Abby Russell

Abby Russell is an Emmy-nominated television producer and filmmaker, and as founder and CEO of Nuforms Media and Food-Pops, she has directed and produced commercial digital series for household-name brands with many client partners, including Ogilvy, Digitas, Razorfish, Hellmann’s, Jenn-Air, Rolls-Royce and TED.  She recently directed multiple Telly Award-winning films, as both ‘filmmaker-in-residence’ and Executive Producer and Creative Director at Yeshiva University, where she oversaw multimedia storytelling product for the university’s online learning initiative. Abby started in multimedia journalism at local television station NY1 News, first as a one-woman-band video journalist, and then as a producer of a TV series with The New York Times.  She co-directed Eat Drink Laugh: The Story of The Comic Strip, a feature documentary executive produced by Chris Rock that world-premiered at the Just For Laughs International Comedy Festival in Montreal and is currently available on Amazon and iTunes.  She directed comedy specials and shorts for VH1, Nickelodeon and Funny or Die, including viral hit Café Attitude, which the Huffington Post called the parody “we’ve all been waiting for.”  Her first documentary film, Politics… Sifting Thru the Spin, called ‘creative and edgy’ by the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, was funded by the Annenberg Foundation and aired nationally as part of the PBS Democracy Project.  She has produced multiple hours of documentary and filmed content – including a James Beard Award winning TV series – for PBS, Discovery, Food Network, MTV, Sundance and Lifetime.  Abby has a Masters degree in journalism from Columbia University.  At NYU, Abby teaches multimedia storytelling and producing comedy video.