Janis Plotkin was part of the founding of the groundbreaking San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. After 21 years she departed to the Mill Valley Film Festival and taught college-level film classes at Stanford, SF State University, and UC Davis. In 2016 she produced her first film, a 74-minute documentary about an iconoclastic artist, "PLASTIC MAN: the Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish" (plasticmanbarrish.com) that screened in film festivals across the US and in Germany. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Hebrew Union College in 2001.