Bio
Jeannie Donohoe’s passion for humanist storytelling has paved her path from a South Bronx classroom to an Irish sheep farm to basketball courts with NBA champions. She is an award-winning filmmaker and a recent fellow in the Sony Pictures Television Diverse Directors Program. In 2024-2025, she has been directing, writing, and producing episodes of PBS/Atlas Obscura’s series Untold Earth. Prior to that, she was selected by Steph Curry and Storm Reid to write and direct a short film about young women in sports for their Under Armour campaign through Curry’s Unanimous Media.
From over 4,600 applicants, Jeannie was chosen to write and direct GAME (starring Rick Fox and Nicole Williams) through the Lexus Short Films program. GAME has 11M+ online views, has screened in over 250 festivals, and has received 90+ awards and honors, including two Oscar-qualifying awards at Raindance and New York International Children’s Film Festival, a Cannes Bronze Lion, Vimeo Staff Pick, and Short of the Week. Jeannie’s film Lambing Season, shot in Ireland, was selected for over 50 film festivals and numerous awards, including a Jury Award at Aspen Shortsfest. Lambing Season was also named one of the “Best Short Films of 2014” by Indiewire and is currently streaming on Omeleto and PBS’s Film School Shorts. Her film Public was selected by Palm Springs ShortFest and HBO’s Outfest and was broadcast on PBS’s Imagemakers. Jeannie has directed and produced music videos that have been featured in NPR/WBUR’s Summer Music Guide and The Big Takeover.
In addition to filmmaking, Jeannie has worked extensively as an educator, facilitator, and mentor. She has taught directing, screenwriting, and producing in Columbia University’s MFA program, Pratt Institute’s Department of Film and Video, Temple University’s School of Film and Media Arts, and the New York Film Academy’s MFA and BFA programs. She has guest lectured on filmmaking at Cornell University, Barnard College, California Polytechnic Institute, University of Tampa, and Southern Methodist University. Jeannie was an inaugural member of the Academy-sponsored screenwriting lab Cine Qua Non Lab in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico and has returned as a facilitator, coordinator, and reviewer. She has also served as a member of several film festival juries.
Jeannie earned her MFA with Honors in directing from Columbia University, where she received the HBO Young Filmmakers Development Award, was appointed to numerous teaching fellowships, and was selected to study at La Fémis in Paris, where she made a short film in French on the historic Pathé Studio stages. She earned her BA with Honors from Dartmouth College and an MS in Education at CUNY’s Lehman College while teaching middle school in the Bronx through the Teach for America program. Jeannie is currently producing an HBO-funded documentary and developing her first feature-length film.