Picturing Lee Dick

Abstract

This short essay provides an overview of the career of Lee Dick, a female nonfiction film director and producer in the late 1930s and '40s. With a body of work that traverses documentary, industrial, and amateur production, Dick challenges perceived divisions between often overlapping spheres of nonfiction filmmaking and invokes tensions between personal and institutional authorship within a sponsored, and deeply collaborative, media context. Her largely unexamined career is a window into gendered labor and mid-twentieth-century media production.