Karla Murthy is a director and Emmy-nominated producer. She began her career working for the veteran journalist Bill Moyers and has been a producer, shooter and correspondent for several news programs on PBS. Her award-winning work was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as “compelling, informative and compassionate.”

Her directorial debut, the feature documentary The Place That Makes Us screened at numerous film festivals including DOC NYC, Big Sky and Cleveland International Film Festival, and won Best of the Festival at Arlington Film Festival, Best Feature at Better Cities Festival and Emerging Documentary Filmmaker at Woods Hole Film Festival. The film also screened at the United Nations World Cities Day Event and had its national broadcast premiere on the WORLD Channel/PBS series America ReFramed.

She also directed and edited the short film Love, Jamie about a transgender artist incarcerated in Texas which premiered at OUTFEST LA and won the Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Documentary Short. The film was featured in numerous publications including People, THEM, Hyperallergic and was called “one of the best short documentaries” by Texas Monthly. It is now streaming on PBS American Masters.

Her next feature documentary film inspired by her father called The Gas Station Attendant, is a co-production with ITVS, Firelight Media, and the Center for Asian American Media for public television and will have its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2025 in the International Competition.

Karla is of Filipino and South Asian descent. She grew up in Texas, studied classical piano at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, and graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in Religion and Computer Science. She is based in New York City, is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Film Fatales, and an alumni of the Third World Newsreel Workshop. Her work has been supported by Women Make Movies, the New York State Council of the Arts, Vital Projects Fund, the Firelight Media/Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival Filmmaker Residency, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, The Chimaera Project, and the Yaddo artist residency.