Perry Miller Adato, producer/director of documentary films, was born in Yonkers, New York. She began her career as a film consultant to the United Nations Department of Social Affairs. In 1954 she joined the staff of CBS where she worked as a film coordinator on such documentaries as Adventure, The Seven Lively Arts, and Odyssey. After ten years she left to join public television (NET). While there the subjects of her documentaries included Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Charles and Ray Eames, Mary Cassatt, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Her 1968 film on Thomas (Dylan Thomas: The World I Breathe), which was broadcast as part of the NET Festival series, received an Emmy. Her latest work on painter Georgia O'Keeffe, was the first in a PBS series on seven female artists made by Adato and by other filmmakers under her supervision. As part of this series, Adato is currently (1979) working on a documentary about abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler.
