A pioneering figure in video documentary, Julie Gustafson has produced several major documentaries for public television. In 1978 she became a co-director, with John Reilly, of Global Village, which was one of the premiere media arts centers for video documentary in the country. She co-founded and co-directed the Documentary Film Festival of New York (originally the Global Village Documentary Film Festival). Among her acclaimed social-issue documentaries was a 60-minute work for public television, entitled Abortion: Across the Barricades.
Gustafson was born in 1949. She received a B.A. from Brandeis University. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, she was the director of the Documentary Center at the New School for Social Research, and taught at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania and at New York University. Gustafson lives in New Orleans.