Ally Acker (born August 17, 1954, New York) is an American filmmaker, poet, author, and film historian. Her book, Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, was the first on the market to reveal the entrepreneurial, and transformative roles that women played in all aspects of the film industry since its inception. Reel Women was optioned in 1995 for one of the first interactive CD-ROMs ever released, Reel Women: The Untold Story. In 2014, Acker directed the feature documentary, "REEL HERSTORY: The REAL Story of Reel Women," hosted by Jodie Foster.
Education and early career
At age seventeen, Ally Acker became the first woman to obtain a First Class Radiotelephone Operator license through the FCC, enabling the operation of radio transmitters. WOR AM radio in New York hired her at age eighteen to become their first female engineer. At WOR, Acker worked closely with radio legends Jean Shepherd, Joe Franklin, and Arlene Francis.
After graduating from Northwestern University in 1976, Acker made the foray into television as a video editor for WRC-TV, the NBC affiliate station in Washington, D.C. From 1977 to 1980, Acker also worked as a freelance radio producer for the Feminist Radio Network, where she interviewed Alice Walker, who had just completed her second novel, Meridian. The interview later aired on National Public Radio.
In 1978 Acker directed, produced, shot and edited the 16mm film, Silver Apples of the Moon, which later became a finalist for a Student Academy Award. She moved to New York in 1980 to pursue filmmaking. Her first job in New York was at Valkhan Films where she worked as assistant to film editor Sam Pollard. A year later, she was hired by NBC network as a video editor for The Today Show, and NBC Nightly News.[1] Only a few months after that hire, Acker was recruited by The Today Show as a producer/writer, becoming the first technician to cross over into producing/writing at NBC in New York. Acker's first network produced stories featured hosts Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw.
In 1985, Acker also interviewed famed Surrealist artist and writer, Leonora Carrington. The interview was later used in Acker's film portrait of Carrington's life and work, The Flowering of the Crone: Leonora Carrington, Another Reality (2012–2014). The film is the only authorized film portrait of Carrington to be produced in the United States.
In 1987, Acker obtained her Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in film and poetry from Columbia University. Her thesis screenplay, The Mathematical Mermaid about the life of Sonya Kovalevsky, was a 1988 finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, administered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s Acker free-lanced as a writer/producer for NBC, ABC, Lifetime Television, National Geographic, and Disney Channel. During these years, she also focused on poetry which she began writing at age 13. Her first volume, Surviving Desire, was released by Garden Street Press in 1994. In 1999, Red Hen Press of California released Acker's second volume, Waiting for the Beloved. In 2010, Red Hen put out Acker's, Some Help From the Dead. Acker's poetry has appeared in numerous journals including, The Sun, Ploughshares, The American Voice, Southwest Review, South Dakota Review, Antioch Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Poetry Kanto among others. She has received The Chester H. Jones Foundation Award for Poetry and The Carl Sandburg Centennial Award.[3]
2000s
In 2012, Acker vastly updated and expanded her 1990 Reel Women work now used in Universities worldwide, into a two volume series, Reel Women: The First Hundred Years, Volume One (Foreword by Judith Crist), and Volume Two (Foreword by Jeanine Basinger). Both volumes include an Afterword by Marc Wanamaker. All photos included in Acker's Reel Women films and books are from Wanamaker's famed Bison Archives.
In 2014, culled from the rich interviews gathered for The Reel Women Video Archives, Acker directed, co-wrote, and edited a three part feature film, Reel Herstory: The REAL Story of Reel Women, hosted by Jodie Foster, and produced by Sam Pollard, and Robert Dassanowsky.[4]
