Alice Elliott

A photo of Alice Elliott, an older woman with light skin and shoulder-length grey hair wearing a black tank top and scarf, smiling widely at the camera, sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Alice Elliott is an Academy Award-nominated documentary director of The Collector of Bedford Street, a short documentary that made its debut on Cinemax/HBO. The film tells the story of her neighbor, Larry Selman, who had an intellectual disability that gave him a low IQ. However, he committed his life to raising money for others, despiteliving at the poverty level. His passion for community involvement and philanthropy was a model of service leadership. The International Kiwanis continues to use The Collector of Bedford Street to train young Key Leaders all around the world in service leadership.

She directed the PBS Award-winning documentary Body & Soul: Diana & Kathy, one of her short documentary films that, through compelling stories, changes our perceptions of ability. The film is now being made into a musical.

A Guggenheim Fellow award recipient, Ms. Elliott also makes training films and branded content that use high-quality visuals and people with disabilities to tell their own stories. As a media diversity and accessibility consultant, she develops programs for corporations, government agencies, and non-profits. Her monthly newsletter, Trusted Source, features outstanding media made by and about people with disabilities and highlights articles and innovations in the disability sphere.

She and Emmy Award winner Jason DaSilva are scheduled to co-direct a feature film, The Dismantled, about an unlikely smuggler. Funded by Canadian Media Fund and Telefilm, all roles featuring people with disabilities will be played by people with disabilities.

She directed Miracle on 42nd Street, a documentary about affordable housing for artists that won a 2020 NY Emmy Award for Best Documentary. The film had its world premiere at DOC NYC and received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Currently, she is directing Carrie’s Blueprint, a feature-length documentary that weaves together three stories of people with Down syndrome and their impact on cutting-edge discoveries in current trials for an Alzheimer’s cure. Formerly head of the NYU Documentary Studies Area, she taught documentary and television production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Sign up for her monthly review of inclusive media, Trusted Source, at www.welcomechange.org.