BIOGRAPHY
SANDY NORTHROP
Producer, Editor, Director, Cinematographer
VIETNAM PASSAGES: JOURNEYS FROM WAR TO PEACE

Sandy Northrop has been a documentary filmmaker for twenty-seven years primarily involved in programming for PBS. Her first work for PBS was as a location manager and editor for the National Geographic Society on its acclaimed television specials. From 1976 to 1985 she covered topics from endangered elephants and gorillas in Africa to the impact of the computer on our lives.

Northrop set out on her own in 1989. She produced How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?, following pianist Jimmy McKissic from the piano bar in Cannes, France where he worked to the stage at Carnegie Hall where he made his classical concert debut. This program about a whimsical artist's pursuit of his dream still airs on PBS.

With a move to Washington, D.C. in 1989, Northrop focused her attention on American History. From 1989-1997, she produced the historical montages that have become the signature for PBS's National Memorial Day and A Capitol Fourth spectaculars. She also directed the 1996 Spirit of America multimedia presentation for the U.S. Army. Drawn & Quartered, a book co-authored with Stephen Hess, was published in 1996. The book, covering two hundred years of American political cartoons and their impact on political and popular culture, grew out of a PBS television special that was developed in association with the Library of Congress and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In September, 1999, Pete Peterson: Assignment Hanoi, an hour program on Douglas ãPeteä Peterson, a former POW and the first American Ambassador to Vietnam since the war, premiered nationally on PBS. Northrop, who lived in Hanoi, Vietnam from1997 to May 2001, not only produced, directed, and edited the program, but also took on a new role as cinematographer. She is currently in post-production on a new one-hour television special: Vietnam Passage: Journeys from War to Peace. The program brings the last 25 years in Vietnam alive through the perspective of six individuals whose lives, once defined by war, now personalize the struggle of a country entering the new millennium in peace.

Northrop received a BFA in photography in 1969 from the University of Michigan, and in 1972 received an MA in Communications from Stanford University.

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