Kira Akerman is a documentary filmmaker and educator. Her film Hollow Tree won a Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival, and an award for Best Documentary at Chicago’s International Children’s Festival. While living in New Orleans, Kira developed a documentary process for the climate crisis with her community there, which she calls filmmaking as a classroom.
Hollow Tree has screened at festivals, museums, and universities across the country and internationally. Click here for a list of recent and upcoming screenings. Screenings often include accompanying learning experiences, such as creative writing workshops and pigment making workshops. These have been created in partnership with the Climate Museum, Columbia’s Climate School, the Museum of the Moving Image, the University of Mississippi, and the Small Center at Tulane University. Kira’s short film “Station 15” is accompanied by a curriculum created with Ripple Effect, a New Orleans educational nonprofit.
Kira’s filmmaking has been supported by the International Documentary Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sundance Institute, the Redford Center, and others. Kira was selected for the 2019 PBS Wyncote Fellowship, the 2019 Sundance Talent Forum Fellowship, the 2020 Gotham Documentary Lab, and the 2021 Climate Story Lab. Kira’s short films have been featured in “The Atlantic,” The Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, the Ford Foundation Gallery, the Camden International Film Festival, MOMA, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and Clermont-Ferrand.
Kira has worked as a consultant for Ripple Effect and the former Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, an interdisciplinary, place-based institute that promotes the understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf South region. Kira has a masters in Learning, Innovation, Technology, and Design from Harvard University, and is a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Contact: kiraperry8@gmail.com