Aldona Watts

Aldona Watts is an award-winning filmmaker working in the Bay Area. Her career began in a remote village in Lithuania, where she met a group of elderly women who were the last to carry on an ancient folk singing tradition. Despite a lack of formal training, Aldona gathered a team and together they documented the women's songs and stories. Out of this experience grew her first film, documentary feature Land of Songs (2015). Land of Songs had its World Premiere at the Vilnius International Film Festival and its North American Premiere with the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the Museum of Natural History in NYC, where it received the Filmmaker Award Special Mention. It also received the Audience Award from the Chicago European Film Festival and was voted back the following year for an encore screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Aldona’s documentary short Steinbeisser (2017), about an experimental culinary event featuring renowned Bay Area chefs and artists can be found streaming on The New Yorker’s video platform. She is currently producing a documentary feature directed by Jacqueline Castel in collaboration with Sacred Bones Records and Dais Records about Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, an international “anti-cult” formed by a group of provocative artists in the 1980s. She is also working on a documentary short about Oaklash, the Bay Area’s drag and queer performance festival. She works mainly as an editor, most recently on a documentary series about the scientists, policymakers and communities driving renewable energy innovation called Empowered: Energy Heroes, now broadcasting nationwide on public TV. Previously, she produced and hosted a punk radio show that broadcast in NYC and Vilnius, Lithuania and ran a youth radio station and after school program in Queens. Aldona grew up in San Francisco and lives in Oakland after spending several years in NYC.