Miri Navasky

producer, FRONTLINE

Miri Navasky is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who began her career in television when she joined FRONTLINE in 1991. While on staff, she worked on numerous films, including The Killer at Thurston High (2000), which she co-produced with Karen O'Connor. This 90-minute film examined the life of a 15-year-old school shooter in Oregon and won the Banff award for best social/political documentary. In 2000, Navasky formed an independent production company, Mead Street Films, and continued her work with O'Connor producing films for FRONTLINE, including: A Crime of Insanity (2002), an in-depth investigation into the criminal case of a 26-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who killed himself behind bars; and The New Asylums (2005), an intimate and powerful portrait of the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people incarcerated in jails and prisons across America. The film was nominated for an Emmy Award, earned the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Award for Journalism and won the Excellence in Journalism Award from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, marking the first time a television program received the award. In 2006, Navasky and O'Connor produced Living Old, a disturbing look at what it really means to grow old in contemporary America. O'Connor and Navasky's most recent production, The Undertaking, is a powerful and moving exploration of death and dying told through the perspective of writer/poet Thomas Lynch, an undertaker in Central Michigan whose family has cared for the dead for three generations. The film aired on PBS in the fall of 2007 and won an Emmy Award.