Judith Dwan Hallet

JUDITH DWAN HALLET is an award winning documentary filmmaker who has been making films for over 50 years. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, she joined the Peace Corps and taught English as a Second Language in Tunisia for two years.  During that time, she also made a film on the Berber Villages of Southern Tunisia with her future husband, Stanley Hallet.  Back in the States, she made several more independent films with her now architect/filmmaker husband, including in 1971, two documentaries in Afghanistan. In 1972 Judy became a Producer/Reporter at KUTV, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah. Over the next 14 years, she was first a filmmaker for KUTV’s Documentary Unit and then a producer/reporter for their news magazine show, EXTRA. During that time she made close to 100 news documentaries winning several awards including a Rocky Mountain Emmy.  Moving to Washington in 1986, National Geographic Television soon hired her as their Senior Producer for their weekly television series, EXPLORER.  Here she oversaw more than 60 documentaries. She also produced and directed four of her own films including a documentary on Jane Goodall, one on the gauchos of Argentina and one on goldmining in the rainforests of Venezuela. While she was at the helm, EXPLORER won numerous awards including close to twenty national Emmys.  

 In 1991, Judy formed her own company, JUDITH DWAN HALLET PRODUCTIONS LLC.  Since then she has produced and directed sixteen documentaries.  In 1995, Women in Film and Video awarded her their Woman of Vision Creative Excellence Award.  In 2001 she received The Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline from the Washington DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.  In 2008 she received an Emmy from The National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in recognition for her significant contributions to the broadcast industry. In 2015 she was recognized by the DC Office of Motion Picture and Television as the March Filmmaker of the Month for her lifetime contribution to the local film industry. 

Over her career, Judy has produced films in seventeen countries around the world on subjects as diverse as an obscure tribe living in tree houses in the rainforest of Papua on the Island of New Guinea, to a biography on Pope John Paul II, and to the return of the buffalo to the American Indians.