Writer/Director Joanne Caputo
Caputo began her independent filmmaking career with a children’s video, Ballerina, Ballerina! (1995), recommended by Sesame St. Magazine. Her first documentary, On A Roll: Family, Disability and the American Dream, was broadcast nationally in 2005 by PBS (www.pbs.org/onaroll), where it won the Independent Lens Audience Award. Recommended by The New York Times, Anti-Defamation League and others, On A Roll continues to represent the USA at international disability film festivals around the globe. In 2008 Caputo self-published Margaret Garner, a dual non-fiction book based on an American Slavery research project for a screenplay. Caputo released her third film, Cutting Loose in 2010, a seven-year documentary study of an American prison artist.
Caputo is the former recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Artist Project Grant (On A Roll, 2002) and a Screenwriting Fellowship (Margaret Garner, 1998). A magna cum laude graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a Pennsylvania Master’s Equivalency Certificate, she is married to author/illustrator Michael Fleishman and is the mother of their two sons, Cooper and Max.
