Hilary Klotz Steinman is an Emmy award-winning independent documentary film producer and director and has been producing historical and vérité documentary films for over 25 years, with a focus on women’s history and the impact of technology on American lives. Her work has been featured on PBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, at Sundance Film Festival, the New York Historical Society and in theaters.

She has produced 4 documentaries for the PBS History series American Experience: Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act, The Codebreaker, Test Tube Babies (director & producer) and the Emmy award-winning film, The Pill.

Hilary recently worked with director Jim LeBrecht(Crip Camp) to produced Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act for the PBS history series, American Experience. The film tells the emotional and dramatic story of the decades-long push for equality and accessibility that culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. A story of courage and perseverance, the film brings to life one of the great civil rights movements in American history, where ordinary people made their voices heard and Congress responded.

In 2023, Hilary directed and produced Loud Enough, a one-hour independent, feature documentary distributed by Women Make Movies, about a young Kansas rape victim and her tight-knit family’s quest for justice using an arcane 1880's "wild west" frontier law after the local District Attorney declines to prosecute her attacker, despite the compelling evidence.

In 2021 Hilary produced The Codebreaker, a one hour film that reveals the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work to decode thousands of messages for the U.S. government would send infamous gangsters to prison in the 1930s and bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in WWII. Her remarkable contributions would come to light decades after her death, when secret government files were unsealed. But together with her husband, the legendary cryptologist William Friedman, Elizebeth helped develop the methods that led to the creation of the powerful new science of cryptology and laid the foundation for modern codebreaking today.

Hilary won an Emmy award for co-producing The Pill, about the history of the birth control pill and its impact on the lives of American women.

As a follow up to The Pill, Hilary produced and directed, Test Tube Babies, the story behind the development of in-vitro fertilization in America.

Hilary has also been honored with the Christopher Award and an Emmy nomination for the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America, and an Emmy nomination for her research on the Bill Moyers PBS series Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.

Hilary spend months in Spain and Brazil to produce Children of the Inquisition, a two-hour independent 2019 documentary film, with a 2021 PBS premiere, that follows descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions as they unravel their complex and often hidden Jewish identity. The film re-examines history as it reveals the secrets of the families who were forced to convert or flee.

In February, 2020, Hilary established Napatree Films to produce independent projects that explore forgotten or overlooked histories and illuminate the experiences of women and girls in America and globally.

Hilary produced Death By Design, a 2016 feature length documentary film about the unintended environmental consequences of our addiction to our digital devices.

Hilary also produced Going Blind, a 2012 documentary film for Lovett Stories & Strategies about the challenges newly blind people face as they navigate a world without their sight, featuring personal stories and cutting edge scientific research on regenerative medicine and gene therapy to restore vision.

Other projects include a video installation for 2019 New York Historical Society exhibit on the Hudson River, developing documentary films for Show of Force about the global impact of climate change, and working with Alex Gibney’s production company, Jigsaw Productions, to develop the CNN series Death Row Stories.  

Hilary is a member of the Documentary Producers Alliance, New York Women in Film and Television, Film Fatales, Film Shop and the International Documentary Association.

Hilary lives in New York City with her husband Rob and daughters, Lucy and Paulina. After serving for 10 years at the outreach director for the NYC chapter of Days for Girls, Hilary recently became Co-Director of the DFG NYC Chapter. Days for Girls works to eliminate the stigma and limitations associated with menstruation so that women and girls have improved health, education and livelihoods. Hilary was honored in 2018 for her work on behalf of Days for Girls by Congregation Rodeph Sholom and by the Women of Reform Judaism at their national convention and the North East Regional conference.