edited Fender Philosophers for PBS. He has edited the feature documentary films Rock the Boat (HBO), Good Kurds, Bad Kurds (Slamdance, Independent Lens/PBS) and Home of the Brave (Sundance, Court TV). Miller has just finished editing the feature documentary Camp Out, about the first Christian bible camp for gay teenagers, sponsored by the Lutheran Church in Minnesota. He is currently producing and directing a feature documentary on Reverend Albert Wagner, an 81-year old black outsider artist from Cleveland, Ohio. Other credits include producing television films for Discovery, and WNET's series on disabilities, People in Motion. In addition, Miller teaches editing at the USC School of Cinema- Television. He is also a pediatrician and has served as medical consultant for Sesame Street and other film and television series. He graduated with a BS degree in zoology from The University of Michigan, an MD from the Medical University of Ohio and a MFA from the USC School of Cinema-Television. 

Patty Oertel (Pasadena, CA) is the president of The Oertel Group, a management consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, fundraising strategy, organizational development and board development for nonprofit organizations and foundations. She served as the executive director of the Center for Nonprofit Management in Southern California for seven years and for the previous ten years as the center's associate director, developing its information, education and consulting services. She holds an MBA from, and has taught at, UCLA's Anderson's Graduate School of Management. In her work to make communities more effective, she has discovered the power of documentaries as a tool for community education and activism; she is one of the organizers of the monthly documentary series "Conscientious Projector," based in Pasadena.

Steven Reich (Santa Monica, CA) is an Emmy-nominated writer who began his career as an actor. His first writing assignments included It's Dance, for WWCR/MCA TV and The Metal Years/Cutting Edge Special, directed by Penelope Spheeris for MTV. He later became director of development, then vice president, creative affairs for the newly formed IRS Media. Subsequent to IRS, Reich wrote and produced a series of public service announcements for Fox Kids Network, for which he received the National Education Award for the Advancement of Learning though Broadcasting and the Chris Award. Reich worked for several years at National Geographic Television as a writer, researcher and associate producer and was nominated for an Emmy for his work on Avalanche: The White Death!, which aired on NBC. Other documentary credits include Valley of T-Rex, for Discovery Channel; Science at the Edge, for Discovery Science; Dating for Dummies, Marriage for Dummies and Parenting for Dummies, for Discovery Health; and The Liberty Bell, for The History Channel, which now plays hourly in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Reich is currently working on Paradise: With a Waiting List, a feature doc about the hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber and the subsequent demise of the last company town in America; another documentary based on the astounding Fop!Tech conference, set to air on PBS this spring; and King of Fools, which profiles "The Fools Guild," an unlikely group of actors, mimes, musicians, fortune tellers, jugglers, clowns and trolls.

Eddie Schmidt (Los Angeles, CA) is an Oscar-nominated documentary producer whose film credits include the critically acclaimed Chain Camera, an intimate look at teenage life that premiered in competition at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival; the compelling hospice chronicle The End, which premiered at the 2004 South by Southwest Film Festival; and the Academy-Award nominated Twist of Faith, about a man who confronts the trauma of boyhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, which premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 2005 Amnesty International Film Festival. Schmidt's television work includes the hit syndicated series Blind Date; A&E's The Competition; and HBO's Showgirls: Glitz & Angst, an explosive musical documentary that was one of the cable channel's highest-rated specials of that year. Other notable achievements include contributing to National Public Radio's popular series This American Life and co-authoring The Finger: A Comprehensive Guide to Flipping Off, a definitive look at the middle-finger gesture, which hit #75 on Amazon.com's sales chart and was nominated for an American Library Association Award. Schmidt's latest documentary, produced for the Independent Film Channel, is This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a breakthrough investigation of the MPAA ratings system and its impact on American culture, which premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Jeffrey Tuchman (New York, NY) is an award-winning documentary producer, director and writer who, over the past 20 years, has built a formidable body of long-form documentary work, with over 30 films to his credit that have aired on A&E, PBS, The History Channel, NHK, ABC, Discovery/TLC, Court TV, CBS, MSNBC and HBO, among others. Tuchman recently completed Voices of Civil Rights, an oral-history project on the Civil Rights Movement that had its premiere at the Smithsonian Institute and aired in February on The History Channel. In 2003, Mavericks, Miracles & Medicine, his award-winning four-part series on the history of medicine, also aired on that network. Tuchman recently served as executive producer on several documentaries for Court TV, including Murder in the Quarter (airing in early '06) and Railroaded in Texas, a groundbreaking film on the civil-liberties debacle in Tulia, Texas (winner of a Silver Gavel Award). In addition to his documentary work, Tuchman directed The Man from Hope, the acclaimed biography on then-candidate William Clinton that was shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention, and more recently, the ads for Hillary Clinton's 2000 campaign for US Senate. Currently, Tuchman is shooting Veiled Humor, a feature-length doc about Muslim stand-up comic Shazia Mirza; he is just beginning work on Snap!, an intimate romp through the NY fetish scene; and he continues work on Testimony, a film about his father's return to Germany to testify in a Nazi war-crimes trial against the man who murdered his mother. Finally, Tuchman teaches documentary filmmaking at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.