Lisa Biagiotti
# Lisa Biagiotti

Lisa Biagiotti (born August 20, 1979) is a filmmaker and journalist based in Los Angeles. She is the director and on-camera correspondent of On the Streets, a Los Angeles Times 12-part series and 72-minute feature documentary on homelessness in Southern California. She directed and produced deepsouth, an independent documentary about poverty, HIV/AIDS and LGBT issues in the rural American South. Biagiotti is a Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is of Italian descent from her father and Hakka Chinese Jamaican descent from her mother.

## Career

Biagiotti is an inaugural Fellow in the Sundance New Frontier Artist Residency program in partnership with The Social Computing Group at MIT Media Lab. She speaks publicly about digital journalism, and independently producing and self-distributing films.

For her independent documentary deepsouth, Biagiotti spent two-and-a-half years reporting, driving 13,000 miles and interviewing more than 400 people. She was invited across rural America on a 150-stop grassroots film tour, and was invited to discuss the domestic epidemic at The White House and Clinton Global Initiative. Biagiotti's work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, PBS, NPR, Oxford American, and The Lancet. She writes about her 5-year journey of making the film in her Director’s Statement titled Same Virus, Different Disease.

Biagiotti is the producer of The World’s Toilet Crisis, an hour-long documentary that aired on the Vanguard series of Current TV in 2010. She produced short video series for the nightly newscast Worldfocus on WNET on under-reported topics covering homophobia in the Caribbean and the humanitarian crisis in eastern Congo—the latter was awarded a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for International Television.

## Awards

| Year | Award | Organization | Work | Award Category | Result |
| - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 2001 | Fulbright Award | United States Department of State | Research: Muslim immigration into Italy | Study/ Research Grant | Won |
| 2009 | Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award | Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights | Crisis in Congo series | International Television Category | Won |
| 2009 | National News Emmy Award | National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences | War in Congo series | Best Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast | Nominated |
| 2012 | SHOUT! LGBT Best Documentary | Sidewalk Film Festival | deepsouth | Best Documentary | Won |
| 2012 | Koronis Fest Special Filmmaker Award | Sidewalk Film Festival | deepsouth | Public Health | Won |
| 2012 | Best Documentary and Audience Favorite | Outflix Film Festival | deepsouth | Awards for Best Documentary and Audience Favorite | Won |
| 2013 |
| 2013 | Award for Freedom | Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival | deepsouth | Special Programming Award | Won |
| 2013 | Official Selection HRW Traveling Film Festival | Human Rights Watch Film Festival | deepsouth | Traveling Film Festival | Won |
| 2013 | Award for Best Documentary Feature | Polari Film Festival | deepsouth | Best Documentary Feature | Won |
| 2013 | Award for Best Feature Length Documentary | Pensacola LGBT Film Festival / ACLU of Florida | deepsouth | Best Feature Length Documentary | Won |
| 2014 | Most Captivating Voices of 2014 | HIV Equal Online Magazine | deepsouth | Top 10 List | Won |
| 2014 | Livingston Award | Livingston Awards for Young Journalists | deepsouth | National Reporting | Nominated |
