Sheila is an award winning producer/director of documentaries and short dramatic films. Her Ballona Wetlands series, hosted by Ed Asner, won 15 awards, including  a Cine Golden Eagle, Best Documentary in several festivals and a Telly Award for Natural Heroes, the Public Television series in which it aired.  Her doc on South Central Farm also aired on this Emmy Award-winning  series and premiered at AFI Fest.  She was co-producer/co-director of Show Me The Way with Oscar nominated William Gazecki.

She co-produced dramatic shorts, We All Need the Forest and In the Middle of the Sea, and directed Walden, all of which are distributed by Green Planet Films.  Other docs include Hawaii in Transition: Vision for a Sustainable Future and Geo-Thermal: A Risky Business in Hawaii’s Wao Kele O Puna Rainforest  which helped save the last lowland tropical forest in the U.S.

Laffey teaches at Santa Monica College where one of her courses is  Green Screen: Films on the Environment and Transformation. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from N.Y.U. and was Program Coordinator for the National Audubon Society in Hawaii. A chapter about her work appears in Search for Reality: The Art of Documentary Filmmaking.