Washington, DC based filmmaker Aviva Kempner makes award winning documentaries about underknown Jewish heroes for 44 years. Kempner just completed A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings, which chronicles the heroism of the two Ciesla Foundation namesakes, Helen Ciesla Covensky and David Chase—siblings who survived the Holocaust separately and managed to reunite after the war. She just co-directed, co-wrote and co-produced Imagining the Indians: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting, a documentary on  the movement to remove Native American names, logos, and mascots from the world of sports. Her The Spy Behind Home Plate is about baseball player and OSS spy Moe Berg. Kempner launched the  SEW: Sports Equality for Women website which strives to amplify the stories and voices of women in sports.

She made Rosenwald, a documentary about how philanthropist Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington in establishing over 5,000 schools with African Americans in the Jim Crow South. 

She was most recently the Associate Producer for the special DVD package of Aviva Kempner’s historical documentary, Rosenwald, which includes four hours of bonus features and an educational packet.

Richards was associate producer of NOVA’s Spies that Fly, a history of unmanned aerial vehicles. Her work in research and production also includes Smithsonian’s Stories from the Vaults with Tom Cavanagh, a behind-the-scenes look at the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex; the WGBH Emmy Award-winning story, Why the Towers Fell, about the collapse of the World Trade Center; NOVA’s Bioterror: Coping with the New Reality; the WGBH Peabody award-winning series Building Big with David Macaulay: Bridges, Domes, Skyscrapers, Dams, Tunnels; and the independent film, Tale of the Tongs.