Debra Tolchinsky
Professor
Contact Information
Research and Creative Interests
- Documentary
- Documentary practice
- Memory
- media production
- criminal justice
Biography
Debra Tolchinsky is a documentary director and producer, multimedia artist, curator, and professor in the IU Media School, with an affiliated appointment in the Maurer School of Law. She previously taught at Northwestern University, where she founded and directed the MFA in Documentary Media program and served as associate chair of the Department of Radio, Television, and Film.
Her four-part episodic documentary, True Memories and Other Falsehoods, examines false memory and false internalized beliefs within the criminal justice system, with particular attention to how the mind may become contaminated through the investigative process. On a more meta level, her work explores how documentary film itself can act as a contaminant.
Her earlier films, including Fast Talk, Lucky, Dolly, Max, and Saint Catherine’s Wedding Ring, have screened nationally and internationally at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the John F. Kennedy Center, the Chicago International Film Festival, FIPADOC, the Italy Innocence Project, and the Supreme Court Institute. More recently, her short documentary Contaminated Memories was released through The New York Times Op-Docs.
She earned an A.B. from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent work has been supported by an Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, a Northwestern Provost Grant, a Sage Fund grant, various private foundations, and Kartemquin Films.