Patricia Gruben

Patricia Gruben is an American-born filmmaker who taught film studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada until 2018. Gruben has worked in many different positions within the film industry, from being a property master to directing a feature film. In 2015, Gruben was the recipient of the Teamsters 155 Woman of the Year Award given by Vancouver Women in Film and TV. She attended Rice University where she studied anthropology. After completing her graduate studies, she moved to Toronto in the early 1970s. was short. on projects like Spasms, a horror film directed by William Fruet, before initiating her own first feature. a nonlinear mystery featuring a man who had apparently lost his memory and ability to communicate. a documentary about the fiction we create from our family history, following her own imaginary lineage from Texas to Germany and the Canadian Arctic.

Gruben began to teach at Simon Fraser University in 1982. In 1987, she and Colin Browne founded the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters. In 2013, a Globe and Mail article announced that the program would end in 2014 due to a lack of funding. During this time she published numerous scholarly articles on film, literature and cultural studies while developing several screenplays. Since leaving SFU in 2018, she has made two films: the short drama Floating Islands (2019) and the hybrid feature film Heart of Gold (2023).

She has been on the executive board of the Hari Sharma Foundation and the South Asian Film Education Society since 2012, and has served on numerous other boards and arts juries. From 2015-2019 she was on the permanent jury for the Daryl Duke Prize. She is married to composer Martin Gotfrit and has two sons, both musicians and community workers.

Awards

Gruben received the Teamsters 155 Woman of the Year Award in 2015 from Women in Film and Television, a not-for-profit organization that hosts the awards. The award requires that the recipient be "a woman who has achieved significant success in the field of film or television, and who is recognized for mentoring other women in the industry."

The Central Character (1979) Sifted Evidence (1982) Low Visibility (1984) Deep Sleep (1990) Ley Lines (1993) Before it Blows (1997) Floating Islands (2019) Heart of Gold (2023)