Bay Area-based director, writer and producer Helen De Michiel's creative media making work moves across independent film and digital platforms.

Beginning in the 1980s, she produced the pioneering series The Independents and Alive TV for public television, created several innovative community media projects with youth, and began writing regularly about issues in the public media and arts field. Her films are included in museum collections across the country.

She is deeply involved in co-creative and participatory media practices, including combinatory storytelling which she calls open space new media.

De Michiel co-authored Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (Routledge 2018) with film historian Patricia Zimmermann. She writes regularly about her creative experiences, knowledge, and insight into these processes and possibilities. Her episodic documentary, Lunch Love Community (2010-15), circulated as an open space project across live and online communities. With Berkeley Vs. Big Soda (2016), these projects continue to make a real impact for global food justice.

She currently teaches in the Film Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.  Her new documentary project, Between the Sun and the Sidewalk, is slated for a 2021 release.