Meema Spedola is a producer, director, and writer in television and radio living in Brooklyn, a short subway ride from Red Hook. She has produced documentaries for PBS, HBO, Cinemax, Sundance Channel, and Public Radio. Her past work includes the Independent Lens documentary Guns and Mothers, about two mothers on opposite sides of the gun control debate, co-produced with director Thom Powers. Spadola’s ITVS documentary Our House premiered on PBS in 2000 and featured the sons and daughters in five diverse gay and lesbian American families. It received jury awards for best documentary at both the New York and Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, and has been broadcast worldwide. Spadola and Powers’s documentaries Breasts and Private Dicks, about women’s and men’s attitudes about their bodies, have been broadcast on HBO to critical acclaim and high ratings, and interviews produced by Spadola were featured in HBO’s 2001 adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Spadola produced the four-part series Shorts From the Underground for the Sundance Channel, and her radio documentaries have appeared on Public Radio’s This American Life. She is the author of Breasts: Our Most Public Private Part (Wildcat Canyon Press), based on her documentary of the same name, and was a contributor to Out of the Ordinary (St. Martin’s Press) a collection of essays by sons and daughters with LGBT parents. Her knitting patterns have appeared in Stitch N’ Bitch (Workman Press) and the magazine Interweave Knits. Spadola grew up in Searsmont, Maine and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.
