Hal Goodtree

Two-time Emmy® winner Hal Goodtree has worked with stars on both sides of the screen, including James Earl Jones, Cindy Crawford and Albert Maysles. Goodtree began his career as a producer at Benton & Bowles in New York. He went on to other commercial stints at Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas, the NFL and The New York Times. Commercial awards include an Emmy® for Sportschannel and the NY Mets, a Cannes Ad Lion and a Caples Award for work with James Earl Jones. In 2014, Goodtree shifted gears, writing and producing his first television documentary, "Because No One Else Would - American Tobacco & the Durham Renaissance." The film earned a #1 Rating in Prime Time for its premiere broadcast on CBS-affiliate WRAL in North Carolina and won Best Short Documentary at the Longleaf Film Festival. From 2015 - 2020, Goodtree worked on "Shaw Rising: The Story of the Oldest HBCU in the South," again as writer-producer. The one-hour documentary premiered on WUNC-TV, North Carolina Public Broadcasting, in February, 2021. "Shaw Rising" was selected for more than a dozen film festivals from Stockholm to New York and across the South. The film won a 2021 Emmy® for Documentary/Historical in the Mid-South region of NATAS. In 2021, Goodtree also completed his first project as a director and editor, "Cary at 150." The 1/2 hour doc, shot on a smartphone, tells the story of how a sleepy Southern town became an elite hub for technology. When he's not deep in a project, Goodtree has teaches filmmaking and photography at Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.