Field was born to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C. and was a full-time organizer for social causes in the late 1960s and 1970s in Boston and New York City. She was a journalist for The Old Mole, a radical New Left oriented underground newspaper and a member of Boston Newsreel, one of a group of independent filmmaking and distribution organizations around the country, which made over 60 documentaries in conjunction with grass-roots organizers to serve as catalysts for social change. Upon moving to New York City, she worked for The People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Indochina Peace Campaign, both national organizations working for a just end to the war in Vietnam. During this time, she discovered a history never taught her generation of the many struggles for social equality achieved by previous generations. Both the importance of this discovery and her commitment to social justice would shape the rest of her life and work.
Film career
Field's first film, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, told the story of American women who went to work during World War II to do “men's jobs.” It has been selected by the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for preservation as a significant component of America’s film heritage. She was co-director of the documentary Forever Activists, a film produced and directed by Judy Montell about the lifelong activism of seven members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American contingent who fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Freedom on My Mind premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is a history of the Mississippi Voter Registration Project during the Civil Rights Movement which culminated in Freedom Summer in 1964. It was nominated for an Academy Award; won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival; was named “One of the Ten Best Films” of 1994 by a variety of film critics, including The San Francisco Examiner and The Oakland Tribune; and Variety called it “a landmark documentary that chronicles the most tumultuous and significant years in the history of the civil rights movement. A must see.” It was also broadcast on PBS’s American Experience. Have You Heard From Johannesburg is a seven-film series covering the struggle of the global anti-apartheid movement to end apartheid in South Africa. It has been called “a monumental chronicle not just of one nation and its hideous regime, but of the second half of the 20th century.” The series won a Primetime Emmy Award for its broadcast on PBS's Independent Lens in 2012, and was awarded Best Limited Series by the International Documentary Association, and named Best Documentary of 2010 by The Village Voice and Time Out New York. Other work includes ¡Salud!, a documentary on Cuba’s role in the struggle for global health equity and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birthright.
