Ten years after leaving her native Borough Park, Brooklyn, Pearl Gluck received a Fulbright grant to collect oral histories from Yiddish speakers in areas of Hungary once home to thriving Hasidic
communities. At heart, she is a zamler, Yiddish for collector, an ethnographer.

Gluck directed a one-hour TV documentary, Soundwalk: Williamsburg, (2007) set to broadcast on Paris Premiere, and the audio tour for Soundwalk which was nominated for a 2007 Audie Award. She is co-writer on Goyta (2007) which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as part of Cinefondation. Gluck is editing Leap of Faith (projected release: 2008), a documentary by Steven Friedman and Antony Benjamin for Humble Films, Conversations with Carl (directed by Muffie Dunn), and was one of the editors on Arusi.

She is developing a narrative project, A Certain Night in Ocotober, which was awarded a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Fellowship (2006). An essay she wrote, Shtreimel Envy, was published in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt (edited by Ruth Andrew Ellenson), a Los Angeles Times Bestseller and winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Her first film, Divan (2004), is a Hasidic tale five years in the making which was developed in part at the Sundance Institute, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, opened theatrically at the Film Forum in NYC (2004) and broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Gluck continues to draw from her rich Hasidic heritage and through her current work seeks to provide both a bridge to the past and a form of cross-communal dialogue through the arts. She was the first to receive a Yiddish Fulbright to Hungary and her work was created with the support of foundations such as New York State Council on the Arts, Eva Eastman Fund, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Her commercial work includes directing and producing documentary shorts for The Covenant Foundation, the Heritage Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries, the American Committee for the Weitzmann Institute of Science, and editing radio and 30-second TV ads for Oxygen Advertising.

Gluck's video art includes Trance with sound artist Basya Schechter for the Eldridge Street Project in NYC, with musician Matt Darriau for the Krakow Jewish Arts Festival installed at Alchemia, and a multimedia installation in Weimar, Germany for backup.loungelab 2002.

She co-directed the award-winning short, Great Balls of Fire (6 mins; 2001) which is a homeless man's response to September 11. The short continues to screen worldwide at venues such as Transmediale, Oberhausen, Walker Center for the Arts, New York Video Festival, and in competition at the Globalica 10th International Media Art Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland.

Gluck has spearheaded community arts programs, curated literary and film events from Hungary to Israel to New York City, and has just returned from a February artist residency at the Paideia Institute in Stockholm. As part of her ongoing commitment to educational outreach, she has appeared on numerous college and university campuses, and acted as writer/mentor at the MacArthur-granted program, The Harlem Writers Crew.

Her first involvement with documentary film was in A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (1998; Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum). Her appearance in the film has encouraged grass-roots organization for an ex-Orthodox creative alliance. As one reviewer of The Boston Globe wrote, "Gluck deserves a documentary of her own."