Jill Freidberg is a documentary filmmaker, sound artist, oral historian, public artist, educator, and researcher.

Freidberg's current projects include Wa Na Wari, a center for Black art and stories, in Seattle's Central District, where she co-directs the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute; and the Shelf Life Community Story project, an oral history collective that uses public art, podcasts, and community gatherings to interrupt the narratives of erasure that accompany gentrification and displacement.

Freidberg is also the Digital Media Editor at HistoryLink, helping put pictures to the stories of Washington State’s history.

Freidberg's public art interventions have included video projections inside the Battery Street Tunnel, a story booth at the Promenade Shopping Center, a public art living room for Seattle Public Utilities, and other shenanigans.

​Freidberg has edited, directed, shot, and/or produced five award-winning feature-length documentaries, three national PBS series, countless documentary shorts, and a handful of radio features. Her work includes the groundbreaking This is What Democracy Looks Like, and Sandy Cioffi's searing film, Sweet Crude.

Between 2003 and 2008, Freidberg worked primarily in southern Mexico, producing, directing, and editing the  award-winning documentaries, Granito de Arena and A Little Bit of So Much Truth. ​It was during this time that she got to interview her greatest hero, the late Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. 

Freidberg teaches documentary film production, oral history, and audio storytelling at the University of Washington Bothell. Prior to joining the University of Washington, she taught in the Film and Video Communications program at Seattle Central Community College, where she instructed second-year students in directing, production, story development, writing, and editing.

Freidberg received a BA in Cultural Anthropology, with a minor in Environmental Studies, from the University of Oregon (1990) and a Certificate of Excellence in Film Production from the Vancouver Film School (1994). She recently completed the Marine Education & Research Society's 2021 Marine Naturalist Certificate Program, as well as the Washington State Teaching Artist Training Lab, and she is currently enrolled in the Orca Behavior Institute’s Student Training as Research Scientists year-long institute, learning how to analyze and visualize data through the study of Bigg’s Killer Whales.

When Freidberg isn't making films, trouble, or art, she experiments with underwater sound recording, works in her garden, researches the history of her 125-year-old house, rides the ferry, naps with her dogs, visits the archives, and watches birds. She is interested in how artists and scientists can work together to solve the climate crisis, so lately she’s been learning from scientists.