Nancy Schwartzman
Biography
Nancy Schwartzman is an Emmy winning and Peabody nominated documentary filmmaker and a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.
She is the Director and Executive Producer of the 5-part original documentary series Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order for Freeform/Hulu and Disney+ with XTR Studios. The show features a diverse cast of young women pooling their talents to fight violence against women and bring justice to victims. Inside the Midnight Order is the 5-part podcast produced by ABCAudio. Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order debuted #3 on Hulu its first week. She is nominated for a Women's Image Award for Best Direction of a Series.
Her recent Netflix original feature, Victim/Suspect, won an Emmy award and was nominated for 3, including for Outstanding Direction, Outstanding Investigative Documentary and Outstanding Research. Victim/Suspect is the winner of the RFK Journalism prize, nominated for the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2023 and the F:ACT Award at CPH: Dox. Victim/Suspect follows an Investigative journalist as she travels nationwide to uncover and examine a shocking pattern: young women tell the police they've been sexually assaulted, but instead of finding justice, they're charged with the crime of making a false report, arrested, and even imprisoned. Produced with Netflix with the Center for Investigative Reporting and Motto Pictures, the film premiered on Netflix to 190 countries
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on May 23, 2023 and trended #6 in the United States, and in the top #10 globally in 28 countries. As of 2024, it was the #7 Documentary viewed on Netflix.
Her debut feature documentary Roll Red Roll (PBS/BBC/Netflix) was nominated for a Peabody award, and exposed the notorious Steubenville, Ohio high school sexual assault case and uncovered the social-media fueled "boys will be boys" culture that let it happen. Roll Red Roll garnered 7 best documentary awards, premiered in 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival and Hot Docs, and has screened at over 40 film festivals worldwide. The film opened theatrically with 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a Critic's Pick in The New York Times and reviewed in The New Yorker, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times among others.
As a follow up to the documentary, she is the author of the non-fiction book Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power and Football in the American Heartland released in July 2022 with Hachette and received stellar reviews from the New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal. This is a deep dive into the Steubenville, Ohio case and a follow-up from the award-winning film.
Her short films including One Shot One Kill, for Mother Jones (2020) and Anonymous Comes To Town (2019), co-produced with the Tribeca Film Institute and Gucci's Chime for Change, xoxosms and The Line. Together, they have garnered over 5 million views.
For her human rights filmmaking and technology development to prevent sexual violence, she is the winner of awards from the Obama/Biden White House, the United Nations and the Avon Foundation. She is a tech founder and created the Circle of 6 safety app.
She is represented by UTA, a graduate of Columbia University and not so newly based in Los Angeles.
In the role of director
Roll Red Roll (03/05/2018)
Social media plays a major role in the case of a teenager girl raped in a small town in Ohio in Roll Red Roll. Steubenville is a town in Ohio best known for the local high school football team Big Red. At a party, a teenage girl is raped by members of the team, which causes […]