Oren Rudavsky

Oren Rudavsky (born c. 1957) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker specializing in work on religion outside the mainstream. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1979. Oren Rudavsky is in post-production on Colliding Dreams, a feature-length documentary supported by a media grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was the producer of media for the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which opened in Moscow in 2012.
Oren recently produced feature portraits of investor Michael Burry and educator Michelle Rhee for the Bloomberg television series Risk Takers. In 2009 he was Producer/Writer of the two part series Time for School 3, a twelve-year longitudinal study of seven children’s education in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle. He was the recipient in 2008 of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts filmmaker awards, three National Endowment for the Humanities grants, several New York State Council for the Arts awards, and many other awards and commendations. 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. He completed his first fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director on The Treatment, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen in 2006. The film premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded Best Film, Made in New York. Oren’s producing career stretches back to stints on Saturday Night Live, The Real World and Tales from the Darkside. He has also taught filmmaking at Columbia University and City College.

As director

• At the Crossroads: Jewish Life in Eastern Europe Today
• Dreams So Real, an animated film about three mentally ill men who created their own films, won first prize at the New England Film Festival in 1981.
• A Film About My Home, an autobiographical film
• Gloria: A Case Of Alleged Police Brutality.
• Ritual, a documentary about Jewish ritual incorporating scholarly commentary with portraits of individuals
• Saying Kaddish, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in Directing
• Spark Among the Ashes: A Bar Mitzvah in Poland took second prize at the Chicago International Film Festival and a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival and was included in the Sundance Film Festival.
• Theater of the Palms: The World of Puppet Master Lee Tien Lu
• A Life Apart in collaboration with Menachem Daum was shortlisted for an Academy Award and was nominated for an emmy. PBS
• Hiding and Seeking in collaboration with Menachem Daum PBS POV
• The Treatment Best Film Made in New York, Tribeca Film Festival, 2006
• "Time for School" 2009 in collaboration with Tamara Rosenberg PBS
• "To Educate a Girl" 2011 in collaboration with Fred Rendina
• "Michael Burry" 2012 Bloomberg TV
• "Michelle Rhee" 2012 Bloomberg TV
• "The Zionist Idea" 2013 in collaboration with Joseph Dorman

As director of photography

• The Amish: Not to be Modern
• The Last Klezmer
• Twitch and Shout, a film about Tourette’s syndrome
• A Life Apart: Hasidism in America