Co-Founder & Board Chair | Utah Film Center
As an Academy Award- and Emmy Award-winning film producer and industry-leading philanthropist, Geralyn White Dreyfous understands the consequential importance of storytelling.
“Cinema is a place where improbable people come together under a tent,” she says. “A well-told story can impact policy and philanthropy. It can change hearts and minds.”
Dreyfous has helped tell dozens of these worldview-shifting stories, with backdrops ranging from Kolkata’s red light district (“Born Into Brothels”) to the beauty pageant stage (“Brave Miss World”), the woods of Northern Italy (“The Truffle Hunters”) and beyond. Beginning her career at programs like “NOVA,” “Frontline” and “20/20,” Dreyfous eventually found her place in documentary filmmaking through philanthropy—and the impulse she felt to tell the stories of the world’s most influential social innovators and entrepreneurs.
“Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank? That’s a movie. Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement? That’s a movie,” Dreyfous says. “I returned to film as a strategy for amplifying amazing stories. In the ’80s and ’90s, the psychology of philanthropy was venture capital: ‘How do we scale?’ But the moral arc of these people’s lives helps others ‘scale’ on a trajectory of creativity, moral imagination and justice. It inspires people to take risks.”
Today, Dreyfous boasts over 180 credits as a film producer and several award wins and nominations for films like “The Day My God Died,” “The Invisible War” and “Navalny.” In 2002, she founded the Utah Film Center in Salt Lake City, where she currently serves as board chair.
In 2007, Dreyfous co-founded Impact Partners, a fund supporting independent voices through financing over 250 films. She is also a founding member of Gamechanger Films, the first equity fund dedicated to financing feature films directed by women to address gender disparity in the industry. Dreyfous is deeply committed to establishing organizations that advance independent and diverse filmmakers, and over 74 percent of films shown through Utah Film Center programming are directed by BIPOC, female or Utah-based filmmakers. She also helped develop the Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival, highlighting impactful stories in the LGBTQ+ community.
“Independent filmmakers are creative entrepreneurs,” Dreyfous says. “They deserve, as a birthright, access to public airwaves to show us who we are, who we’re becoming and where we’ve been.”
To help provide access and opportunities to these storytellers and address the crucial need for nonprofit recognition in the industry, Dreyfous initiated the creation of the Utah Film Center Fiscal Sponsorship program in 2008. Fast-forward to 2023—in an age where Hollywood is shutting out independent voices and support for public television is on the rocks, this type of funding is more crucial than ever.
“We live in a country where independent voices are vital and fundamental to democracy,” Dreyfous says. “Right now, we risk having the public square shut down by streamers that have gotten too big. … It’s more challenging than ever to be a storyteller, and the role of philanthropy in supporting visual storytelling has never been more important.”
Connect with Geralyn White Dreyfous on LinkedIn.