About the Filmmakers

Washington, DC based filmmaker Aviva Kempner makes award winning documentaries about underknown Jewish heroes for over 44 years. Kempner 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 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.

William Levine is a businessman, community leader and philanthropist. He was previously Executive Director of the documentary about Moe Berg: The Spy Behind Home Plate.

Levine has worked extensively with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to diversify its outreach and education efforts through the Levine Institute for Holocaust Education.

Patty Stern has been editing independent, educational and broadcast documentaries for over 40 years. She studied film at Antioch College with New Day Film founders- Julia Reichart and Jim Klein. She went on to study at the MIT Film Section with Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. She specializes in verité, and non-narrated filmmaking. Stern has strong story-telling abilities, a good sense of timing and sensitivity to the human condition. She strives to edit creatively, to keep the viewers engaged while informing and inspiring them.

An Emmy award-winning editor who has been telling compelling stories for over thirty years. She has edited films and videos on topics as diverse as tango dancing to PTSD. Her films have appeared in movie theatres, on network television, cable television, streaming platforms, and in film festivals around the world. Her current films explored the life of baseball player and spy Moe Berg, the legacy of Justice John Marshall, the Right to Die Movement, oil spills, and autism.

Kristen Vanderzant is an independent filmmaker based in Washington DC. Kristen discovered her passion for filmmaking while working as an ER scribe in New York. Immersed in the life stories of patients, she fell in love with the city, its inhabitants, and her film-centric neighborhood, Astoria, Queens. She transitioned to full-time work in film, producing Born on 9/11, a feature length documentary executive produced by Academy Award Nominee Matt Ogens. Currently, she is serving as Associate Producer on Aviva Kempner’s Ben Hecht Film. Her work as Archival Researcher includes Kempner’s most recent film, A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings. In 2018, Kristen produced the short film, El Cocinero, which won awards at New Filmmakers NY, London Independent Film Awards, and screened at festivals in Austin and Oklahoma. Kristen has made research contributions to articles appearing in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. She holds a BA in Biology from George Washington University.

Vera Aronow is an independent filmmaker with a track record of award-winning work. She was a producer and editor of the documentary feature, Backpack Full of Cash (2017) narrated by Matt Damon, which explores the real cost of privatizing America’s public schools. She also co-produced, co-directed and edited, MEGAMALL: Money, Power and Politics the Age of Sprawl (2010), an in-depth look at the controversial origins of a massive regional shopping mall in NY’s Hudson River Valley.  Early in her career she was Associate Producer & Director of Archival Research for Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, which remains one of the most popular series ever broadcast on PBS.

In 1996 she founded Turnstone Productions with her husband, cinematographer Roger Grange. Turnstone creates short films and feature documentaries while also doing freelance work for other producers.

In addition to production work, Aronow served for 3 years as Board Chair and is currently Vice-Chair of Rivertown Film, the Rockland County, NY based non-profit which celebrates the art of motion pictures through screenings and educational programs.

Alison Richards has worked in documentary film and television production and research for over 20 years. She was the Associate Producer of both Aviva Kempner’s The Spy Behind Home Plate and the Rosenwald, special DVD package which includes over four hours of extras and an educational packet. She is currently working as Archival Producer on Kempner’s in production feature length film on Ben Hecht and short film, Pissed Off.Most recently, Richards was an Archival Producer for both Free Exercise: The Story of America’s Religious Liberty and John Marshall, The Man Who Made The Supreme Court. She also did research and social media for Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting. She was Associate Producer of NOVA’s Spies that Fly, a history of unmanned aerial vehicles. Her work in research and production also includes: When My Time Comes: A Conversation about Dying with Diane Rehm;  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, Tunnel; and the independent film, Tale of the Tongs. Richards received a Master’s in Producing for Film and Video from American University and a certificate in Copyright from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Yemen, grew up in Southern California and has a BA degree in English from the University of California at Irvine. (UCI)

Roger Grange has served as a Director of Photography on award winning documentary films for over thirty years, and in recent years he has filmed numerous feature length documentaries. Among them are American River, a feature documentary following a pair of kayakers whose journey reveals the history and natural history of the Passaic River in New Jersey; The Spy Behind Home Plate, about World War II spy and baseball player Moe Berg; The Anthropologist, which shows how climate change is affecting traditional communities in Siberia, Peru and the US; The Colfax Massacre, about a racist mass murder in Reconstruction era Louisiana; Moynihan, a biography of New York’s intellectual Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie, about one of television’s first outrageous talk show hosts, and Backpack Full of Cash, a feature documentary narrated by Matt Damon, about the controversy of education reform and charter schools. During his career he has worked for producers and broadcasters such as National Geographic, Discovery, BBC, ITV, Channel Four, ZDF, The American Museum of Natural History, WNET and PBS, as well as numerous non-profit organizations and independent producers. In 1994, Roger won an Earthwatch Film Award for a PBS documentary he co-directed and shot in Kerala, India for the Quiet Revolution series.

Michael Moser is an independent Director of Photography, a former union representative, and a member of IATSE 600. Before he started Michael Moser/Media, he worked for television stations as a cameraperson and director.

He was an early practitioner of experimental media and video art with a graduate degree in Visual Studies from MIT.

His practice as a Director of Photography includes field, live venue, and studio production ranging from documentary and feature production to producing and directing training series and advertising.

He approaches his work with freshness and artistic vision. His work encompasses award winning projects in the documentary, broadcast, and corporate fields.

Susan Hormuth has been providing motion picture, still image, and textural research services in the Washington, DC area for over thirty years.  Her clients include documentary and fictional filmmakers, museum curators, exhibit designers, theatrical projection designers, and book publishers and authors.  Her research projects have appeared on PBS, at international film festivals, and in permanent museum exhibitions, and range in subject from the Blues to Broadway Musicals, from the Civil War to Civil Rights, from James Brown to Jesse Jackson, from Reconstruction to Route 66, from the Sixties to the Supreme Court, and from Woody Guthrie to Watergate.

Janet Fries is Senior Counsel with Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP.  She has provided advice regarding intellectual property and rights clearance issues on a number of films produced by The Ciesla Foundation.   Janet is also a contributing photographer with Getty Images and a leader in the community of lawyers who serve artists, authors and filmmakers.  She serves on the board of the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts (WALA) and on the advisory board of the American Law Institute and the Washington Sculptors Group.  Janet is active with the American Bar Association, having served as chair of the Copyright Division,and is currently a member of the ABA’s AI Task Force and Copyright Reform Task Force.  She was an adjunct faculty member at George Washington University Law School and American University Washington College of Law.  Janet is admitted to practice in NY and DC.

Josh Lasser is a 2023 graduate of the University of Michigan Film, Television & Media department. He has worked as an Editor and Associate Producer for the DC Cable Network, as well as Production Assistant for Magen Entertainment, both based in Washington, DC. Josh most recently worked as a Production Assistant for Landing Gear Productions, where he managed set building for interviews of hip-hop artists including Pusha T and Big Daddy Kane. He is an assistant editor for Aviva Kempner’s upcoming film on Ben Hecht.

Ben Dally is a Washington D.C. based filmmaker with a 15+ year career on branded entertainment and integrated marketing teams in the film and video game industries. Recently, he was the head of Video Development and Production and was on the Executive Team at Evite in Los Angeles. During the pandemic, he produced and edited a feature film, titled Adam and the Water, which won the “Best in Fest” Award at the Washington DC Independent Film Festival and awards at the Manhattan, Paris and Vancouver Film Festivals. The film was picked up by Freestyle Digital Films and is widely available on all VOD platforms. Ben led the Save My Vote! video production team that captured the voter advocacy activities of the disability community across Georgia during the 2022 midterm and Senate run-off elections. He is currently working as the Director of Development and Marketing for The Ciesla Foundation. He edited the theatrical trailer for Aviva Kempner’s film, A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings and will also be editing the trailer for her film about Ben Hecht.

Jessie Atkin is a DC based writer and social media manager. She writes fiction, poetry, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Writing Disorder, Daily Science Fiction, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, and elsewhere. She is also the Social Media Coordinator for the documentary, Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting. Jessie holds an MFA in creative writing from American University.