Biography

A filmmaker with a mix of professional and teaching experience, Pearl Gluck joined the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications faculty in 2014. Gluck teaches screenwriting, directing, producing and through her courses and her films she explores themes such as autobiographical film and representations of gender, class, and faith in cinema.

Gluck is currently in post-production on her short film, Castles in the Sky, starring Lynn Cohen. Her feature film, The Turn Out (2018), which blends documentary and fiction storytelling to address the underreported issues of domestic sex trafficking at truck stops, is currently screening at film festivals and won Best Debut Feature at the Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto, Canada, as well as the American Tracks Music Award for the film's title song, Heaven Spelled Backwards.

In 1996 she received a Fulbright grant to Hungary to collect Hasidic stories. Gluck has been interviewed about her work on NPR with Melissa Block, WBUR's The Connection with Chris Leiden in Boston and produced for WBAI. She has appeared in A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (1998; Directed and Produced by Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum). In 2016, along with Film/Video students and M.F.A. Theater alum, Elle Jae Stewart, Gluck directed Junior, an award-winning film which looks at racially motivated police violence through one mother's eyes.