White Rose

Julie is an Academy Award-nominated director and producer and the winner of the 2024 Freedom of Expression Award from the Jewish Film Institute/San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. She is best known for RBG (2018, Magnolia Pictures/CNN Films) which she directed and produced along with Betsy West. RBG was nominated for two Oscars, won an Emmy, a Critics Choice Award, a duPont-Columbia award and numerous others. Other feature documentaries she’s directed include Every Body (2023; Focus Features) nominated for an Emmy, a Critics Choice Award and a GLAAD Award and spent three weeks as one of the top ten streaming documentaries; My Name is Pauli Murray (co-directed with West; 2021, Amazon Studios/Participant Media); Berlinale Official Selection and ten time Jewish Film Fest Audience Choice winner The Sturgeon Queens (2014; PBS). Julie graduated from Colgate and holds master’s degrees from Yale Law School and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Tia Lessin is a recipient of the duPont-Columbia Award and three Emmys, including Best Documentary, for her work on The Janes (2022, HBO). Tia directed and produced three other feature-length films alongside Carl Deal: the Oscar-nominated Hurricane Katrina survival story Trouble the Water, winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award (2009, HBO), the Oscar shortlisted film Citizen Koch (2013, Netflix), and most recently, Steal This Story, Please! which screened at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival and had a wide theatrical release in the U.S. in 2026. Tia was the supervising producer of Michael Moore’s Palme D’Or winning Fahrenheit 9/11 – the highest grossing documentary of all time – and his Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine (2003); she produced Where to Invade Next (2015), and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2018) and line-produced Martin Scorsese’s Grammy-winning No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005, PBS).