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Mark Lipman

San Francisco, California, United States
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MarkLipman
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Bio

Mark Lipman has worked as a documentary filmmaker for forty years, exploring a wide range of subjects from domestic violence to human sexuality to affordable housing and community organizing. His films have been broadcast nationally on public television and won numerous awards. His producing and directing credits include To Have and To Hold (1981), the first documentary to look at domestic violence through the experiences of men; Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street (1996), a film about the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s successful efforts to revitalize a Boston neighborhood devastated by redlining, arson and illegal dumping; Father’s Day (2003), an experimental documentary about the death of Mark’s father; and Gaining Ground (2013), a sequel to Holding Ground that explores DSNI’s success in preventing foreclosures and fostering youth leadership.

Mark has produced media for non-profit organizations throughout New England including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where he documented the creation of new artwork by internationally renowned artists-in-residence. As a freelance editor, he has worked for the NOVA series at WGBH/Boston and for many other Boston-area companies. After moving to San Francisco in 2004 and forming Open Studio Productions with Helen Cohen, Mark edited Alaska Far Away, a feature documentary about a controversial New Deal program that relocated 200 destitute farm families into the wilds of Alaska. Together they produced States of Grace, a verite film that follows a woman's recovery from a near-fatal car crash over a period of four years. Their most recent production is Arc of Justice, a film about the first community land trust in the United States that developed out of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Georgia in 1970.

Mark also has extensive experience designing and implementing audience engagement campaigns for his films. The Ford Foundation included Holding Ground as one of ten case studies in an evaluation of its most successful media grants over the prior twenty years. Since 1981 he has been an active member of New Day Films, a national cooperative of social issue filmmakers who collaborate in the distribution of their films, serving several times as its chief financial officer and as a member of its steering committee.

Mark has an MFA in filmmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art and a BA in psychology from Harvard University.