James Rutenbeck is an Emmy® award-winning filmmaker. His nonfiction films have screened at Cinema du Reel, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery and Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. James' 2021 feature, A Reckoning in Boston, premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and screened at numerous other festivals including Human Rights Watch Film Festival and Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival, where it won the Best Feature Award. Reckoning aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2021.

James is a two-time recipient of the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award for his work as episodic producer of the landmark PBS series on the social determinants of health, Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? and Class of ’27, which he executive produced, directed and edited. Class of ’27, which explores the lives of young children in three rural American communities, is streaming as an Editor’s Pick at The Atlantic.

Editing credits include the Emmy® award-winning NYT OpDoc My Disability Road Map; Zoot Suit Riots, Jimmy Carter and Roberto Clemente for the PBS series American Experience and American Denial and Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness for Independent Lens and the forthcoming The Ride Ahead, a film by Samuel and Dan Habib.

The Sundance Documentary Fund, LEF Moving Image Fund, Southern Humanities Media Fund and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have supported James’ film work. He was a 2019/20 Fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University and 2021 Poynter Fellow at Yale University. James is a member of the Steering Committee of the Alliance of Documentary Editors and a member of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Boston.