Vivian Kleiman
2022 Eureka Fellow
Vivian Kleiman is a documentary filmmaker whose work is noted for its cultural and stylistic diversity. From the poignant to the quirky, her films always approach their subject with emotional resonance and filmic rigor while tackling challenging subjects and filmic approaches. A longtime collaborator with the acclaimed experimental documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs, she served as additional cinematographer for his landmark work Tongues Untied, and supervised the posthumous completion of his final film, Black Is…Black Ain’t. The films garnered the George Foster Peabody Award, Organization of American Historians’ Eric Barnouw Award, and the International Documentary Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award. In addition, she was nominated for a national Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement. A mentor to many, she served as Executive Producer of the Academy Award-nominated animated short film Last Day of Freedom (Hibbert- Jones/Talisman), Maquilapolis (de la Torre/Funari), Strong! (Wyman), and First Person Plural (Borshay), among others. An educator as well, she served as adjunct faculty at Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Documentary Film & Video Production for nine years. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, she launched Tongues Untied@30, a 2019 year-long global celebration of the 30th anniversary, from Berkeley to Boston, from Rio to London and Mumbai. Currently, she is completing a feature-length documentary, No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, scheduled for release June 2020. *Artist biography at time of award.
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