Jody Hassett Sanchez

Jody Hassett Sanchez is president of Pointy Shoe Productions, a documentary and long-form TV production company. She’s also the director of Documentaries for Kingston Road Pictures. She’s spent the past year and a half working on More Art Upstairs, a documentary that follows several blue chip artists competing at ArtPrize, a contest with half a million dollars in prize money that’s upending our ideas about art, aesthetics and populism. The film will have its world premier at North America’s largest documentary film festival in May.

Jody’s previous documentary has been broadcast in more than 60 countries, screened on more than a thousand campuses and been included in the State Department’s international cultural affairs program, among other honors.

Filmed in India, Pakistan and West Africa, that film, SOLD: Fighting the New Global Slavery intertwines the stories of three extraordinary individuals who defy death threats and challenge powerful interests in the battle to end child slavery in the 21st Century.

Before entering the world of documentaries, Hassett Sanchez covered religion, culture, and education for ABC’s World News Tonight and Nightline. Prior to joining ABC News, she traveled the globe as CNN’s State Department producer, reporting on everything from democratic elections in Mongolia to refugee resettlement in Macedonia.

She served as a senior producer of CNN’s Cold War Postscript, a 24-part weekly program examining connections between the history of the Cold War and global affairs today. She was part of the CNN team that won a national Emmy award for breaking news coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and the ABC team that won a national Emmy for 9/11 coverage.

Jody is a graduate of Smith College who lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband George, a journalist and fine arts photographer and their son Sebastian Beck, a lego enthusiast who was born in Kazakhstan.