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.
DEBORAH SHAFFER
Co-Producer
Guggenheim Fellow and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Deborah Shaffer directed the The Wobblies, which was added to the National Film Registry in 2021. Shaffer has focused on human rights, from her Oscar-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), won the Audience Award and Best Documentary at the Hamptons Documentary Film Festival.
RACHEL REICHMAN
Editor
With a body of Emmy and Peabody Award-winning work, editor Rachel Reichman has focused on 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. She also edited Martin Scorsese’s Letter to Elia and Hitchcock Truffaut; Peace Unveiled (PBS) and co-directed and edited Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack. She also has won a Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award and has worked for National Geographic, Discovery, Bravo, IFC, and The New York Times.
KEITH REAMER
Editor
Keith Reamer is an ACE editor who has cut over 60 features, documentaries and television shows. Many of his features have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Berlin and Tribeca, such as Jed Rothstein and Alex Gibney’s The China Hustle, Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, and Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, by Jeffrey Wolf.
HALIL EFRAT
Additional Editor
Jerusalem-born, award-winning filmmaker and editor Halil Efrat was on the 2025 Oscar shortlist for the Alex Gibney produced documentary The Bibi Files. He is known for such films as Tantura, Foreign Land, Trophy, Aida’s Secrets, Album 61 and Souvenirs.
SLAWOMIR GRUNBERG
Director of Photography
Slawomir Grunberg is an award-winning producer, director who has shot over 50 documentaries, including School Prayer: A Community at War for PBS, which received an Emmy Award. His film, Karski and the Lords of Humanity won a 2016 Lavr Award. He has shot documentaries for HBO and PBS series Frontline, AIDS Quarterly, American Masters and NOVA.
DROR LEBENDIGER
2nd Director of Photography
Drop Lebendiger is an award-winning cinematographer who has shot films for directors like David Attenborough, Emmy Award winning James Jacoby and Alex Weresow. His credits include Sabbath Queen, The Center, Spinoza, LaCerca and Holocaust themed Stalags and Who Will Remain.
WENDY BLACKSTONE
Composer
Award-winning composer Wendy Blackstone is known as the “score queen” for scoring over 140 TV shows and films, 10 of which have been nominated for Academy Awards. She is the first woman signed to CAA and one of the first women invited to the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Her most recent credits include: An American Bombing (2024), Cyndi Lauper: Let the Canary Sing (2023), Pelosi in the House (2022), 9 to 5: The Story of a Movement (2020), and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019).
MOLLY SCHWARTZ
Director of Animation
Molly Schwartz is an award winning artist and founder of animation and design studio Phlea TV, know for creating breathtaking 2- and 3-D visuals for such documentaries as Lady Bird Diaries, U.S. & the Holocaust, Worlds of Ursula K. Leguin, Watchers of the Sky and many others.
DEBORAH OPPENHEIMER
Executive Producer
Film and television producer Deborah Oppenheimer won an Academy Award for her documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, based on her mother’s wartime past. It was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2014. She also wrote and produced Foster, which received a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay in 2020. She was president of Mohawk Productions at Warner Bros, executive vice president of NBC Universal International TV Production, and executive VP of Carnival Films, where she conceived and led U.S. strategies for Downtown Abbey. She was appointed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council by U.S. President Barack Obama.
NANCY SPIELBERG
Executive Producer
Nancy Spielberg has collaborated with director Roberta Grossman, on films like Who Will Write Our History, which had a global theatrical release through UNESCO on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and was shown at 300 venues around the world. Her titles include Vishniac, Closed Circuit, Aulcie, Above and Beyond, and A Letter to David, which premiered this year at the 75th Berlinale.
MICHAEL BERENBAUM
Executive Producer
A leading Holocaust scholar and author, Michael Berenbaum is 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 of several Holocaust films (One Survivor Remembers, Blessed is the Match, Defiance). He was also president/CEO of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and is Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute of Holocaust studies at American Jewish University.
MAIA HARRIS
Script Consultant
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.
SCHOLAR ADVISORS
The film’s consultants include 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 executive director emeritus Stephen Smith and distinguished professors of history, Holocaust, genocide, gender and interfaith studies like Atina Grossmann, Natalia Aleksiun, Mehnaz Afridi and Björn Krondorfer.
©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2025