C.M. HARDT
C.M. Hardt is an award winning photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles.
PHOTOGRAPHER
C.M. Hardt began her photography career in 1988 documenting the Tompkins Square Riot in NY's Lower East Side. Her graphic pictures of the violence appeared in The Village Voice and she became a regular contributor to the paper working on such feature cover stories as riding the nightshift with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps and going undercover on a two day stake-out of Genovese mafia boss Vincent "the Chin" Gigante.
In 1991, Hardt began working for The New York Times, after traveling to Sudan to document the widespread famine. On her return, she became one of the Times' regular contributors for the next 6 years, covering everything from spot news to feature work for the fashion pages. Hardt was also a contributor to Newsweek, various magazines at Scholastic Inc. and New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority among other clients.
Today, as a multi-media artist Hardt shoots mainly high end portraiture and event photography for a variety of clients ranging from political figures like Senator Christine Kehoe and Congresswoman Hilda Solis to creative advertising firms.
DIRECTOR - PRODUCER - WRITER
C.M. Hardt produced, directed, wrote and shot Death in El Valle, an investigation of her grandfather’s political murder in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Death in El Valle was an independent project for Channel Four Television in the U.K. where it first aired in 1996. After being censored in Spain for ten years, Hardt’s documentary has become a grassroots sensation, as the country finally begins to face the brutal repression of Franco’s dictatorship with a national movement to recover memory. Death in El Valle is currently part of an international film series entitled Imagenes contra el olvido.
Death in El Valle was first seen in theaters in Spain in the fall of 2005 while being distributed through the website www.deathinelvalle.com The film also aired on WNET (New York) in 1998, and on flagship WGBH (Boston) in 2001. Death in El Valle has been screened at the AFI Festival in Los Angeles, The Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York, the Taos Talking Picture Festival in New Mexico, and was a finalist at the USA Film Festival. Hardt has been invited to present and speak about Death in El Valle at NYU, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA and Instituto Cervantes NY, as well as numerous cultural centers throughout Spain, Mexico and the UK.
C.M. Hardt has also worked as writer / director / producer on numerous award winning documentary and reality series, including most recently, Nanny 911, the Fox hit; ABC’s In Style Celebrity Wedding; MTV’s Peabody Award-winning series BIOrhythm, and Road Rules, the Emmy Award winning hit series; as well HBO’s powerful series, Taxicab Confessions. Hardt also worked closely with actress Goldie Hawn as a writer / consultant, and was creative director for The Hitchhiker Chronicles a hidden camera documentary series for FX.
AWARDS
In 1995, C.M. Hardt received a Distinguished Achievement Award from The Educational Press Association of America for "Poverty in America". In 1994, she received a Merit Award in Journalism from the Society of Publication Designers for "Condition Critical: America's Health Care System in Crisis." Both stories appeared in Scholastic Update.
ABOUT C.M. HARDT
CM Hardt was raised in NYC by her mother and grandmother, Spanish exiles who fled the Franco dictatorship. She studied at the Lycée Français de NY where she graduated with a Baccalaureate in Philosophy and Mathematics. She then attended Connecticut College where she earned a B.A. with Honors in English and Theater. Hardt also attended the School of Visual Arts. C.M. Hardt is fluent in English, French, and Spanish.
