Angela Shelton

Angela Shelton is an award-winning filmmaker, whose semi-autobiographical movie Tumbleweeds (1999) was awarded the Sundance Film Festival (2000) filmmaker's trophy and earned the lead actress Janet McTeer an Academy Award® nomination and a Golden Globe® win. Angela followed Tumbleweeds with her highly acclaimed adaptation of Kaye Gibbons's novel Charms for the Easy Life (2002), starring Gena Rowlands. In 2004 Angela made her directorial debut with Searching for Angela Shelton (2004), a documentary aimed at surveying women across the U.S. who were also named Angela Shelton. However, she soon discovered that 70% of the women she interviewed with the same name had, like Angela, been a victim of rape, childhood sexual abuse or domestic violence. The film received many accolades and went on to begin a grassroots movement of survivors and humanitarian organizations around the world dedicated to exposing the epidemic of abuse. Her memoir, "Finding Angela Shelton" was published in 2006 and described how her journey across America, whilst making the documentary, changed her life. Committed to helping others, Angela traveled the world for over a decade as an internationally recognized social activist raising money for rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters as a public speaker. She collaborated with trauma informed care providers to create a healing program to help abuse survivors move on from trauma. On film Angela has starred in 9 Line (2014), Comfortably Numb (1995), The Shrink Is In (2001), The Big Time (2002) and her television roles include Pacific Blue, Chicago Hope and Becker. She won a regional EMMY for her portrayal as Safe Side Superchick in the Safe Side Series (2004, 2006) created by Baby Einstein's creator, Julie Clark. Angela's feature film, Heart, Baby! (2018), starring Gbenga Akinnagbe, Jackson Rathbone, Keir O'Donnell, that she wrote, produced and directed, tells the remarkable true story of a prison boxer who was offered freedom to fight in the 1984 Olympics and refused to go. In Eagle and the Albatross (2019), Angela used her own experiences with her mentors in the tear-jerking comedy about an orphaned half Korean girl who seeks help from a widowed optometrist with the only thing both of them love - golf. The only problem is, he only has three months to live.