Aviva Kempner
Producer/Director/Writer
Award-winning filmmaker Aviva Kempner has been making independent films since 1979
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 also made Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, about Gertrude Berg who created the first television sitcom and Peabody awarded The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, about the Hall Famer slugger who faced anti-Semitism during the 30s. She also produced the award-winning Partisans of Vilna, about Jews fighting the Nazis.
She is presently making a film on screenwriter, journalist and activist Ben Hecht, who exposed the horrors of the Holocaust to the American public and advocated to bring more Jews to US shores and helped bring survivors to a permanent Jewish home in Palestine.Kempner is also making Pissed Off, a documentary short exploring the struggles faced by female lawmakers in Congress who advocated for potty parity in the United States Capitol.
A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Kempner is a voting rights and statehood advocate for Washington, D.C. and proudly serves on the board of DC Vote.
Alison J. Richards
Associate Producer
Alison Richards has worked in documentary film and television production and research since 2001.
.
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.
Richards received a Master’s in Documentary Film from American University and a certificate in CopyrightX from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She serves on the St. Albans Development Committee and Harvard College Leadership Committee. In addition to documentary film work, Richards was a Peace Corps Volunteer, grew up in Southern California and has a BA degree in English from the University of California at Irvine. She and her husband Ron Dreben have lived in Washington DC for the past 25 years and have a son James.
Join Our Mailing List
Sign up for the latest news and updates from The Ciesla Foundation.