Lessin is producer and director, together with Carl Deal, of the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary Trouble the Water, winner of the Gotham Independent Film Award and the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for best documentary.
She directed the HBO film The Janes with Emma Pildes and won three Emmys in the categories of Best Documentary, Outstanding Social Issue Documentary and Outstanding Direction, Documentary at the 44th News and Documentary Emmy Awards. The film also won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award's Silver Baton, which honors outstanding public service audio and video reporting in television, radio and digital journalism.
Lessin was a co-producer of Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next, Capitalism: A Love Story, Fahrenheit 9/11, winner of the Palme d'Or, and the supervising producer of Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine.
Lessin received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism for her documentary Behind the Labels. She line produced Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and was consulting producer for his Living in the Material World: George Harrison. She began her career as associate producer of Charles Guggenheim's Oscar-nominated short film Shadows of Hate.
In television, Lessin's work as producer of the series The Awful Truth earned her two Emmy Award nominations and one arrest.
Lessin is a Sundance Institute Fellow, an Open Society Institute Katrina Media Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee and won the Women of Worth "Vision" Award by L’Oréal Paris and Women in Film.
