Whitney Dow is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator. He has has been producing and directing films focused on race and identity for almost two decades as a partner in Two Tone Productions. His directorial credits include documentaries broadcast on public television: Two Towns of Jasper (POV 2003); I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, Unfinished Country (Wide Angle); and When the Drum is Beating (Independent Lens). His credits as a producer include: Freedom Summer (The History Channel); Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America (Independent Lens), The Undocumented (Independent Lens), Toots (Menemsha Films/Indiepix) and Among the Believers. His films have premiered at festivals ranging from Sundance to Tribeca and been broadcast on networks around the world. His his work has been recognized with: the George Foster Peabody Award; Alfred I. duPont Award; Anthony Radziwill Documentary Achievement Award; and the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award as well as many film festival honors.
Dow's current focus is on the Whiteness Project, a story-based interactive media and research project he is producing in collaboration with Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). The project, which will ultimately include 1,000 subjects from communities across the United States, examines how Americans who identify as "white" or "partially white", process their ethnicity, and pairs it with with secondary quantitative data — attitudinal, socioeconomic and genomic — collected by a team from INCITE. The resulting media and data set will serve as the foundation for a series of academic and media projects as well as an interactive academic resource that will live in Columbia's library system. Dow is also currently serving as Story Director for the multi-platform Public Media project "Veterans Coming Home" (VCH), a digital initiative by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Dow teaches interactive storytelling in the Integrated Media Arts (IMA) MFA program at CUNY Hunter College and has lectured widely and has a Research Scholar appointment at Columbia University.