Jeff Spitz

Background

About Jeff Spitz

Jeff Spitz is a Chicago-based Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Sundance Film Festival honoree and tenured Professor in the School of Film & and TV at Columbia College Chicago. Co-founder of Groundswell Educational Films, NFP, a non-profit production company, Jeff partners with educational institutions to develop documentary shorts & features, internships, and environmental justice themed STEM projects.Jeff’s documentaries have screened and won awards at international film festivals and aired on broadcast networks such as PBS, ABC, A&E and CBC. A winner of the Illinois Governor's International Arts Exchange Award, Jeff collaborates with participants to make first-person voiced stories that engage mainstream media and help change public policies. Presented by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the US EPA, Jeff’s internationally acclaimed film, The Return of Navajo Boy, triggered a federal investigation into uranium houses on the reservation and the first clean up of an abandoned uranium mine. The acclaimed documentary and its epilogue exposed a corporate contaminator, Kerr-McGee, helping the Navajo Nation secure one of the largest environmental damage settlements in Native American history. Groundswell engages and aligns with allies connected to multiple audiences including high schools, universities, media outlets, festivals, community-based organizations, government agencies and broadcasters.(See links below.)Multi-award-winning documentaries and social impact campaigns such as Food Patriots, The Robben Island Singers and The Return of Navajo Boy generate news, curricula, social media and real world results.An Education Consultant, Jeff provides professional training in storytelling, collaborative media making and social impact.In 2016 Jeff created The Doc Talk Show. Sponsored by local production companies this monthly series in Chicago features non-fiction filmmakers sharing clips and personal stories in Q & As with F2F and online audiences. See