Kate Trumbull-LaValle is a Peabody Award winning documentary filmmaker with a passion for telling stories about rebellious women, motherhood, labor, immigration, art, and the hybridity of identity. Her critically acclaimed debut feature documentary, OVARIAN PSYCOS (2016) follows a fierce, unapologetic Latinx bicycle collective formed on the Eastside Los Angeles in the face of gendered violence. The film had its world premiere at SXSW (2016) and was picked up for broadcast on PBS' Independent Lens in 2017.

In 2018 Kate directed two one-hour broadcast films for public television: ARTIST AND MOTHER (Artbound/KCET) and CITY RISING: THE INFORMAL ECONOMY  (KCET). Both films were nominated for LA Area Emmys, and both films won LA Press Awards. In 2019 Kate was a co-producer for the groundbreaking 5-part PBS history series, ASIAN AMERICANS (2020), for which she received a Peabody Award. Kate’s most recent project is KILLFACE (2024), an exhaustive and visceral meditation on female power that is both a short experimental documentary and spatial sound and video installation. Kate describes the work as,”not just a fight film, but a conversation with the echoes of gendered violence, threats to bodily autonomy and demands for the patient witnessing of burgeoning and sustained female power.” The project premiered at Mimesis Documentary Festival in 2024 where it was presented as a three-channel installation on loop, and where it won the Audience Award in the expanded cinema category. 

Kate’s work has been supported by California Humanities, ITVS Open Call, ITVS Diversity Development Fund, Pacific Pioneer Fund, Women in Film, Sundance Institute, Working Films, the International Documentary Association, Studio IX, and Women Make Movies. She has screened her work at over fifty festivals internationally including SXSW, Hot Docs, the New York Human Rights Film Festival, Ambulante, MASS MoCA, Milano Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and New Orleans Film Festival to name a few.

In addition to directing and producing long-form films, Kate is hired to direct social issue nonfiction broadcast and digital content for nonprofits and social issue campaigns. She is a lecturer of film, documentary and journalism at Chapman University and California State University, Long Beach.  She received her M.A. from the Social Documentation Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is a proud member of the IDA and Film Fatales.