Dee Dee Halleck works as a professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California. Further she works as a media activist and was a co-founder of the Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, which was some of the first grass roots community television networks. In her filmmaking she often works with children and immigrants, which makes identity an important theme in her movies.

Dee Dee Halleck has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Media Fellowships and the Life Time achievement award of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC)
She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Austrian Triennial of Photography, the Wexner Center, the Gallery at the SanFrancisco Art Institute, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Bellevue Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum