Clara Bingham

Roles: Producer

Clara Bingham (born 1963) is an American journalist, author and documentary film producer.

Bingham was born in 1963 into a newspaper famil in Louisville, Kentucky. She moved to New York City in 1968. She graduated from Harvard University in 1985 with a degree in History and Literature.  At Harvard, she served as co-news editor of the Harvard Independent. She has written three books: Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul (2016), Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law (co-written with Laura Leedy Gansler 2002) which was adapted into the 2005 feature film, North Country. Class Action was a 2002 Los Angeles Times best book of the year and won the AAUW Speaking Out For Justice Award in 2007 Bingham’s first book was Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress (1997).

As a Washington, D.C. correspondent for Newsweek magazine from 1989 to 1993, Bingham covered the George H. W. Bush administration leading up to and during the 1992 presidential election. Her writing has appeared widely in publications including, The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair, Ms.,Vogue, Talk Magazine, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Monthly. She also worked as a stringer for United Press International in Papua New Guinea. Bingham also worked as a press secretary for the 1988 presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis.

Bingham wrote an exposé about the Air Force Academy rape scandal for Vanity Fair in 2003, which earned her the 2004 Exceptional Merit in Media Award (EMMA) given by the National Women’s Political Caucus. The article was anthologized in the 2004 edition of Best American Crime Writing. In January 2016, Investigation Discovery’s Vanity Fair Confidential series featured Bingham in its one-hour program about the rape scandal.

While reporting a story in West Virginia, Bingham, a Kentucky native, witnessed the destructive effects of mountaintop removal coal mining for the first time. Afterwards, she spent several years producing The Last Mountain (directed by Bill Haney), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, screened in theaters in over 60 American cities, and won the International Documentary Association’s Pare Lorentz Award.