Jan Krawitz

Jan Krawitz taught in the MFA Program in Documentary Film at Stanford for 34 years. Her films have screened at festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Edinburgh, AFI Docs, London, Sydney International Film Festival, Full Frame, and SXSW (South by Southwest). Her documentaries explore eclectic topics. Perfect Strangers follows an altruistic kidney donor on an unpredictable, four-year journey of twists and turns. It was shown at a number of film festivals and in two successive years on the PBS series America Reframed. Jan's previous film, Big Enough, poignantly reveals the emotional and physical challenges faced by several dwarfs as they attempt to live in an average-sized world. The participants in Big Enough first appeared in Little People, which Jan co-directed 20 years earlier. Big Enough was broadcast on the national PBS series P.O.V., internationally in eighteen countries, and in the European Parliament. Little People was a national Emmy Award nominee in the category of Outstanding Individual Documentary and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Jan's short documentaries, Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, and Drive-in Blues have been in educational distribution for many years and received large audiences on national PBS. Her experimental film, Styx, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She has had retrospectives of her films at the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, the Austin Film Society, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Jan was awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, Docs in Progress, and at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is currently a voting member of the Documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Karl Franzens University of Graz in Austria in 2022.