Lesley Chilcott

Director, CODEGIRL

Lesley Chilcott is an award winning filmmaker, documentarian, and producer. In addition to award winning documentary features and shorts, she is Chair of the West Coast Producers Guild of America (PGA) Non-Fiction documentary committee while also hosting a popular screening series for them, The Doc Club.

Lesley got her start in film and production with MTV Networks. Before she made documentaries, she produced and directed hundreds of TV commercials. She was a producer of the 2007 Academy Award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth; and she also produced the amazing rock documentary, It Might Get Loud (2009), about legendary guitarists including the Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White. Other notable films Lesley produced include A Mother’s Promise, the Barack Obama biographic film for the Democratic National Convention in 2008; and Waiting for Superman (2010), for which she was awarded a win by the PGA for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Documentary.

In 2014, Lesley directed the feature documentary, A Small Section of the World, about a village of women coffee producers from the Talamanca mountains of Costa Rica which played at the Stare Department of the UN in Geneva. The film also had a theatrical run and aired in 40 countries through Sundance International. Her short film, CodeStars, garnered over 20 million views online and was the number one video on Youtube for two days.

In 2015, Lesley released the documentary CodeGirl which follows the annual Technovation Challenge, a competition where high school-aged girls from around the world design an app that solves a problem in their community. Lesley filmed teams all over the world including Moldova, Mexico, and Brazil documenting how exposure to technology and computer science can transform young girls’ lives. CodeGirl was the first movie to have its premiere on Youtube before going to theaters and other outlets. It premiered on TV in February and will stream on Netflix starting April 1, 2016.

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