Winchester Academy will host Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Catherine Tatge at 6:30 p.m. Monday. March 4, at the Waupaca Area Public Library.
Tatge will discuss her work with Lawrence University students who filmed their interviews with four Holocaust survivors who spoke about their experiences. The presentation will include clips from her students’ work.
A 1972 Lawrence graduate, Tatge is currently finishing a two year stint at her alma mater as artist-in-residence.
Tatge is a producer and director of film and television projects. She and her husband, Dominique Lasseur, run a New York and Los Angeles based firm, Tatge/Lasseur Productions.
Her work has, for over 25 years, encompassed many genres, from public affairs, performance, fine art and dance, to biographies and the world of ideas, creating 50 films as producer, director or writer.
In 1988, she w as the producer and director of Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, for which she received an Emmy Award. She has since produced and directed various documentaries for PBS’s American Masters Series. In 1991, she documented Bill Moyers’ interviews with Elie Wiesel, Vaclav Havel, Jimmy Carter, members of the White Aryan Resistance, and others trying to cope with violence in their lives. The PBS project was called Beyond Hate: Facing Hate with Elie Wiesel.
Tatge brought her dance-film experience to the world of feature films in 1997 and produced the New York City Ballet version of The Nutcracker, starring Macaulay Culkin, for Warner Brothers.
Tatge has directed part of the PBS series, Art of the 21st Century in addition to several other fine-art-related films including the IBM series on the nature of creativity, The Creative Spirit.
Ms. Tatge’s story-telling skills also examine controversial topics, as in two documentaries on the subject of domestic violence, Breaking the Silence: Journeys of Hope and Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, which premiered on PBS in 2001 and 2005. In 2008, she produced Bill Moyers Journal: Beyond Our Differences, which explored the positive role of faith in the world today and the fundamental unity of world religions. Her latest offering about environmental pioneer John Muir premiered in 2011.
In addition to an Emmy, her work has been recognized with numerous awards including several CINE Gold Eagle Awards and Chicago International Film Festival Gold Hugo Awards, as well as the Gracie Award, the DuPont Columbia Award, the ACE Award, the Humanitas Prize, the San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award, and the Silver Screen Award for the U.S. International Film and Video Festival.