Laura Israel

Laura Israel is an acclaimed photographer, editor, and documentary filmmaker. She studied film at New York University, and landed several jobs editing various music videos, commercials, and experimental films as a student. Of the latter, Israel worked closely with famed photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank cataloging and preserving his own experimental films and documentaries. Based out of New York City, Israel has worked and become friends with a number of artists based there, including Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie. She worked with Lurie on his comedic faux documentary series "Fishing with John," where the musician and sometimes actor Lurie travels to various locations in the world--Thailand, Jamaica, Maine--and goes fishing with his friends Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, and Willem Dafoe. She has also served as editor on the documentaries "Africa Unite: A Celebration of Bob Marley's 60th Birthday" and "In the Hearts of Africa." Israel made the leap to directing her own documentary with the controversial 2010 film "Windfall," a project that originated from her own experiences in the Catskill Mountains when the small town near the cabin she regularly retreated to plunged into a contentious debate about wind energy when some residents agreed to allow towering wind generators to be built on their land, and others opposed it.