Maintenance Artist
Director and Producer Toby Perl Freilich, Producer Judith Mizrachy
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. Maintenance Artist chronicles the evolution of this Orthodox rabbi’s daughter and how her deeply humanistic interpretation of Judaism inspires her largely secular work.
Toby Perl Freilich
Director, Producer
Toby Perl Freilich co-produced and co-directed Moynihan, a biography of former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which opened at NYC’s Film Forum, and was broadcast on PBS’ American Masters series in 2024. Freilich directed, produced, and wrote Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, hailed by The New York 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, Jewish Review of Books, Sh’ma, and The Forward, where she was awarded a 2007 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.
Judith Mizrachy
Producer
Judith Mizrachy is a New York City-based producer whose recent films include the short Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary The Martha Mitchell Effect (2022), and The Booksellers (2019), a behind-the-scenes look at the rare book world. Her films have screened at festivals including Sundance, Hot Docs, New York Film Festival, and SXSW and have been shown in theaters around the world including BAM, Lincoln Center, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Bertha DocHouse and Cinema São Jorge Lisbon. Judith previously served as the Director of Marketing and Communications at Women Make Movies.