Sigal Yehuda is the Founder & Executive Director of Close-Up, an Independent International Organization based in Brussels, Belgium, dedicated to mitigating conflict through documentary filmmaking. For the past 12 years Yehuda was the Director of Greenhouse, a development program for filmmakers from the Middle East & North Africa. She led the program into a prestigious and internationally recognized initiative for fostering the talents of the region’s most promising filmmakers.
She has been instrumental in securing financial support for Greenhouse from the European Union between 2006-2013 in four different EU programs - EuroMed Audiovisual I, II III and Media Mundus Program as well as securing funds from Steven Spielberg's the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Ford Foundation and family foundations in the USA and Canada. In addition Yehuda establishes significant professional partnerships with key international & regional organizations, these strategic alliances with The Sundance Institute, IDFA Bertha Foundation, Tribeca Film Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Catapult Film Fund, Fork Films, ARTE France, Blue Ice Docs, MDR Germany, IKON TV the Netherlands, Doc Society, The Jacob Burns Film Center in NY, MEDIMED Industry Market in Spain, is the avenue through which the filmmakers are able to achieve an international audience and financing for their pr ojects.
Under Yehuda’s tutelage, Greenhouse encompassed a lasting legacy that created the ground for the initiation of Close-Up, an international independent consortium of individual leaders from Turkey, Morocco, Israel, the Netherlands and USA. Since its ini tiation in March 2019 Yehuda secured funding for Close-Up from international individual donors and cultural institutions.
Prior to her current position, Yehuda established a successful production and post-production company in Greece, where she produced and co-directed several films. In 2010, she co-produced the feature length documentary, The Black Bus (Berlinale 2009), by Israeli filmmaker Anat Zuria about women's oppression in Orthodox Jewish society and the documentary film, The Hangman (IDFA 2010), by Natalie Braun and Avigail Sperber, about the man who hanged Adolph Eichmann.
Yehuda graduated from Camera Obscura, Israel’s most prestigious school for Avant Garde cinema and the arts, in 1994 with a degree in Art Photography and Sound Design for Film.