Marisa Fox

Writer, Director, Producer

A veteran print, broadcast (WNET, VH1, Fx) and digital journalist, Marisa Fox has produced social impact campaigns for Hearst, earning American Society of Magazine Editors awards and nominations. She has written extensively on gender, genocide, sexual trauma and extremism (The Daily Beast, CNN, Ms., The New York Times, Elle, Health, The Forward and Ha’aretz, where she was a U.S. correspondent) and is a “she source” for the Women’s Media Center, started by Gloria Steinem. My Underground Mother, Fox’s directorial debut, led her to curate and unveil Holocaust memorials in Poland and the Czech Republic, and a digital exhibit of women’s testimonies curated with USC’s Shoah Foundation. She has spoken about her search to groups from the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival to the City University of New York, where she received a Humanitarian Award for recording 50+ women’s testimonies. Fox has a B.A. in French Language Arts, and an M.S. and B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, where her graduate thesis won a National Journalism Society Award.

DEBORAH SHAFFER

Producer

Guggenheim Fellow and Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Deborah Shaffer directed the NEH-funded The Wobblies (1979), which premiered at the New York Film Festival and was one of 25 titles added to the National Film Registry in 2021. Throughout her storied career, Shaffer has focused on human rights, from her Academy Award-winning short Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements (1984) to the Academy Award-nominated short Asylum (2003) and Ladies First: The Women of Rwanda (Emmy, WNET, 2004). Her most recent film, Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack (2019), premiered at DOC NYC and won the Audience Award and Best Documentary at the Hamptons Documentary Film Festival. With experience in historic and women’s narratives and as the daughter of a European Jewish refugee, she is committed to producing a film that’s a vibrant, moving testament to women Holocaust survivors with contemporary resonance.

RACHEL REICHMAN

Editor

With a body of Emmy and Peabody Award-winning work, documentary editor Rachel Reichman is known for tackling global women’s issues through films like Ladies First, about Rwandan women’s struggle to mobilize after genocide, and the PBS series Women, War and Peace, directed by Fork Films’ Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney. Much of Reichman’s experience has involved a personal story with a bigger social history, like Martin Scorsese’s Letter to Elia; and Peace Unveiled for PBS. Reichman co-produced and edited Hitchcock Truffaut (2015) and co-directed and edited Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack, winning Best Editing Award at the Ashland Film Festival. She also has won a Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award and two Broadcast Design Awards, and has worked for National Geographic, Discovery, Bravo, IFC, History and The New York Times Television.

MAIA HARRIS

Script Consultant

Maia Harris is a two-time Emmy Award winner with 20 years experience writing and producing many PBS documentaries, namely GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II, about young European Jewish refugees who found redemption by returning to Europe to liberate it from the Nazis; Our Journey Through History, a 10-part series about a Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn; No Job for a Woman, about women reporters during WWII; and Banished, about racial cleansing in three American towns, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Harris holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.S. from Teachers’ College, Columbia Univer

SLAWOMIR GRÜNBERG

Director of Photography

Slawomir Grünberg is a Polish-born American Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, director, cameraman and graduate of the Polish Film School in Lodz, who has directed and produced over 40 television documentaries, including School Prayer: A Community at War, which received an Emmy Award.  Grünberg’s film, Karski and the Lords of Humanity, won a 2016 Lavr Award, the Russian Oscar, and was nominated for an Eagles Award, the Polish Oscar for best Polish documentary. His film Sister Rose’s Passion won best documentary short at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004 and received an Academy award nomination in 2005. His credits as a director of photography include: Legacy, which received an Academy Award Nomination for the best documentary feature in 2001, and Sister Rose s Passion, which won the best in documentary short at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004 and received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary short in 2005. As a principal director of photography, Grunberg has shot over 50 documentaries, five of which received Emmy nominations. Slawomir has also been a contributing director of photography and editor for such PBS series as Frontline, AIDS Quarterly American Masters, and NOVA, as well as Lifetime and HBO.

The film’s team also includes foremost Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, a founding director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and an Academy Award, Emmy and Cable Ace Award-winning producer (One Survivor Remembers, Blessed is the Match, Defiance); Holocaust post-trauma pioneer and clinical psychologist Dr. Eva Fogelman, writer and co-producer of award-winning PBS documentary Breaking the Silence; UNESCO chair and USC Shoah Foundation’s former executive director Stephen Smith; Academy Award-winning producer Deborah Oppenheimer (Into the Arms of Strangers), acclaimed and award-winning consulting producer Nancy Spielberg (Who Will Write our History?); and our distinguished academic advisory board, which includes leading Holocaust, genocide, interfaith and history professors and authors Atina Grossmann, Natalia Aleksiun, Mehnaz Afridi, Björn Krondorfer and Elisa Von Joeden-Forgey.

©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2022