Stan Hirson — A Short Bio
Stan started his professional career as a documentary filmmaker at WGBH-TV in Boston in 1962. Among his early credits — much to the amusement of family and friends — was being floor manager on Julia Child’s first 2 seasons of The French Chef. He moved out of the television studio and covered the civil rights movement in the South for National Educational Television in 1963 and made film portraits of James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Stan joined the Maysles Brothers as Associate and was involved in the films such as The Beatles in America, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens, documenting the Christo progjects and numerous television documentaries.
As a result of his films about the workplace, he was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship to the Graduate School of Management at UCLA at the Center for Quality of Working Life and left his film career to practice organizational consultation. He trained in group and organizational behavior at the Washington School of Psychiatry and was awarded a fellowship at London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the application of psychoanalytic theory and practice to the worikplace. In addition to consulting to industry he taught group and organizational dynamics in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University.
Stan’s long relationship with the Bell System as a consultant on workplace issues and strategic planning gave him opportunities and resources to use film to document organizational change as well as to understand and effect it.
He currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley where he has consolidated his careers to make documentary videos for the internet.