Katie Doering was born and raised in Los Angeles, right in the heart of Hollywood. After college in the midwestern United States, she spent years teaching in South America and working as a labor organizer in the south Bronx before finding herself back in LA working in documentary film and reality television.
Her first production job was for the groundbreaking documentary series POV for PBS. Since it's premiere in 1988, "POV" has won 34 Emmys, 19 Peabody awards, and 3 Oscars.
Katie specifically mentions the POV documentary Two Towns of Jasper.
After leaving POV, Katie went on to work on such popular shows as LA Ink and Intervention, as well as producing on the documentaries The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia and ESPN's Angry Sky.
After leaving her work in reality TV production, Katie was hired by the Sundance Institute, the entity that hosts the world-famous Sundance film festival. Working as a producer for the Women at Sundance Initiative has allowed her to play an active role in tackling one of the entertainment industry’s biggest ongoing problems: inequality in both opportunity and wages for women.
For the last 13 years, 25% of the American directors at the Sundance Film Festival have been female, a figure vastly higher than the typical American box office, where only 4% of the top 100 films were helmed by women. The Women at Sundance initiative organizes a summit of Hollywood decision makers seeking systemic change, and also provides a year-long fellowship program for talented female directors and producers.
Two books that have made an impact on Katie's life are Working by Studs Terkel and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans.