Julie Wyman
Julie Wyman is an American director, cinematographer, and professor whose work is concerned with body image. She mainly makes documentary film and currently teaches at UC Davis as an associate professor of Cinema and Digital Media. Early life and education. Julie Wyman received a BA in Anthropology and English from Amherst College in 1993. She completed a MFA in Visual Studies at UC San Diego in 2002. Career. "A Boy Named Sue" documents the transition of a FTM person named Theo. The film delves into the physical and emotional effects of medical transitioning as well as the changes  in the way Theo interacted with the world and the world interacted with him. It took six years to make and played in predominantly queer film festivals such as Berlin Lesbian Film Festival, Image Out Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. It won the Sappho award for Best Documentary in 2000 and was nominated for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's Best Documentary Media Award. In 2012 she completed and began showing her full-length documentary Strong! about three time Olympic competitor Cheryl Haworth. Wyman's fascination with Cheryl Haworth began in  2000 when she competed in the Sydney Olympic, the fact that Haworth is a 300-pound athlete was a contradiction that upset Wyman's idea of what a woman athletes looked like. Strong! began filming in 2004; originally planned to be a short film it turned into a much larger project exploring not only Haworth's Olympic journey but self image and the training that goes into weight lifting. Strong! aired on PBS's Independent Lens series in 2012. In 2017 while teaching at UC Davis, and with the help of Irene Lusztig, she assisted students in creating a website  called Interviews With Feminist Experimental Filmmakers. Students can present their research on a filmmaker and invite that filmmaker to an interview, allowing for exposure of the artist and education of the students. Wyman is a member of the artist collective BLW, which engages people with live reenactments centered around civil rights. Honors. Wyman's film "A Boy Named Sue" won the Sappho award for Best Documentary in 2000 and was nominated for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's Best Documentary Media Award in the same year but did not win. In 2012, Wyman won the Princess Grace Award  for Film Honorarium.