Immy Humes

Immy Humes is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker from New York City who treats social and political themes through the prism of real stories about unconventional people. She is currently working on a documentary portrait of Shirley Clarke, an inventor of independent film in America, that will feature Clarke friends and collaborators including Agnès Varda, Jonas Mekas, DA Pennebaker, and Martin Scorsese. The film has won support from Sundance/NEH, the Warhol Foundation, and the NEA, and is being made in association with Milestone Films.

Her new book, “The Only Woman,” grew out of a longtime obsession with images of women like Clarke who entered a man’s world one at a time. Immy collected hundreds of photos of the phenomenon into a book (Phaidon, 2022). Viewing the pictures as records of life in patriarchy and its uneven erosion, she finds the repetition and variety of the images endlessly fascinating—funny, tragic, infuriating, mysterious, and inspiring—and is eager to share them with the world.

Her film, DOC, was a life and times of her late father, HL “Doc” Humes, a novelist and co-founder of The Paris Review literary magazine. It is a political, personal, and cultural tale of mental illness, drugs, and creativity. When it opened at NYC’s Film Forum and aired on PBS, critics called it: “exquisite,” “fascinating,” “engaging,” “nothing short of inspiring… deliciously ironic.”

Immy’s first film, A LITTLE VICIOUS, about an alleged pit bull, was nominated for an Academy Award. She has won residencies from Yaddo, Kopkind, Blue Mountain, and MacDowell; screenings at MOMA and festivals from Amsterdam to Arkansas; grants from NYSCA, ITVS, NEH, and CPB; and broadcasts on PBS, NBC News, A&E, National Geographic, and Michael Moore’s TV Nation.