Oren Rudavsky

Oren Rudavsky (born c. 1957) is an American documentary filmmaker specializing in work about individuals and communities outside the mainstream. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1979. Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People. He is also working on a documentary for a program called Witness Theater, which will chronicle the relationships formed between high school students and Holocaust survivors, culminating with a dramatization of the lives of the survivors. His films Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016.

His film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and his film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the permanent installations at the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow which opened in 2013. In 2011, Rudavsky produced a series of profile documentaries for Bloomberg television called Risk Takers. In 2009 Rudavsky was Producer/Writer of the two part series Time for School 3, a twelve-year longitudinal study examining the education of seven children in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle. In 2006, he completed his first fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director: The Treatment, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen. The film premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival where it was awarded Best Film, Made in New York.

Rudavsky’s other work includes writing and producing segments for the ABC national series PrimeTime Live, the PBS series Media Matters, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly and other national programming. He has also worked as a post-production supervisor on the film unit of Saturday Night Live and the syndicated series Tales From the Darkside in the 1980s.