About
Door Number 3 Productions
Door Number 3 Productions is an independent production company in Toronto Canada helmed by Lisa Jackson, one of Canada’s premiere filmmakers.
Lisa Jackson
Photo: Emily Cooper
Lisa Jackson lives in Toronto and is Anishinaabe from Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Her award-winning work has screened at CPH:DOX, Sundance, Berlinale Forum Expanded, SXSW, Camden, Hotdocs, Tribeca, BFI London, the Melbourne Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and broadcast widely. She’s made works ranging from current affairs to IMAX, animation to VR, and even a residential school musical. In 2021 she received the Documentary Organization of Canada’s Vanguard Award and in 2022 she was selected for a Chicken & Egg Award.
Her 2024 hybrid feature documentary Wilfred Buck premiered in the DOX:AWARD section at CPH:DOX and was a top five audience pick at Hot Docs and won Best Canadian Film at Calgary Film Festival and the Women Inmate Jury Award at RIDM. Her short Lichen screened at Sundance in 2020 and Indictment: The Crimes of Shelly Chartier is one of the top watched documentaries on CBC, won the 2017 imagineNATIVE Best Doc award and was also co-produced by Lisa.
Her Webby-nominated VR Biidaaban: First Light premiered at Tribeca Storyscapes in 2018, exhibited internationally to 25,000+ people, and won a Canadian Screen Award (Canada’s Oscar), the second time she’s received this honour.
Transmissions, a 6000-square-foot immersive multimedia installation and sister project to Biidaaban, premiered in Vancouver in 2019 and was featured on the cover of The Georgia Straight. In 2016, she directed the VR Highway of Tears for CBC Radio’s The Current which was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists award. In 2015 she was drama director for the 8 x 1 hour APTN/ZDF docudrama series 1491: The Untold Story Of The Americas Before Columbus, based on the bestselling book by Charles C. Mann, which was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award.
She has an MFA in Film Production from York University (thesis prize) and is an alumna of the TIFF Talent and Writers Labs, Canadian Film Centre’s Directors Lab, IDFA Summer School, CFC/NFB/Ford Foundation’s Open Immersion VR Lab, and was a Fellow at the MIT Open Doc Lab.
Community
Lisa’s work extends into community, showing in galleries and museums as well as educational institutions and conferences. She’s part of the Indigenous Screen Office’s Membership Circle, was a consulting programmer at Hot Docs, and was an inaugural member of the National Film Board of Canada’s Indigenous Advisory Committee. She’s presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal’s C2 Conference, judicial conferences, and at events by the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Community Foundations Canada.
She was Director of the Gladue Video Project, a pilot with Osgoode Hall Law School to make video profiles of Indigenous offenders for use in the court system. She is co-author, with NYU Professor Eugenia Kisin, of the chapter “Careful Images: Unsettling Testimony in the Gladue Video Project” for Insiders/Outsiders: The Cultural Politics and Ethics of Representation and Participation in Canada’s Media Arts (ed. Ezra Winton and Dana Claxton).
She’s sat on juries for arts councils and film festivals, and was Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia and Queens University. For five years she was the Director Mentor for the National Screen Institute’s IndigiDocs program.
Media
Selected Media
Now Magazine, “Doc Vanguard award recipient Lisa Jackson celebrates her community”
NOW Magazine, “Roundtable: Indigenous Directors Discuss the ‘Savages’ in the Coens’ Latest Western”
CBC article by Lisa Jackson, “When It Comes to Indigenous People, Canadian Justice is Not Blind”
The Globe and Mail, “Is Virtual Reality About to Break Through as an Artists’ Medium?”
CBC Radio The Current interview on Indictment: The Crimes of Shelly Chartier
Vice, “Why An Indigenous Filmmaker Directed a VR Documentary About the Highway of Tears”
