BIO
Award-winning filmmaker and photographer Clarymond Hardt aka "C.M. Hardt" has made a career out of her passions: capturing candid, compelling and vibrant stories about people and conveying those stories visually. With over 25 years in photography, film, television, health education and new media, Hardt has a broad range of professional experience. Whether she’s interviewing children and families or filming entertainers, policy makers and human rights leaders, her intuitive ability to put people at ease and celebrate their uniqueness while digging deep stands out.
Most recently, Hardt created two short videos about Project Room Key, the statewide measure to house the homeless most vulnerable to Covid 19. Previously, she completed "We are the LA we've been waiting for!" a short documentary about the implementation of the Yes on Measure H campaign fighting homelessness. In 2017, Hardt’s aha! mediaworks masterminded the digital and social media strategy behind the defeat of California Senate Bill 649, which the L.A. Times described as “A high-speed assault on
the public’s right to say no” to Big Telecom’s attempt to put cell towers just about anywhere they wanted without any input.
For the past few years, Clarymond Hardt has engaged in advocacy work for a variety of non-profits focused on environmental, health, and poverty issues, as well as developing several personal projects including: Booby-Trapped, a documentary featuring world renowned neonatologist Dr. Nancy Wight and Mayim Bialik, which explores how breastfeeding is sabotaged in the “Land of Milk and Money”; The Lactivists, a docu-style series about the challenges families face when trying to breastfeed; and Mother Corps online education for women about how to optimize their health through reducing environmental and emotional stress so they can flourish on their motherhood journey.
Clarymond has also studied yoga, reiki, meditation and is certified as an EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and mystic shamanism practitioner.
Her path has been anything but direct, paved with careers in television, photojournalism and documentary film making. After majoring in Theater and English and graduating with honors from Connecticut College, Hardt unexpectedly landed at Condé Nast where she worked under the tutelage of Alex Liberman, "The Silver Fox" of publishing. Liberman encouraged her to follow the path of her passion, and she took the legend's advice to heart.
In August 1988, Hardt made a name for herself photographing the Tompkins Riot for The Village Voice. She cut her journalistic teeth at the Voice, shooting stake outs of mobsters like Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante and documenting the night shift with the Bedford Stuyvesant Ambulance Corps on the weekends.
In 1991, after a trip to document famine in the Sudan, she became one of the youngest photographers working for The New York Times. She had fun working for the big shots, but they tried to peg the riot girl as a fashion photographer and she got restless.
In mid-1992, C.M. took off on a 6-month trip to Spain where she began what would become nearly a 5-year adventure filming a documentary about her grandfather’s political murder in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Death in El Valle, which began as a photo essay about a disappearing village, ended up being commissioned as an independent project for Channel 4 Television in the U.K. where it first aired in 1996. After being censored in Spain for ten years, it suddenly became a grassroots sensation, as the country began to face the brutal repression of Franco’s dictatorship with a national movement to recover memory.
After completing Death in El Valle, Hardt began working in television as a field producer for PBS’s Emmy Award winning series City Arts and HBO’s Taxi Cab Confessions. In 1998, she moved to Los Angeles to work on MTV’s Award winning Road Rules and the following year the Peabody Award winner BIOrhythm. C.M. Hardt decided to remain in LA, where she worked as an episode producer (writing, producing, and directing) for Medical Diary, a Discovery series and field director for The Residents, a documentary series on UCLA for TNT. She also worked on many Reality TV shows. Hardt was field director / story producer for USA Networks’ Cannon Ball Run where six teams of racers vie in souped up cars in a road race from New York to Los Angeles for a top prize of $100,000; Creative producer, lead writer and director for The Hitchhiker Chronicles, a hidden camera series for FX; Supervising story editor for Your Reality Checked, a new Fine Living series, overseeing a team of writers; Senior producer for Nanny 911, the reality hit on FOX that offered “Expert Advice for All Your Parenting Emergencies”; Senior field producer for The Megan Mullally Show, a daily variety talk show for NBC Productions; and Writer / Producer for Platinum Weddings, a WE series. During those ten years in television Hardt learned to tell all kinds of stories, oversee crews, deal with networks, run budgets, keep schedules and polish turds and turn them into golden eggs.
Clarymond lives in Altadena, CA with political consultant Steve Barkan. Together they co-produced Rafael, a spirited boy wonder who, along with his younger sister Teeka -- a 150lb Great Dane / Akita beast -- keeps them both on their toes striving to make the world a better place.