Bernardo Ruiz is a three-time Emmy®-nominated documentary filmmaker and member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. For more than two and a half decades, he has worked in the documentary field—primarily as a director and producer, but simultaneously as an organizer, mentor, and panelist. Ruiz was an active steering committee member of the Independent Caucus, created to represent the interests of independent filmmakers in public media, where he lobbied public media and local station leadership to keep Independent Lens and POV on the primetime schedule in 2015. Previously, Ruiz served in an elected position on the council of the Writer’s Guild of America, East (WGAE), where he helped to successfully lobby the House Appropriations Committee for increased funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Ruiz has also served on the board of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), during a period when the organization was actively involved in advocating for increased public media funding and distribution opportunities for filmmakers from Latino/x/e communities.
As a working filmmaker, Ruiz has directed and produced five feature-length documentaries as well as a host of nonfiction programming for both public media and commercial outlets, including HBO, ESPN, and Disney+. His latest film, EL EQUIPO (THE TEAM), was recently nominated for an Emmy®, was awarded the Jury Prize for best documentary feature at the 2023 Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival and was named a “Top 20 Audience Favorite” at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival. He is currently working with a talented team of journalists and filmmakers on “Latino Vote 2024,” which will air nationally on PBS, followed by free streaming on pbs.org, this Fall.
To address significant changes within the independent documentary field by illuminating potential lessons from past organizing efforts, Ruiz will examine the role of public media in this ecosystem through the creation of an oral history that offers insights from the key participants who successfully lobbied Congress “to expand the diversity and innovativeness of programming available to public broadcasting” by creating the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in 1988.
