Kate Levy
Kate Levy
Affiliations
New Day Films, FilmshopBio
Kate Levy (b. 1984, Royal Oak, Michigan) is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. Her documentary films, installations, sculptures, texts, and photography series interrogate power structures, political memory and cultural narratives. She has worked on projects related to water, education, police violence, immigration and environmental and economic justice. She has exhibited her work at museums, cultural centers, film festivals and conferences in the US and internationally.
In 2015, Levy’s work with the ACLU of Michigan helped expose the Flint Water Crisis. She was a 2017 Patagonia Works grant recipient for her feature film, Whose Water (New Day Films, 2024) and a 2018 MacDowell fellow. From 2019-2021, Kate served as the Co-Director of the Youth Documentary Workshop at Educational Video Center in New York City. Her 2021 short Detroit Will Breathe, was featured in the Ann Arbor Film Festival Off-the-Screen Series and received awards at the Freep Film Festival and the Whistleblower Film Festival. From 2023-2024 she was the Stuart B. and Barbara Padnos Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at Grand Valley State University where she produced a series of public art installations. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice of Media and Communications at Drew University. She is currently working on a short film, Courtwatch, about New Yorkers who attend immigration court to support migrants facing the danger of ICE arrests after their hearings. Her second feature, The Fate of the Machinery, about her family's relationship to Detroit and community organizing in the city, is currently in post-production
Projects
Detroit Will Breathe
In the summer of 2020, Detroiters faced unprecedented police violence as they took to the streets to protest the killings of Black people across the country. Woven together from never-before-seen footage from police body cameras, protesters and bystanders, "Detroit Will Breathe" provides an unprecedented look into the tactics of the Detroit Police, reveals shocking conversations between police officers, and offers a poignant look into what it means to be part of an integrated movement fighting for Black lives.
Whose Water
Across the United States, nearly 2.2 million people lack safe or affordable water in their homes. Another 1.7 million lack proper sanitation systems. Whose Water?: The People’s Movement for Safe, Affordable Water and Sanitation in the United States travels to five drastically different regions of the country that are facing the impacts of this troubling trend–Lowndes County, Alabama; Flint, Detroit, and Highland Park, Michigan; Philadelphia; Navajo Nation; Martin County, Kentucky and Des Moines, Iowa. Through the stories of communities fighting for safe, affordable water and sanitation, the film examines the industrial and governmental systems that prevent so many people from accessing this basic necessity of life and offers concrete solutions to address this unprecedented human rights crisis.
