Sally Rubin is a documentary filmmaker, editor and tenured professor who has worked in the field for more than 25 years. She is currently directing (with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan) Taking the Reins, a feature-length documentary funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities about the cowboy icon and American identity. She recently completed Mama Has a Mustache, a fully animated documentary about kids and gender identity. The film was acquired by Disney+ and offered a development deal for a related series called Kids Talk. It premiered at Outfest in 2021 and screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, MountainFilm in Telluride, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and many others. Rubin also recently completed a commissioned piece for the Smithsonian, Appalachian Futures, which was released in January 2022.
In 2018, Rubin completed Hillbilly, a feature documentary about media stereotypes of Appalachia. The film streamed on Hulu and Al Jazeera, and is now available on iTunes, Amazon and beyond. Hillbilly is in distribution through 1091 Media (Cartel Land, Life Animated), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and has been praised by Michael Moore and Dolly Parton. In 2014, Rubin completed Life on the Line (with Jen Gilomen) about a teenage girl growing up on the U.S./Mexico border. The film was broadcast nationwide on PBS and premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Rubin's previous film, Deep Down, was an ITVS-funded feature-length documentary about two friends in eastern Kentucky who find themselves divided over mountaintop-removal coal mining near their homes. The film was part of the 2010-2011 Independent Lens Emmy-winning PBS series and has reached almost 1.5 million people through its broadcast, distribution and outreach campaign. It was nominated for an Emmy for its Virtual Mine outreach project in the New Approaches to News and Documentary category. It was funded by Chicken and Egg Pictures, the MacArthur Foundation, ITVS, and the Fledgling Fund.
Rubin's other credits include The Last Mountain, a film about her father's death in a hiking accident that was broadcast on PBS, Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers and the television series The Freedom Files (editor), as well as David Sutherland's six-hour Frontline special Country Boys (associate producer), and Riverwebs (editor), which was broadcast nationwide on PBS. In 2004, Rubin founded the groundbreaking Straight Outta Grrrlville Film Festival in San Francisco and continues to produce local events and benefits for artists and filmmakers, alongside her own ongoing work.
Other professional memberships and affiliations include: Doculink Steering Committee (member); Doculink Planning Committee (member); Tenth Muse Films (president of the board); International Documentary Association (member); International Documentary Association David Wolper Award (member, screening and judging committees); International Documentary Association Awards (feature documentary judge); New Day Films Cooperative (member/owner).
After earning her M.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University, Rubin fell deeply in love with the field of documentary film and hopes to continue working in it for a very long time.