MARY BARNETT BIO
Mary Barnett has been working in media, marketing and production for 25 years and recently jumped into independent documentary productions of her own.
After attending Seton Hall University, Barnett began her career in media and marketing at the epicenter of New York City's entertainment industry, working with the city's top-rated radio station Z-100, Virgin Records America, and MTV Networks. As a field producer/coordinator, promoter and artist representative, Barnett entered “the business” with full steam, gaining a professional foundation that grounds her to this day. She relocated to Chattanooga in 1992 where she was able to balance her career with a lifelong love of photography and an emerging interest in documentary. After attending Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies summer institute in 2004, she returned to Chattanooga and began working on her first documentary short, "One Road," which debuted in 2005 at Harvard University’s Design School’s Loeb Fellowship Conference. It made its festival premiere at The Nashville Film Festival.
While working in Chattanooga, Barnett continued to add to her production and project management experience taking on key roles within advertising agencies, television newsrooms and marketing departments of small and mid-sized companies. She is an excellent writer, creative thinker, and work flow management specialist.
Barnett and her foundry project, "And The Iron Did Swim” were the recipients of a prestigious Lyndhurst Foundation’s Create Here Make|Work Individual Artist Grant in 2008. The documentary debuted as a solo photography exhibition in 2009 at The Tanner Hill Gallery and featured 45 large format editorial and abstract art prints. In May 2010 Barnett received a Tennessee Arts Commission Arts Build Communities (ABC) grant for fieldwork preproduction on the oral history phase. Thru this grant, Barnett began collaborating with the Chattanooga History Center on the creation of a new public archive of raw material from her project.
