Join us for a lecture with filmmakers James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham. 

James LeBrecht has over 40 years of experience as a film and theater sound designer and mixer, filmmaker, author and disability rights activist.

LeBrecht co-directed and co-produced, with Nicole Newnham, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winning feature length documentary, Crip Camp.

Jim began his career in the theater in 1978, working as the resident sound designer at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for 10 years. His theatrical sound design work took him to many, well known theaters, including the New York Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse and ACT in San Francisco.

In 1989 he found a home at the legendary Saul Zaentz Film Center where he started out as an apprentice and worked his way up the ladder to become a sound designer, mixer and sound supervisor.

In 1996, LeBrecht founded Berkeley Sound Artists, an audio postproduction house. He quickly found a home in the documentary and independent film community. His film credits include Minding the Gap, The Island President, The Waiting Room, Audrie and Daisy and, of course, Crip Camp.  A complete list of his film credits (over 180) can be viewed at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0495898/

Jim co-authored Sound and Music for the Theatre: the art and technique of design. Now in its 4th edition, the book is used as a textbook all over the world. 

Jim’s work as an activist began in high school and continued at UC, San Diego, where he helped found the Disabled Students Union. Jim is currently a board member at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, which works for the rights of the disabled through education, legislation and litigation.

Some of LeBrecht’s additional accomplishments include co-founding FWD-Doc, an organization that supports documentary filmmakers with disabilities and being a character consultant for Pixar Animation Studios for 2 of their films. He has been a mentor at the SFFILM’s FilmHouse residency fellowship for 3 years. 

Jim is honored to be a member of the Disability Futures Fellowship, an initiative of the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

Nicole Newnham is an Emmy-winning documentary producer and director, four-time Sundance Film Festival alumnus and six-time Emmy-nominee. Most recently she co-directed the Sundance Audience Award-winning documentary Crip Camp with Jim LeBrecht. She has also recently produced two virtual reality films with the Australian artist / director Lynette Wallworth: the breakthrough VR work Collisions, which won the 2017 Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary (exhibited at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Museum of Modern Art, the Barbican, and Sundance among others) and Awavena, winner of the 2020 Emmy for Outstanding New Approaches to Documentary, and featured at Davos, the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and the 2019 Venice Biennale. Previously Nicole co-directed the Emmy-nominated documentary feature The Revolutionary Optimists, winner of the Sundance Hilton Sustainability Award, and Sentenced Home, also Emmy-nominated, about the ongoing deportation of Cambodian American youth raised in the U.S. She also co-directed and co-wrote the acclaimed documentary The Rape of Europa, about the Nazi war on European culture, which was nominated for two Emmys, a WGA award, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. With Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Brian Lanker, she produced They Drew Fire, about the Combat Artists of WWII, and co-wrote the companion book, distributed by Harper Collins.

A 1994 graduate of the Stanford Documentary Film Program (her first documentary Unforgettable Face screened at Sundance in 1994) Nicole lives in Oakland with her husband Tom, and two sons, Finn and Blaine.

cripcamp.com