Crip Camp: A Film Screening and Conversation

On the Same Page presents: CRIP CAMP Directors and Producers Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht: A Film Screening and Conversation

Nicole Newnham is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary producer and director, five-time Sundance Film Festival alumnus and seven-time Emmy nominee. She most recently directed The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by IFC films this fall, and two episodes of the Emmy-nominated ESPN landmark Title-IX series 37 Words. Nicole co-directed and produced the 2021 Academy Award-nominated documentary Crip Camp with Jim LeBrecht. The film won the Sundance Audience Award, the IDA Best Feature Documentary Award, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature, and a Peabody. Nicole has produced two virtual reality films with artist/director Lynette Wallworth that have each won an Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary: the breakthrough VR work Collisions (2017) and Awavena (2019). Both films premiered at Sundance New Frontiers and were featured in installation form at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nicole’s other acclaimed documentaries include, the Emmy-nominated films The Revolutionary Optimists, Sentenced Home and The Rape of Europa. A graduate of Oberlin College and Stanford University’s documentary film graduate program, Nicole lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband, Tom Malarkey, and sons Finn and Blaine.

Jim LeBrecht co-directed and co-produced, with Nicole Newnham, the 2021 Oscar Nominated, 2020 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award and 2021 Peabody Award winning documentary, Crip Camp. He has over 40 years of experience as a film and theater sound designer and mixer, filmmaker, and disability rights activist. Jim is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. LeBrecht is a co-founder of FWD-Doc and the 1in4 Coalition, two organizations that support people with disabilities in the entertainment business. He is a member of the first cohort of the Disability Futures Fellowship, an initiative of the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches disability in contemporary Japan and the United States at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first project was on sign language, identity, and deaf social movements and resulted in a monograph, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, and edited volume, Many Ways to Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities. Her second project was on schizophrenia and community-based recovery in Japan and this resulted in a book, A Disability of the Soul: An ethnography of schizophrenia and mental illness in Japan, its translation, and two films. She is currently running the UC Berkeley Disability Lab and the Othering and Belonging Institute’s Disability Studies research cluster while finishing a third project which explores the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality, which will result in a book titled: Trans/Japan. After that, she is working on a project on prosthetic, replacement, and augmentation technologies in contemporary Japan and the USA.

This event is a part of On the Same Page, UC Berkeley’s way of welcoming our new students into the intellectual community. Each year, we feature a book, theme, or other work of art to provide the focus of a range of events, courses, and activities that bring our new students into contact with each other and our faculty. This year’s featured work is CRIP CAMP: A DISABILITY REVOLUTION.

This event is free and open to the public. We ask all attendees to wear a mask while indoors for the duration of this event. If you require an accommodation or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Disability Access & Compliance (DAC) at access@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Contact Info:
Aileen Liu, aileen.liu@berkeley.edu, 510-664-7862

Access Coordinator:
DAC, access@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-6456

Event is free.