About

Leitman has produced, directed and shot several music videos, independent experimental films and PSA’s since she graduated with a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her early work as a photographer includes album covers for the Black Crowes and The Indigo Girls, magazine covers featuring Outkast, Da Brat and Jermaine Dupri as well as being a frequent contributor to Working Mother Magazine, Rolling Stone, Spin and Newsweek.

Leitman has made five independent documentary features. She received a Rockefeller Fellowship for Alma (1998). The Documentary Feature Jury Prize winner at the Hamptons International Film Festival was selected to screen at the Director’s Guild of America NYC and the Whitney Biennial. Alma aired on TV Ontario and Channel Four Finland. Lipstick & Dynamite (2005), about the pioneers of girl wrestling, was an official selection of the TriBeCa Film Festival was picked up for distribution by Koch Lorber films and aired on Showtime and STARZ/ Encore. At the Nantucket Film Festival, it won Best Documentary Storytelling. The film was featured on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and Leitman was a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” and The Independent Film Channel’s ‘At the Angelika’ in 2005.

Currently, Leitman is working on the documentary Tony & Janina’s American Wedding. This urgent film follows the Wasilewski’s, a Chicago Polish Immigrant family being torn apart by our broken immigration system and reframe the conversation about immigration reform in this country.  It will premiere in 2010.

Leitman’s upcoming fiction feature projects include two screenplays she has written, Venus Stopped the Train and a girl wrestling script set in the 50’s entitled, The Pin-Down Girl, both of which she will be directing.

Leitman’s directing clients include: Oxygen Network, Ronald McDonald House Charities, Sallie Mae Student Loans, Related Midwest, American Trial Lawyers Association, Safe Humane Chicago, Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, Fair Wisconsin, Neko Case and The Redwalls.

Leitman teaches filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago.