Vanessa Roth

Vanessa Roth

Adjunct Faculty

Vanessa Roth has written produced and directed award- winning non-fiction film and headed up social issue reform efforts through storytelling for over a decade. Roth’s work has earned her dozens of honors including an Academy Award, two Sundance Special Jury Prizes, Cine Golden Eagles, Casey Medals, and a Dupont-Columbia Award. Her films have been catalysts for national progressive social change, received the highest accolades in documentary filmmaking, and have been broadcast nationally on PBS, HBO, A&E, ESPN the Sundance Channel and Discovery, and distributed internationally. Her work is always accompanied by national impact campaigns made to empower the subjects of her films to become active participants in the policies that affect them and to raise awareness and participation among the general public. Also used by colleges and universities across the country, her films become tools for training new lawyers, judges, social workers, journalists and filmmakers, and have been seen by congress, the National Governor’s Association, have been featured on Oprah, NPR, at the Youth Presidential Inauguration events in 2009 and in the upcoming 2013 inauguration. Vanessa is a Thought Partner to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a frequent key-note speaker on nonfiction storytelling and ethics in documentary filmmaking. Some of her films include: Taken in: The Lives of America’s Foster Children, Close to Home, Aging Out, Schools of the 21st Century, 9/11’s Toxic Dust, No Tomorrow, Freeheld, Third Monday in October, American Teacher, as well as the upcoming The Other Side and the Untouchables. Vanessa received a Masters Degree in Social Work and a minor in Family Law from Columbia University in 1995.