Lynn Corcoran began making documentaries in 1974. Her independently-produced work has examined the relationships between citizens and government in areas including community renewal, health care, housing and the environment. Documentaries about the environment include In Our Own Backyard, which chronicles events at Love Canal and examines how citizen and government participants viewed the central issues the disaster raised. Testing the Waters considers the complex international effort to chart a future for the polluted Niagara River, at the US - Canada border. Borderline Cases is a view of the effort to repair the environmental damage at the US - Mexico border that resulted from rapid, unregulated industrialization -- the building of nearly 2,000 foreign-owned factories, or maquiladoras.

Corcoran’s work has been broadcast nationally on PBS and on TLC (The Learning Channel) and it has received awards including a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival, a Cine Golden Eagle, Best of Category at the Audubon Environmental Film Festival, and awards from the Athens Film and Video Festival and the US Film and Video Festival.

Her independently - produced documentaries have been supported by grants from the New York Council for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Beldon Foundation, and the US/Mexico Fund for Culture / Fideicomiso para la Cultura México/USA, (Rockefeller Foundation). She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York Creative Artists Fellowship Program.

She produced 65 one-hour programs of The Frontier, a nationally-distributed series featuring the work of independent filmmakers and videomakers, for the Buffalo - Toronto PBS affiliate, WNED-TV. She has been a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the country. Since 1978, she has worked as a video producer, director and editor of independent and commercial productions.

Lynn Corcoran produced the documentary In Our Own Backyard: The First Love Canal in 1982. Copyright and distribution rights are held by Bullfrog Films, Inc., Oley, Pennsylvania 19547. The documentary aired on Public Broadcast System (PBS) stations. The container notes give this synopsis:

A brilliant video documentary on the nation's first encounter with toxic waste, it provides a complete and moving account of the way the people involved, both in government and in the community, responded to a frightening situation.

It shows the complexity of the democratic process in action, as government officials struggled with a new set of questions -- weighing not only what government should do, but what it could do in the first environmental emergency of its kind -- while residents formed their own views of these questions and developed strategies including public protest and a skillful use of the media to influence government's response.