Alexandra Elizabeth Shiva is an American film director. Bombay Eunuch is her 2001 award-winning film, and in 2015 she showed How to Dance in Ohio at the Sundance Film Festival in the US Documentary Competition. [1] Shiva also founded a production studio called Gidalya Pictures.
Shiva was born in New York City, the daughter of Susan (née Stein) and Gil Shiva. Her grandfather was Jules Stein, founder of MCA, the film, television, and record company. She graduated Vassar College in 1995 with her BA in Art History. [2] In 2003, Shiva married writer Jonathan Marc Sherman. [3] They have two children.
Shiva's first directed documentary film was Bombay Eunuch (2001), which was also co-directed with Sean MacDonald and Michelle Gucovsky. The film was released by Shiva's production company Gidalya Pictures. [4] It examined the decline in the traditional status of eunuchs in India focusing on one family. Meena the leader of the family Shiva follows around allowed the filmmakers into the private world of hijras in hopes of improving the stigma around hijras. [5] Shiva accomplished gaining access to the private world of hijras, which has traditionally been inaccessible to journalists. [6] Thus allowing for a glimpse of a secretive, invisible world. The New Yorker commended the film for dignifying these outcasts and never condescending them. [7]
In 2006, Shiva directed her second documentary film Stagedoor. The film is about the Stagedoor Manor, a premier summer theatre camp for children ages 8 – 18. [8] The film follows extroverted, budding young actors at Stagedoor Manor, where her husband also attended as a boy.
Shiva continued to be interested in the theme of people who felt like they didn't belong but find communities where they do, with her third film How to Dance in Ohio (2015). The film takes place in Columbus, Ohio following the story of three teenage girls who have autism preparing to go to the prom. [9] It shows the courage of people facing their fears and entering the adult world. [10] This was Shiva's first film she created after her children were born. She intended to make it in NYC, but her research led her to Ohio where she discovered Emilio Amigo, a psychologist working with autistic children. [11]
The US TV rights for How to Dance in Ohio were acquired by HBO Documentary Films. [12] The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and appeared on HBO later in 2015. It won a Peabody Award in 2016. [13] The film is being adapted into a musical by composers Jacob Yandura and Rebekah Greer Melocik, which was conceived of by Hal Prince. [14]
In 2018, Shiva directed This is Home: A Refugee Story, an intimate portrait of four Syrian refugee families arriving in America and struggling to find their footing. The film premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award. [15] It was also awarded the 2019 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award [16] and was acquired by Epix.
For her fifth film, Shiva directed Each and Every Day (2021) for MTV Documentary Films. The documentary is an exploration of youth mental health through the eyes of young people who have attempted suicide or have struggled with suicidal thoughts. It premiered on MTV. [17]
In 2024, Shiva co-directed and produced alongside Lindsey Megrue, One South: Portrait of a Psych Unit revolving around patients and staff at Zucker Hillside Hospital for HBO. [18]
In the Indian subcontinent, hijra are transgender, intersex, or eunuch people who live in communities that follow a kinship system known as guru-chela system. They are also known as aravani, aruvani, and jogappa. The term used in Pakistan is khawaja sira, the equivalent of transgender in the Urdu language.
Edward Graydon Carter, CM is a Canadian journalist who served as the editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 until 2017. He also co-founded, with Kurt Andersen and Tom Phillips, the satirical monthly magazine Spy in 1986. In 2019, he co-launched a weekly newsletter with Alessandra Stanley called Air Mail, which is for "worldly cosmopolitans". His current net worth is 12 million dollars.
Alexandra Corinne Pelosi is an American journalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer. She is a daughter of Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and Paul Pelosi.
Antidote Films, also known as Antidote International Films, Inc., is an independent film production company founded by producer Jeff Levy-Hinte based in the Hudson Square neighborhood of New York City. In 2008, Antidote completed several documentaries, including Soul Power and The Dungeon Masters, both of which premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.
