Maintenance Artist
Director and Producer Toby Perl Freilich
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. Maintenance Artist 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 - 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.