Space, Hope and Charity

An independent documentary film about Charity Woodrum, a young woman from rural Oregon whose dream of becoming an astrophysicist is nearly derailed when she suffers a devastating tragedy.

​Charity was a nontraditional university student, raised in poverty, the first in her family to graduate from high school. In her mid-20s, she was married and nine months pregnant when she decided to return to school to study physics. Life felt perfect. Then, what she calls "The Worst Day." Her world was destroyed.

With help from friends old and new, she finds her way back to the distant galaxies where she feels most at peace.

Charity Woodrum

Charity has come a long way from her childhood in Canyonville, Oregon, where she found peace many nights looking up at the night sky. Her dream from early on was to work for NASA one day, but it felt like a crazy goal for a kid from rural Oregon who had never met a scientist.

 Through devastating tragedy, she has kept her eyes on the sky. She is a Ph.D. candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona. She is working with Professor Marcia Rieke and Dr. Christina Williams as part of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Near-IR Camera (NIRCam) science team. Her research uses the Universe as a time machine to tell the story of how galaxies evolve over cosmic time.