Tanaz Eshaghian is an Iranian-born American documentary filmmaker. She resides in New York City.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company Story Syndicate.
Jeffrey Blitz is an American film director, screenwriter and producer best known for the documentary Spellbound (2003), The Office, the fiction film Rocket Science (2007) and Comedy Central’sReview. Blitz is a two-time Emmy Award winner, the winner of the Directing Prize at Sundance and an Academy Award nominee.
Steven Cantor is an American film and television director and producer. Eight of his films have been nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards, with two winning, including the 2022 Outstanding Documentary prize for When Claude Got Shot. While as a student in graduate school, Cantor was nominated for an Academy Award for his first film, Blood Ties.
Josh Fox is an American film director, playwright and environmental activist, best known for his Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning 2010 documentary, Gasland. He is the founder and artistic director of a film and theater company in New York City, International WOW, and has contributed as a journalist to Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, NowThis, AJ+ and Huffington Post.
Heidi Ewing is an American documentary filmmaker and the co-director of Jesus Camp, The Boys of Baraka, 12th & Delaware, DETROPIA, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, One of Us, Love Fraud (series), I Carry You With Me (narrative) and Endangered.
How to Dance in Ohio is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Alexandra Shiva. The film follows a group of autistic young adults in Columbus, Ohio preparing for their first spring formal. With guidance from their group counselor, Dr. Emilio Amigo, the group spends 12 weeks practicing their social skills in preparation for the dance. HBO Documentary Films acquired television rights to the film eleven days before its world premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The film premiered on HBO on October 26, 2015. Three young women are the main subjects of the documentary.
Matthew Heineman is an American documentary filmmaker, director, and producer. His inspiration and fascination with American history led him to early success with the documentary film Cartel Land, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, and won three Primetime Emmy Awards.
Evgeny Mikhailovich Afineevsky is an Israeli-American film director, producer and cinematographer. He has an Academy Award nomination and Emmy nominations for his documentary Winter on Fire. Afineevsky resides in the United States.
Marina Zenovich is an American filmmaker known for her biographical documentaries. Her films include LANCE, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which won two Emmy awards.
Nanfu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. Her debut film Hooligan Sparrow premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017. Her second film, I Am Another You, premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2017 and won two special jury awards, and her third film, One Child Nation, won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Wang is the recipient of a 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking, from the Vilcek Foundation.
Julia Bell Reichert was an American Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and feminist. She was a co-founder of New Day Films. Reichert's filmmaking career spanned over 50 years as a director and producer of documentaries.
1091 Pictures is an American production company based in New York City and Los Angeles. The company was founded as the film and television division subsidiary of The Orchard in 2015. The company is best known for the Oscar-nominated films Life, Animated and Cartel Land. Sony divested the company and its catalogue of over 4,000 in 2019, with the company adopting the name 1091 Media. In 2020, the company rebranded as 1091 Pictures and announced that its parent company rebranded as Streamwise, the name of its new technology platform in development.
Karim Amer is an Egyptian-American film producer and director. He worked on The Square (2013) and The Great Hack (2019); the former was the first Egyptian film to earn an Academy Award nomination and went on to win three Emmy Awards, while the latter got nominated for an Emmy and a BAFTA Award. In 2020, he produced and directed The Vow, an HBO documentary series about the self-improvement group, NXIVM. In 2022, he produced and directed Flight/Risk for Amazon Studios, revolving around whistleblowers at Boeing.
Giant Pictures is an American independent film distribution company founded by Nick Savva and Jeff Stabenau with offices in New York City and Los Angeles. The company releases feature films, documentaries and series on streaming platforms, with an emphasis on flexibility and customization for filmmakers. Giant Pictures owns and operates specialty theatrical label, Drafthouse Films. Giant is the distribution and technology partner of the Tribeca Festival.
Deborah Shaffer has a 50-year career as a documentary filmmaker.