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Bio

Rachel joined the team at Film & Campaign Ltd in 2022 to support the impact campaign for Emma Davie’s THE OIL MACHINE, a new documentary film about North Sea oil & gas. She is passionate about storytelling as the catalyst for social and environmental change. Before joining Film & Campaign, she was working in the US documentary film industry, most recenlty as CEO of the San Francisco Green Film Festival, and prior to that as Festival Director of the International Ocean Film Festival.

In 2010, she founded and launched the San Francisco Green Film Festival as the region’s first environmental public programme of any kind, with the vision of bringing communities together to share urgent stories about the climate crisis. As CEO for ten years (2010-20), she grew the festival into one of the largest and most influential events within the field globally, and developed pioneering new community engagement and impact models for issue-driven documentaries.

Before this, she held positions with film organisations in the UK and USA, including the Edinburgh, BFI London, and SFFILM International Film Festivals, and was Festival Director of the International Ocean Film Festival (2007-09), North America’s largest showcase for marine films. She has been a regular guest lecturer on Environmental Communications at UC Berkeley (2013-19); and is an active committee member of the Green Film Network (2013-present), a global association of 30+ film festivals that supports the diversity and strength of environmental filmmaking worldwide. In 2021, she produced Scotland’s Climate Festival, a nationwide community events programme funded by the Scottish Government to engage the public in COP26.

Rachel has an MA in Cinema from the British Film Institute (BFI) and is a Documentary Chapter member of BAFTA. She recently returned to live in her hometown of Edinburgh after nearly 20 years in California and is enjoying new opportunities to support artists and audiences, campaigns and causes.