Oren Jacoby

Oren Jacoby is an Oscar® nominated filmmaker who has written, directed, and produced award-winning films for two decades. His filmmaking has been recognized by the American Film Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and Britain’s Royal Television Society, as well as by AMPAS. His films have appeared on the BBC, HBO Cinemax, PBS, National Geographic, VH-1, NHK (Japan), Nokia and Human Rights Watch.

His last project, “Sister Rose’s Passion”, was winner of Best Documentary Short Film at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival and was nominated for a 2005 Academy Award®.

He is about to release a feature–length documentary based on Constantine’s Sword, the best seller by National Book Award winning author James Carroll and is in pre-production on Little Mountain, a dramatic feature about the untold story of the fight by Native Alaskans with the U.S. government for control over their own land and destiny.

Recent credits include: “Downtown Stories” 5 portraits/jam sessions filmed with the latest cell phone/video technology, commissioned by Nokia and the Tribeca Film Festival, featuring Rosie Perez and Ed Burns; “The Topdog Diaries” with the 2002 Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, and performances by Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright; “The Shakespeare Sessions” starring Kevin Kline, Cynthia Nixon, Liev Schreiber, and Charles S. Dutton; “The Beatles Revolution”, for ABC and VH-1, “Swingin’ with Duke”, starring Wynton Marsalis and ”Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself”; “Master Thief” on the ‘art heist of the century’; and “Success” for the Emmy award-winning PBS series, The Irish in America.

Jacoby also wrote, produced and directed “The Return Ticket”, adapted from a short story by Anton Chekhov; “Ghosts of the Bayou”; “Idols of the Game”, featuring Michael Jordan; “Benny Goodman: Adventures in the Kingdom of Swing” for American Masters and “The Second Russian Revolution”, a behind the scenes investigation of the collapse of the USSR, called ‘the best BBC series of the decade’ by the London Independent.

He has won CINE Golden Eagles, the Royal Television Society (UK) journalism award, the MacArthur Golden Owl award. as well as grants from the American Film Institute, ITVS (The Independent Television Service) and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jacoby has directed plays at Theater for the New City, the Williamstown Theater Festival, Ensemble Studio Theater, the West Bank Café and regional theaters, including new works by Richard Dresser, Quincy Long, and Franz Xavier Kroetz. He collaborated with Adrian Hall on an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”, with songs by Randy Newman, at the Dallas Theater Center and Trinity Rep. His stage adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was performed in a reading at the 2004 Tribeca Theater Festival, in a co-production with the Classical Theater of Harlem. He wrote the screenplay for “Shores of a Dream" (in development) and is co-author with Forrest Stone of the original screenplay “Tarzan Brown” for the Oxford Film Company. He is a graduate of Brown University and the Directing Program of the Yale School of Drama and is a native New Yorker.