Jim Lebrecht

James LeBrecht has over 40 years of experience as a film and theater sound designer and mixer, filmmaker, author and disability rights activist. LeBrecht co-directed and co-produced, with Nicole Newnham, the 2021 Oscar nominated feature length documentary, Crip Camp. Crip Camp received the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for feature length documentary. Jim began his career in the theater in 1978, working as the resident sound designer at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for ten years. His theatrical sound design work took him to many, well known theaters, including the New York Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse and ACT in San Francisco. LeBrecht is a founding member of FWD-Doc, an organization of documentary filmmakers with disabilities – and their allies – working for greater support for D/deaf and disabled filmmakers. Some of LeBrecht’s additional accomplishments include being a character consultant for Pixar Animation Studios for two of their films. He has been a mentor at the SFFILM’s FilmHouse residency fellowship for three years. Jim is honored to be a member of the Disability Futures Fellowship, an initiative of the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.