Body of Work: Tony Heriza
Thursday, September 18 and Friday, September 19, 2025, 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Tony Heriza has been engaged in producing media for social change since the 1970s, while also teaching and working with community organizations. His work has been broadcast on PBS and screened widely at film festivals. He was one of the founders of the Media House, a Dayton, Ohio collective that included Julia Reichert and Jim Klein, activists and filmmakers whose films Union Maids and Seeing Red won Oscar nominations at the time. Tony has a B.A. from Antioch College and a Master’s degree from Rutgers University. He has taught media production at Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, and Temple University, and served for many years as Director of Media Production for the American Friends Service Committee.
As Tony retraces his pathway through political media-making for the last 50 years, he will discuss the power and varied purposes of radical media and will draw threads of connection between the activist filmmaking of the past and the needs of our present moment.
This Body of Work event will include two evenings highlighting Tony’s varied work across five decades.
Thursday, September 18th, 7:00 PM
Facing the Wind
(USA, 2024, 58 minutes)
On the first evening, Thursday, Sept. 18, Tony will begin by sharing stories of the political and cultural climate of the early 1970s, when he was introduced to both radical politics and documentary media-making. He will discuss the films and activist energies that influenced a group of young “cultural workers” to form a living and working collective that lasted nearly ten years – and will share clips of his work with that group. He will tell stories of the lifelong relationships that emerged from that period, closing the evening with Facing the Wind, his newest work with long-time collaborator Deirdre Fishel.
Friday, September 19th, 7:00 PM
The Art of Survival
(USA, 2023, 28 minutes)
On Friday, Sept. 18, Tony will share short works and clips from both his independent work and his collaborations with other filmmakers, exploring how his early collective media-making influenced his work dealing with a range of political and social issues across the decades. He will discuss how his approach to working in and with communities has evolved and will finish with a full screening of Art of Survival, his recent collaboration with Cindy Burstein and Jim Wasserman filmed in Kensington.