Princess Grace Statue Award, 2013

Princess Grace Award
Graduate Film Scholarship, 1994
San Francisco State University

Wendy Levy is the Director of New Arts Axis.  She is also a Senior Consultant with the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and the Co-Founder of Sparkwise, an online data and story platform funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  During her long parallel career in restaurants, Wendy waited on the Dalai Lama and Bruce Springsteen.  “When I got the call that my short film had gotten into Sundance, I was waiting on Robert Redford at Chez Panisse,” she says.  In 2011-2012, Wendy was a Senior Strategist at Tomorrow Partners, a creative communications agency in Berkeley, California with a focus on human-centered design, innovation, and sustainability.  From 2004-2011, Wendy was Creative Director at BAVC where she created and directed the Producers Institute for New Media Technologies, The Mediamaker Fellows Program, and The Stream, a series of short documentaries focused on interactive storytelling, new technologies, and social change.  During her tenure in 2011, BAVC was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.  Wendy has been a featured speaker and panel moderator at the United Nations, Sundance Film Festival, Skoll World Forum, and South by Southwest Film Festival, among many other venues.  She has served as an Advisor to the Skoll/Sundance Stories of Change Program, Tribeca New Media Fund, Louverture Films, Screen Edge New Zealand, ABC Australia, WeOwnTV, Witness, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and Open Society Foundation’s Documentary Photography Program, in addition to a diverse group of NGOs, social entrepreneurs, and independent artists around the world.  Wendy’s short films have screened at Sundance and at festivals internationally, won numerous awards, and have been broadcast on PBS and the Sundance Channel.  Wendy has a B.A. in English and Ethnopoetics from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University.  She has taught Media Studies, Film Theory, and Film and Video Production at numerous colleges and universities in the Bay Area including UC Berkeley Extension, San Francisco City College, the College of San Mateo, and San Francisco State University.  Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Wendy has been happily transplanted in Oakland, California since 1983.