Heather Rae is an American film producer, director, and actress born on October 1, 1966, in Venice, California. She grew up in the mountains of Boise, Idaho, and is of European and Cherokee descent. Rae graduated in 1990 from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, with a Bachelor of Arts in Film and multicultural studies. She is married to director and writer Russell Friedenberg since July 1999, and they have a daughter, actress Johnny Sequoyah. Rae also has two grown sons, Chema and Emilio.
Rae has over twenty years of experience in the film industry, focusing on Native and independent films. She is known for works including Frozen River (2008), Ibid (2008), and Trudell (2005). Trudell, a project spanning 13 years, won Best Documentary Feature at the American Indian Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival, and aired on PBS in 2007. Frozen River received two Independent Spirit Awards, including Producer of the Year for Rae, was nominated for Academy Awards, and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. From 1996 to 2001, she ran the Native Program at Sundance Institute and was a Sundance Film Festival programmer. Rae has also produced American Monster (2003), A Thousand Guns, The Space Between All Things, and co-produced Backroads (2000). Before 1996, she worked on documentaries such as CBS’s 500 Nations and PBS's Storytellers of the Pacific. Rae is an adjunct professor at Boise State University, founder of the True West Cinema Film Festival, and has served on boards for True West and TVTV. She established a production center in Boise that produced four feature films before becoming non-operational.
