Sheila Curran Bernard is a filmmaker with credits on nearly 50 hours of prime-time broadcast, theatrical, and giant screen programming, including the acclaimed theatrical documentary Slavery by Another Name . She is also the author of two books on filmmaking: Documentary Storytelling, now in its fifth edition and widely translated, and with Kenn Rabin, Archival Storytelling, a book for filmmakers working in fiction as well as nonfiction.
In 2005, Bernard served as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University. In 2008 she joined the faculty at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she is an associate professor in the Department of History and has served as director of the Graduate Program in Public History. She received the University's President's Excellence Award for both Academic Service and Scholarship & Creative Activities, and the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship & Creative Activi
She was awarded residencies at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and received the Geri Ashur fellowship in playwriting/screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). In 2021, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, support for "Bring Judgment Day": Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies , a book she is writing under c ontract with Cambridge University Press.