Daphne Pinkerson

Pinkerson has worked on a range of award-winning social and political documentaries for HBO, PBS, Bill Moyers, and NBC, among others. She has been Marc Levin’ s documentary film partner for the past 15 years. Along with Marc, she won the National Emmy for best documentary of 1999 for producing Thug Life in D.C., which premiered on HBO. Their most recently aired documentary feature for HBO was Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, a film about what happened to manufacturing in America through the emblematic story of the Garment Center in Manhattan. She was also the supervising producer on Brick City, a five-hour docu-reality series on Newark, NJ, which premiered in 2009 on the Sundance Channel and will run its second season in early 2011. In 2007, she was the supervising producer on Mr. Untouchable, a film about heroin kingpin Nicky Barnes, which was theatrically released by Magnolia Films. In 2006, she was the Supervising Producer on Protocols of Zion, Levin’ s personal look at 9/11, which aired on HBO/Cinemax and was theatrically released by ThinkFilm. Heir to an Execution, a film she produced about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO in 2004. In 2003, she produced Godfathers and Sons, a film on Chicago Blues for Martin Scorsese’ s PBS series on Blues music. In 2001, NARAL presented their Courageous Advocate Award to her for Soldiers in the Army of God, a film she produced and co-directed for HBO. In the year 2000, she produced two films, Speak Truth to Power, a PBS special on human rights activists and Twilight Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith’ s performance film on the riots in South Central. For The Execution Machine, which also aired on HBO, she was able to secure unprecedented access to Death Row in Texas. She was the supervising producer for the critically acclaimed Discovery Channel series, CIA: America’ s Secret Warriors. Her other HBO films include Mob Stories, Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock and its ten year follow-up Back in the Hood, Prisoners of the War on Drugs, and Gladiator Days. For Bill Moyers she produced The Home Front, The Politics of Addiction, Oklahoma City: One Year Later, and three parts of his series on youth violence. In addition to producing, she also shoots stylized film and video with small format cameras. She has captured some cinematic firsts, filming a gang drive-by shooting in Little Rock, Arkansas (HBO’ s Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock) and inmates injecting drugs in prison (HBO’ s Prisoners of the War on Drugs.) She was the Associate Producer on the dramatic feature SLAM and shot all of its montage footage. In 1988, during the press restrictions in South Africa, she launched South Africa Now, a weekly half-hour news program which commissioned pieces from inside South Africa for broadcast on Public Television, CNN World Report and ITN. Her most recent film, Triangle: Remembering the Fire, a cautionary tale about the relationship between business and government in the Gilded Age, will premiere on HBO March 21st, 2011.