A Healthy Baby Girl-- Filmmaker, crew, and staff bios

JUDITH HELFAND, Producer/Director/Writer :
Judith is an independent film and video maker based in New York. She co-produced and co-directed with George Stoney The Uprising of '34, an award winning documentary that draws on the hidden history of the General Textile Strike of 1934 to explore labor, power and economics in the South today. With this film, Helfand developed a series of "Using History as an Organizing Tool" workshops, which evolved into the nationwide "Labor to Neighbor" campaign at the time of the film's broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. in June of 1995.

She worked as an associate producer on two other PBS documentaries: Broken Minds, a Frontline episode directed by DeWitt Sage on the treatment and mistreatment of schizophrenia and the homeless mentally ill, and Through The Wire, Nina Rosenblum's film about an experimental maximum security unit for women political prisoners in the U.S., which was aired on P.O.V. She is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Undergraduate Film and Television Program.

Prior to focusing on documentaries, Helfand worked for three years at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research as a production associate on the archival photo video-disk People of a Thousand Towns: A Visual Encyclopedia of Jewish Eastern Europe 1865-1939.

She has run video and media literacy workshops with textile workers, community organizers in the South and designed a video production program for homeless mentally ill adults in New York City. Over the past year she has been working in collaboration with social studies teachers on an interactive curriculum using The Uprising of '34 to "Link the Classroom to the Community."

TRICIA REIDY Editor
Tricia edited three episodes of the nine-part PBS series Baseball, directed by Ken Burns, which was broadcast nationally in September 1994. She was one of the editors of the landmark PBS series The Civil War, directed by Ken Burns, for which she, Paul Barnes and Bruce Shaw were nominated for the American Cinema Editors Award for best documentary editing. Other editing credits include Los Mineros directed by Hector Galan for The American Experience, and the PBS specialBackstage at Masterpiece Theatre. She most recently cut Words of our Ancients, produced by Paige Martinez for Tucson, Arizona Public Television. In addition to her work as an editor, Tricia was associate producer of Coney Island (produced by Ric Burns) and post-production manager for Pearl Harbor, (produced by Tom Johnson and Lance Bird), also for The American Experience.

MARJORIE DEUTSCH, Sound Editor
Marjorie Deutsch sound edited the PBS series The Civil War and Baseball, directed by Ken Burns; she was awarded both Golden Reel and Golden Scissors Awards for her work on The Civil War. Other sound editing credits include the Woody Allen films Zelig and Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy; the Warren Beatty feature Reds, and the Steve Gordon feature Arthur. She was ADR editor on the features The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian de Palma, and on Robert Benton's Places in the Heart, for which she also received a Golden Reel.

IRENA KLEPFISZ, Co-writer
Dr. Irena Klepfisz was born in Poland in 1941 and came to the U.S. in 1949. She was educated in New York City public schools and in Work-men's Circle shules and mitl-shul (high school), graduated from City College and received her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Chicago. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Weinreich Center for Jewish Studies at YIVO, Institute for Jewish Research, and in the late 1980's served as YIVO's translator-in-residence. Dr. Klepfisz is a poet, essayist, and translator of Yiddish women's fiction and poetry and has received NEA and New York State grants in poetry and Yiddish translation. She has taught Yiddish, Judaic and Women's Studies, and English literature and creative writing at Columbia University, Long Island University, Brooklyn College, SUNY (Albany), Vermont College, Hamilton College, and Wake Forest University. During the summer of 1995, she taught a special course on Yiddish women writers at YIVO's Uriel Weinrich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Columbia University. This fall, she will be teaching at Barnard College. Her books include: A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New and Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes. She is also the creator of Bread and Candy: Songs of the Holocaust, a musical drama for five voices, and the performance piece Zeyere eygene verter/Their Own Words: Yiddish Women's Voices, both of which premiered at New York City's Jewish Museum.

THE KLEZMATICS with DAVID KRAKAUER and ADRIENNE COOPER, Music
The Klezmatics bring the idiom of traditional East European Jewish celebration music known as klezmer into the 21st Century, combining Jewish identity and mysticism with a contemporary zeitgeist, a postmodern aesthetic and an overtly political worldview. The band's 1995 album, Jews with Horns, has reached the top ten of The College Music Journal's World Music and the European World Music Charts, and a place on the Village Voice Best of the Year list. The Klezmatics have provided music for new works by choreographer Twyla Tharp, filmmakers Judith Helfand (A HEALTHY BABY GIRL), Jonathan Berman (The Shvitz) and Gregg Bordowitz (Fast Trip, Long Drop), and for Mark Lamos's Hartford Stage production of The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds. In 1995 the Klezmatics appeared with violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman in his Emmy Award-winning PBS Great Performances special, In the Fiddler's House, which was Mr. Perlman's first foray into klezmer. The companion recording has topped World and Classical music charts internationally, becoming one of the top selling folk albums of the past decade, and the band has gone on to record a second album with Mr. Perlman, featuring their composition A HEALTHY BABY GIRL HORA, as well as touring with him internationally in Fiddler's House concert dates.

Internationally acclaimed clarinetist DAVID KRAKAUER is known as a performer of many diverse musical styles, including classical chamber music, Eastern European Jewish klezmer music, and the avant-garde. He has performed as a guest artist with the Kronos Quartet; as a soloist with the Brooklyn Philharmonic; as a solo performer for Luciano Berio's 70th birthday celebration concert at the 92nd Street Y; and as the leader of his own klezmer/new music ensemble at John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture Festival at Merkin Concert Hall. Notable recent CDs include his own album, Klezmer Madness!; In the Fiddler's House with Itzhak Perlman; and Conlon Nancarrow: Orchestral, Chamber, and Piano Music with Continuum. His recording with the Kronos Quartet of Osvaldo Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind was scheduled for release on the Elektra/Nonesuch label in early 1997.

ADRIENNE COOPER, the 4th generation in a family of Yiddish singers, is known for her reinterpretation of Yiddish song performance style. She has appeared in concert throughout North America and Europe, and is the featured singer with the pioneering klezmer band Kapelye. In addition to her debut solo recording, Dreaming in Yiddish, she can be heard on Remember the Children: Children's Songs and Lullabyes of the Holocaust, Kapelye on the Air: Old Time Jewish American Radio, the Grammy-nominated Partisans of Vilna, and on recordings by the Klezmatics.

PAMELA CALVERT, Organizing/Outreach Director
Pamela Calvert joined A HEALTHY BABY GIRL after three years as director of programs and services at the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers Foundation/Foundation for Independent Video and Film (AIVF/FIVF), the largest membership organization of independent media makers in the U.S. She recently served as program evaluator for the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, assessing the Fund's five years of grantmaking in progressive media. She consulted on the new workbook, High Impact Television, to be published this fall by The American Documentary/P.O.V., and provided material on media funding for Robin Hood Was Right, to be issued in a new edition by the Haymarket People's Fund with support from the Funding Exchange. Calvert was a member of the steering committee for the 1996 National Educational Media Network Festival and Market. She has been development consultant for George Stoney's work-in-progress Paulo Freire in Action, and for Mirra Bank's PBS documentary Nobody's Girls.