Biography
Gillian Caldwell is a serial social entrepreneur, filmmaker, and an attorney with 30 years of experience advocating for social justice in the United States and around the world. She is currently president of Gillian Caldwell Consulting, which helps progressive non-profits, corporations, and foundations increase their impact. Her special areas of expertise are strategic planning, outreach and advocacy campaigns, and organizational development. She recently served as the producer and engagement manager for Citizen Koch, a documentary on money in politics directed by Academy-Award nominees Tia Lessin and Carl Deal that premiered at Sundance 2013 and will be released theatrically in the United States in the spring of 2014.
She has served as the director of 1Sky, which she helped build from inception and grew to become the largest collaborative climate and energy campaigns in the United States. She has also served as executive director of WITNESS (co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel), which harnesses the power of video to advocate to human rights abuses. Caldwell led WITNESS' rapid expansion during her decade of leadership and helped produce dozens of documentary videos for use in campaigns around the world, including Books Not Bars, on California’s spending priorities and approaches to juvenile justice, and Operation Fine Girl (Oxygen Television), on rape as a weapon of war in Sierra Leone. Before her 10 years of leadership at WITNESS, she directed a global undercover investigation and global campaign on the Russian mafia’s involvement in trafficking women for forced prostitution, and produced and directed Bought & Sold, a documentary film which helped spur policy changes worldwide. Caldwell is co-editor and author of Video for Change: A Guide to Advocacy and Activism (2005). She received her BA from Harvard University and a JD from Georgetown University, where she was honored as a Public Interest Law Scholar; she is a recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Ashoka, Skoll, and Schwab awards for social entrepreneurship.
