Vicky Funari

Background

About Vicky Funari

Vicky Funari is a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher. Her current work-in-progress is POOL STORIES (working title), a story of healthy aging and ladies in a pool. From 2009-2023, Funari was Senior Lecturer of Visual Studies at Haverford College, where she taught documentary filmmaking and designed interdisciplinary programming and curriculum. Funari produced, directed, and edited MAQUILÁPOLIS [city of factories](2006), a piercing look at globalization through the eyes of Mexican factory workers (co-directed by Sergio De La Torre). She produced, directed, and edited the non-fiction feature Paulina (1998), a story of human resilience, about a Mexican woman who redefines and reclaims herself after being trafficked as a child (co-produced with Jennifer Maytorena Taylor). She directed and edited Live Nude Girls a fierce and funny account of the first strippers’ union in the US (co-directed by Julia Query). These critically acclaimed films have screened in preeminent film festivals, including Sundance, Locarno, Havana, Rotterdam, SXSW, and Tribeca, and have won numerous awards, among them Grand Jury Prize and Audience Awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Lifetime Television's Vision Award at the Hamptons Film Festival, and Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Women’s International Film Festival of Barcelona. Her films have aired on PBS, HBO/Cinemax, and the Sundance Channel. Funari’s work encompasses a commitment to co-creative and community-oriented processes. She builds multiplatform project elements and collaborative engagement campaigns to keep the work connected, useful, and accessible to the people represented in the work and to maximize its real-world impact. With MAQUILÁPOLIS and its Binational Community Engagement Campaign, which she directed from 2006-2009, she and her team modeled this approach, partnering with factory workers and grassroots organizations to promote public dialogue and social change. Funari also works as a consulting editor, editor, and producer. She edited STRONG, directed by Julie Wyman, which aired on INDEPENDENT LENS in 2012. Funari is a Guggenheim Fellow and a MacDowell Colony Fellow.