Kate Trumbull-LaValle

Kate Trumbull-LaValle is a Peabody Award-winning non-fiction storyteller, filmmaker, artist, and educator with a passion for telling stories about rebellious women, motherhood, labor, immigration, art, and the hybridity of identity.

Her critically acclaimed directorial debut, Ovarian Psycos (2016), is a feature documentary that follows a fierce, unapologetic Latinx bicycle collective formed on the Eastside of Los Angeles in response to gendered violence. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in 2016 and a national broadcast on PBS's Independent Lens in 2017.

In 2018, Trumbull-LaValle produced and directed Artist and Mother (2018), a one-hour broadcast documentary that explores the theme of motherhood through the lens of four contemporary California artists for PBS SoCal’s Artbound, an Emmy Award-winning arts and culture series. That same year, she was commissioned by PBS SoCal to produce and direct City Rising: The Informal Economy (2018), an investigation of the informal economy through the stories of workers fighting for justice. Both Artist and Mother and City Rising were nominated for L.A. Area Emmys and won L.A. Press Awards in 2018.

In 2019, she co-produced “Episode 1: Breaking Ground” and “Episode 3: Good Americans” of the groundbreaking five-part PBS history series Asian Americans (2020), a bold and sweeping look at the history of Asians in the United States by series producer Renee Tajima-Peña, for which she received a Peabody Award.

Trumbull-LaValle is also a co-producer for Space to Breath (2024), an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary written and produced by Walidah Imarisha and directed by Juicebox P. Burton that premiered at Sheffield Documentary Film Festival in June 2025.

Her most recent project is Killface (2024), an exhaustive and visceral meditation on female power that functions as both a short experimental documentary and a spatial sound and video installation. The project premiered at the Mimesis Documentary Festival in 2024, where it was presented as a three-channel installation and won the Audience Award in the Expanded Cinema category.

In addition to directing and producing long-form nonfiction projects, Trumbull-LaValle directs social issue-focused broadcast and digital content for nonprofits and advocacy campaigns. Notably, she directed a video series for the Oregon Health Authority’s Safe + Strong initiative, the best-performing public health campaign of all time on Twitter.

Her work has been supported by California Humanities, ITVS Open Call, the ITVS Diversity Development Fund, Pacific Pioneer Fund, Women in Film, Sundance Institute, Working Films, the International Documentary Association, Studio IX, and Women Make Movies. Her films have screened at more than 50 festivals internationally, including SXSW, Hot Docs, the New York Human Rights Film Festival, Ambulante, MASS MoCA, Milano Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival and the New Orleans Film Festival.

Trumbull-Lavalle was an adjunct professor of creative nonfiction at California State University, Long Beach from 2000 to 2025. She received her M.A. from the Social Documentation Program at University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a proud member of the International Documentary Association (IDA) and Film Fatales.