SHEILA CURRAN BERNARD

SHEILA CURRAN BERNARD is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning writer, filmmaker, educator, and consultant. She received a 2021 NEH Public Scholar Award to support writing of Bring Judgment Day, a nonfiction book under contract with Cambridge University Press. In 2016 she was honored with a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Playwriting/Screenwriting, as well as its Geri Ashur Screenwriting Award. Her credits include nearly 50 hours of broadcast and theatrical film programming, including the nonfiction PBS series I’ll Make Me a World and the feature documentary Slavery by Another Name, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon; the film premiered at Sundance in 2012. A member of the Dramatists Guild, her stage plays include A Firefly in August (2015 Boston Theatre Marathon; 2014 Warner Int’l Playwrights Festival) and Leaving Ibsen (finalist, Christopher Brian Wolk Playwriting Award, 2010). Sheila earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. Honors include selection as a Guest Artist at the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive and residencies at MacDowell and at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The author of Documentary Storytelling, now in its fifth edition and widely translated, and co-author of Archival Storytelling, in its second edition, Sheila was the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University in 2005 and now holds a tenured position as associate professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. www.sheilacurranbernard.com