Rory Kennedy

Award-winning producer, director, and writer, Rory Kennedy is co-founder of Moxie Firecracker Films. Kennedy has produced and/or directed documentaries for HBO, PBS, Lifetime Television, A&E, Court TV, The Oxygen Network and The Learning Channel, covering a variety of topics including the global AIDS crisis, human rights, domestic abuse, poverty, drug addiction, labor struggle and political corruption.

Most recently, Kennedy produced and directed Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House for HBO Documentary Films, which aired on HBO, August 18, 2008.  In 2007, Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the 2007 Primetime Emmy Award for Best Documentary. In 2006, she also produced and directed The Homestead Strike as part of the History Channel’s ground-breaking series, Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. She also Executive Produced Street Fight, which follows the controversial 2002 Mayoral Race between Sharpe James and Cory Booker in Newark, New Jersey. Street Fight earned a 2006 Academy Award Nomination for Best Documentary, as well as numerous awards on the 2005 festival circuit, including Audience Awards at the Tribeca Film Festival and SilverDocs, as well as the Grand Jury Prize at Hot Docs.

In 1999, Kennedy’s film American Hollow brought her filmmaking to the attention of critics and the viewing public. The story of a tight-knit Appalachian family caught between century-old tradition and the encroaching modern world, American Hollow premiered at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Subsequently, it won Best Documentary prizes at a number of festivals, including the American Film Institute and The 1999 Chicago International Film Festival, and garnered an Independent Spirit Award nomination. After its critically acclaimed run at New York City’s Film Forum, HBO broadcast the film as part of the America Undercover series. It was nominated for a Non-Fiction Primetime Emmy Award. Additionally, Little, Brown & Co. published Kennedy’s companion book, American Hollow, in conjunction with the film’s broadcast premiere.

The film also generated an American Hollow cultural exhibit, featuring the photographs of Steve Lehman, and has been shown at numerous museums, including The National Gallery of Art, The Dayton Art Institute, and The Norton Museum in Palm Beach.

Rory Kennedy also directed and produced the Emmy nominated series Pandemic:  Facing AIDS, which premiered at the Barcelona World AIDS conference on July 8, 2002, and aired as a five-part series on HBO in June of 2003.  Pandemic follows the lives of five people living with AIDS in different regions of the world and uses their experiences to put faces behind the numbers and to connect audiences with the heartache and triumph of living with AIDS. The film was released theatrically and was nominated for two Prime Time Emmy Awards.  Pandemic is accompanied by a book, CD, website, traveling exhibition, and educational materials.

In 2003, Kennedy produced and directed A Boy’s Life, the story of a young boy and his family in rural Mississippi. The film premiered to rave reviews at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the Woodstock Film Festival. The film was later broadcast on HBO. Her next film for HBO, Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, aired on September 9, 2004. The film takes a “what if” look at the catastrophic consequences of a radioactive release at the Indian Point Nuclear Energy Center, located 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan.

Moxie Firecracker, Inc.

Since Rory Kennedy and Liz Garbus co-founded Moxie Firecracker Films in 1998, they have pursued their unique filmmaking vision, producing documentaries that illuminate larger social issues by telling the stories of everyday people.

Kennedy and Garbus’ first joint venture, Different Moms, a one-hour documentary about mentally retarded parents raising normally developed children, aired on Lifetime Television in April 1999. They also completed a short documentary for Cinemax titled Xiara’s Song, about a young girl coming to terms with her father’s 10-year jail sentence. Garbus and Kennedy are also responsible for the 2002 feature documentary, The Execution of Wanda Jean, which premiered in the Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival and aired later on HBO’s America Undercover series. The film tells the story of Wanda Jean Allen, a twelve-year inhabitant of Oklahoma’s three-woman death row, the first black woman to be executed in America in the last fifty years. The film opened theatrically at the Quad Cinema in New York, won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award and was nominated for Best Documentary by NAMIC (National Association of Minorities in Communications). New York Magazine called it a "broad, gripping, and tragic piece of Americana."

Additionally, Kennedy and Garbus directed and produced The Changing Face of Beauty, a film that examines our cultural myths and standards of beauty (Lifetime Television, March 2000), All Kinds of Families, a film about alternative families (Lifetime Television, February 2001), Healthy Start, a film about the state of pre-natal healthcare in America (Lifetime Television, January 2001), and Speak Truth to Power, a series of PSAs highlighting the accomplishments of several human rights activists (Court TV, October 2001). Kennedy also produced Juvies, a documentary about juvenile justice (A&E), and The Travelers, which follows a group of disenfranchised young adults as they hop freight trains across the country (MTV), as well as Sixteen, a four-part series of one-hour documentary films for The Oxygen Network, which featured a cross-section of teenage girls in their most crucial and volatile year of adolescence (Oxygen, 2002) and Girlhood, a film about violent juvenile offenders at Maryland’s only all-female juvenile detention facility (The Learning Channel, 2003).

Public Speaking and Social Activism

Rory Kennedy has served on the Board of Directors for a number of non-profit organizations including The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, The Legal Action Center and the Project Return Foundation. She served as Chairperson of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation Associate Trustees Program from 1993-1995 and has served as a member of the Board of the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation since 1999. She initiated and helped develop the Teacher Transfer Program between the U.S. and Namibia in the fall of 1990 after her work there at the Dobra Resettlement Camp. Kennedy was a member of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights delegations during human rights trips to the following countries: South Africa (1996); South Korea (1989); Japan (1989); South Africa (1989); El Salvador (1988); and Poland (1987).

Kennedy maintains an active speaking schedule and recently has been the keynote speaker for various lecture series, university events and community organization functions including: The Wittenburg Lecture Series, The Museum of National Art, New Jersey’s Women’s Crisis Services, Dayton Museum of Art, Sisters of Charity Hospital in Maine, University of San Diego and the University of Pennsylvania. She was also the principle speaker for the Women of Substance Education Outreach Campaign (1992-1994) and the Fire in Our House Outreach Campaign (1995-1996); surrogate speaker for Bill Clinton’s Presidential Campaign in Pennsylvania and New York in 1992; speaker at the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards in Washington, DC (1986-1997), the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Delegation trips (1987-1996), and the United Farm Workers Union in New England (1988).  

Kennedy has also spoken on a number of film-related events, including panels and seminars at the Sundance Film Festival, the Doubletake Film Festival and the Museum of Television and Radio. She has also served as a judge for a number of festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and, just recently, at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

Kennedy’s work has been featured in numerous national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times and she has appeared on numerous talk, news and radio programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Rosie O’Donell, The Charlie Rose Show, The Today Show, CNN and NPR.

During the summer of 1990, Kennedy served as assistant to Bella Abzug at the Women’s Foreign Policy Council. During the summer of 1989, she was Coordinator for the U.S. Congressional and Business Delegation and a reporter for the Church Information Monitoring Service covering “Free and Fair” elections in Namibia. She graduated from Brown University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Women’s Studies.