Barb Lee

Barb Lee is the founder and President of both Point Made Films, a documentary film company that focuses on American identity, and Point Made Learning, a consulting company that, using the stories of Point Made Films, provides organizations with creative, story-based education regarding issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lee is the director and producer of the feature length documentary film Adopted, which explores the grit rather than the glamour of international adoption. The film includes a companion DVD, Adopted: We Can Do Better, which she and her team created as an educational teaching guide for adoptive families. Today, the film and the companion videos are still used as standard training material in almost every adoption agency in the country. Point Made Films teamed up with filmmaker Andre Robert Lee for its second documentary, The Prep School Negro, which reveals how costly scholarships can be for young African American scholars who attend some of the most elite prep schools in the country. To date, the film has been screened in more than eight hundred  prep schools across the country. Point Made Films latest film is I’m Not Racist… Am I? a documentary directed by Catherine Wigginton Greene that follows, verité style, twelve New York high school students who commit to completing a year of anti-racism training together. Throughout the course of the film, the teens and their parents learn how today’s racism is both different and much the same as the racism of thirty years ago. I’m Not Racist… Am I? is the principle resource for an innovative online anti-racism course developed by Point Made Learning, the sister company to Point Made Films. Point Made Learning creates and offers engaging anti-discrimination products and services based in storytelling. Point Made Learning’s goal is to the change the way organizations engage in equity issues such as racism, sexism, gender equity, classism, and physical ability differences.

Lee has served as a consultant on numerous documentary films, including Overburden, about systemic oppression and poverty in the Appalachian Mountains; Without a Fight, about the role of youth soccer in the Kenyan slum of Kibera; and Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which reports the heartbreaking aftermath of some five hundred infants who were secretly adopted during Argentina’s Dirty War.  Point Made Films is also a producing partner for the independent feature film The Birth of a Nation written, produced, directed by, and starring, Nate Parker.

Prior to creating her own companies, Lee worked as a freelance video producer, a corporate event designer, a video production teacher at the North Carolina School of Science and Math (still her favorite job); she also worked in development at 20th Century Fox and Fox TV.  Her first movie job was at Paramount Studios, where she was a writing intern for Star Trek:  The Next Generation.

She has dual degrees in broadcast journalism and speech communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has volunteered in numerous leadership roles including Chair of the UNC Board of Visitors, Vice-Chair of the UNC Performing Arts Board of Advisors, Chair of ACRED (Alumni Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity), and as a member of UNC’s School of Media and Journalism’s Board of Visitors. Lee is the 2015 recipient of UNC’s Alumni Diversity Award, the university’s highest honor for work in racial justice, and was the 2016 commencement speaker for the UNC School of Media and Journalism. She is also a trustee of the foundation board of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.