Tabitha Jackson is an arts advocate and consultant who has spent her 30 year career supporting the independent voice, championing the social and cultural power of artful cinema, and uplifting a more expansive set of makers, audiences, and forms. In 2020, as the first woman and person of color to be appointed Director of Sundance Film Festival, she re-imagined and led two technologically innovative and radically accessible pandemic editions which ‘expanded the possibilities of what a film festival can be, and who it can be for’. Between 2013 and 2020 she headed the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, launching the Art of Nonfiction initiative to rethink traditional project support in favor of artist-centered models, and to amplify institutional support of formal innovation in nonfiction cinema. In the UK Tabitha worked in production at BBC Television, as Arts Commissioning Editor at Channel 4, and Executive Producer of theatrical documentaries for Film4 including 20,000 Days on Earth (Iain and Jane), and The Arbor (Clio Barnard).
Tabitha is a member of the Academy, serving 3 terms on the Documentary Branch Executive Committee. She was a 2024 Documentary Film Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Policy and Public Policy. A passionate believer in the vital role of the arts as a transformative public good, Tabitha has been working on a broader project about the crisis of trust and truth in documentary. Her time at Open Doc Lab will be spent on the ontological implications of XR/GenAI, and possible institutional responses.