Across feature documentary, premium nonfiction, television, branded content and emerging platforms, Ivins has worked at every level of the filmmaking process - from the Director’s chair and the edit room to Executive Producing, building production companies and leading complex productions from concept through final delivery. As a Director of feature documentaries and premium nonfiction, she leads projects from the earliest stages of story development and access through field production, editorial and final cut, shaping the creative vision at every stage. As an Executive Producer, she builds and leads creative teams, oversees complex budgets and operations, and negotiates with networks, platforms, talent and brands. Through her own production company, she has also managed more than $10 million annually in production budgets, overseeing the financial and operational execution of complex projects from development through delivery. That combination of creative authorship, editorial instinct, production leadership and entrepreneurial experience gives Ivins a rare understanding of how to take an idea from vision to execution.

She began her career in Washington, D.C. at CNN's investigative unit, where she researched campaign finance and learned to chase the story beneath the story - following the money, questioning the accepted narrative, and tracing how institutions and policy bear down on individual lives. More than two decades later, that instinct still defines her work. For Ivins, everything is political: who has power, who doesn't, whose story gets told, and what happens when systems collide with individual lives. Whether the subject is politics, human rights, women's sports, pop culture or branded storytelling, she looks for the larger forces at work and the human story inside them.

Ivins then spent five years crafting A&E BIOGRAPHY and other award-winning documentaries about iconic figures in American culture - work that went beyond celebrity to examine how personal and professional choices shape a life and ultimately define a legacy. That work left her with a question that continues to inform her work: how do the forces of ambition, cultural pressure and the desire for recognition shape people — and what does that reveal about the society that formed them?

Most recently, Ivins directed and executive produced THE RISE for Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine, a premium five-film series on the rise of women's professional sports across the WNBA, X Games, NASCAR, Unrivaled and the PWHL. She co-conceived the series' creative approach, supervised all five films from development through delivery, directed two of the films, and partnered with each league and brand sponsor Ally Financial to make films that were both journalistically rigorous and culturally consequential — telling a story of women gaining visibility, economic power and cultural influence in real time.

Her sports and issue-driven directing credits also include BILLIE JEAN KING’S GROUNDBREAKERS (PBS), a cross-generational film examining how Title IX transformed women's sports and the profound social and cultural impact of that change; DARKNESS TO LIGHT (Hulu/Lifetime), with Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman, on survival, accountability and healing after sexual abuse; LIGHT IN THE WATER (MTV/Logo), a film set against the backdrop of the 1980s AIDS crisis and the story of the first LGBTQ Masters swim team — and the community of friends who became family; and WYNONNA JUDD: BETWEEN HELL & HALLELUJAH (Paramount+), a vérité and concert documentary made in the aftermath of Naomi Judd's death.

Her independent feature DECONSTRUCTING KAREN, which she directed, wrote and executive produced, is an unflinching look at race, privilege and the work of confronting white supremacy, centered on anti-racism activists and New York Times bestselling authors Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. The film premiered internationally at Hot Docs in Toronto and domestically at Geena Davis' Bentonville Film Festival. Her upcoming independent documentary UP IN ARMS follows a group of suburban moms determined to overturn the Second Amendment.

Ivins has also shaped popular culture and nonfiction television more broadly. She helped develop the concept and format for FOX's THE SIMPLE LIFE and served as its original creative showrunner, helping pioneer an unscripted format built on character, access and culture rather than traditional documentary conventions. Other credits include the WIN Award-winning HUNGRY, on gender inequality in the culinary world, and THE EXHIBIT: FINDING THE NEXT GREAT ARTIST (Smithsonian Channel/MTV Studios).

Through her production company, PB&J TV + Docs, Ivins continues to develop films and series centered on cultural urgency, politics and human rights, women's sports and the complicated relationship between individuals and the systems around them.

At the center of it all is the instinct she developed in Washington and has never lost: find the story, understand the forces behind it, and tell it in a way that makes people see the world differently.