Rita Baghdadi

Rita Baghdadi is a Moroccan-American documentary filmmaker. She earned a B.A. in Film from Columbia College Chicago where she graduated with honours. Rita got her start as a cinematographer, filming verité documentaries such as Served Like a Girl (2017) and Circus of Books (2019). Her feature documentary directorial debut, My Country No More (2018), was awarded Best Feature at the 2018 Big Sky Film Festival. Her documentary miniseries City Rising (2017) won the LA-area Emmy award for Best Social Issue Film and is still being used as a tool for activism around housing inequality. She is the co-founder of Lady & Bird Films and is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia. Known for the intimacy of her bold, character-driven films, Rita’s third feature documentary Sirens (2022) premiered at Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Outfest. When she’s not in the field, she is an active mentor dedicated to empowering women and girls of colour through documentary film training.