Brigid Maher Email & Phone Number

Brigid Maher is a tenured full professor in the School of Communication. She is also a Faculty Director of Complex Problems and University College at American University and Founder and Director of the Anacostia Youth Media Festival. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker focusing on women, from women’s issues in the Middle East to women’s health and beyond. She recently completed the documentary Experimental Curator: The Sally Dixon Story (2022), about a little-known pioneer in the male-dominated art world who transformed experimental cinema by helping film artists make it and the public see and understand it. The film premiered at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which is the oldest and most prestigious experimental film festival in the United States. The film also broadcast on public television across the country during Women’s History month.Maher produced and directed The Mama Sherpas (2015) in collaboration with executive producers Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein (The Business of Being Born). It follows nurse-midwives and their patients over two years to give an intimate glimpse of the unique value midwives can bring to childbirth in the hospital system. Distributed by Bond/360, it screened nationwide and is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video and elsewhere.Maher produced and directed Veiled Voices (2009), bringing to light the complex role of female leaders in contemporary Islam through the stories of three women in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It screened on 150+ public television stations across the US, with multiple national satellite broadcasts. In 2005 Maher was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Lebanon, where she wrote, produced, and directed a fiction short, AWOL. In 2002 she wrote, produced, and directed the feature film Adrift in the Heartland, shot in the West Bank and Chicago.Maher’s writing examines the interplay between traditional film theory and new media theory. She has been published in the International Association of Film and Television Schools (CILECT)’s International Digital Media Arts Association Journal, Database|Narrative|Archive’s anthology Seven Interactive Essays on Digital Nonlinear Storytelling, and elsewhere. She was co-executive editor of the Journal for Digital Media Arts and Practice (2013–2017), president of the International Digital Media Arts Association (2017), and Conference Vice President of the University Film and Video Association (2016–17). Maher has served on numerous juries at film festivals in the US and abroad.

Listed skills include C++, Media Production, and Film.