I Make Maintenance Art

Director and Producer Toby Perl Freilich
I Make Maintenance Art

Logline

What happens when high art meets trash? Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been revolutionizing contemporary art since the 1960s, becoming the NYC Sanitation Department’s first artist-in-residence and spearheading Ecofeminist and Social Practice Art. I Make Maintenance Art chronicles the evolution of this Orthodox rabbi’s daughter and how her deeply humanistic interpretation of Judaism inspires her largely secular work.

Phase of Support: Production

Project Links

Toby Perl Freilich

Toby Perl Freilich - Director and Producer

Toby Perl Freilich co-produced and co-directed Moynihan, a biography of former NY Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which opened at NYC’s Film Forum, and is slated for a broadcast premiere on PBS’ American Masters series in 2024. Freilich directed, produced, and wrote Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, hailed by the NY Times as “fascinating” and “excellent” by NPR. Freilich was nominated for a news and documentary Emmy for her writing for Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers, which she also co-produced. The film was selected by Andrew Sarris as one of the ten best non-fiction films of 2003. She also co-produced the Emmy-nominated Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans, an independent PBS documentary that was broadcast nationally. Freilich is a contributing writer to Tablet, the Jewish Review of Books, Sh’ma, and the Forward, where she was awarded a 2007 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.

Project logline and bios courtesy of the grantees.