Cara Mertes, Founder & Director

Throughout her career as a nonprofit executive, award-winning executive producer and producer/director, broadcast programmer, curator, teacher, and writer, Cara has championed the leadership role of artists in society, and worked to harness the power of cultural expression—with an emphasis on nonfiction storytelling—to amplify awareness and accelerate progressive change.

Cara currently serves as Founding Director of the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS), a donor collaborative focused on supporting creative visual storytelling and narrative analysis in the public interest internationally. Previously at Ford Foundation, she served as Project Director, Moving Image Exploration, International Programs piloting a network-focused, narrative-informed, cultural grantmaking resource. Here, she supported ten regions and global strategies in designing and supporting grants for creative visual content, research, narrative analysis, organizing and networks.

She joined Ford as Director, JustFilms, the foundation’s signature documentary portfolio, where she and her team integrated the initiative across the foundation’s strategies, supported hundreds of documentary films internationally, created an international network of non-fiction resource hubs and incubated a range of narrative-centered initiatives including the Pop Culture Collaborative, the Detroit Narrative Agency and DocAfrica.

Previously, Cara served for eight years as director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund, and was part of the Sundance Institute’s leadership team. In that role, she oversaw the growth of the Documentary Film Program and Fund and led her team in funding and mentoring hundreds of filmmakers from around the world, expanding the annual portfolio of activities to include new funding, additional labs, and new global partnerships to increase impact and resources for the field. There she led a series of new initiatives, co-founded Doc Society’s Good Pitch event and training model, and created the Stories of Change initiative with the Skoll Foundation.

Earlier, Cara was executive producer of the PBS documentary series POV. She led an expansion of POV/American Documentary, producing an annual prime-time series and PBS specials that brought dozens of award-winning films to public television viewers. She received multiple Emmy Awards, George Foster Peabody Awards, and duPont-Columbia Awards and was awarded a Webby Award for her pioneering web series on PBS, POV’s Borders. She was also executive producer of several Academy Award-nominated films, including Street Fight, Nerakhoon: Betrayal, and My Country, My Country, and served as executive director of American Documentary.

Cara has served on numerous nonprofit boards and festival juries and is a member of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Writers Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. She earned her BA from Vassar College and her MA from Hunter College. Cara also completed the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow and Harvard University’s owner/president management program as a Ford Fellow. She currently serves as a Board Member for the Guild of Future Architects and Landscapes of Hope. She lives in New Jersey with her family.