Nina Rosenblum
Nina Rosenblum is an Academy Award–nominated, two-time IDA Distinguished Achievement Award–winning producer and director of documentary films and television, and President of Daedalus Productions, Inc., which she founded in 1980 with her husband and creative partner, Daniel Allentuck. Rosenblum has produced and directed award-winning films for PBS, HBO, TBS, New York Times Television, SHOWTIME, ABC, and NBC. Her co-production partners include Channel Four/UK, WDR/Germany, La Sept/France, and SBS/Australia. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America (Director), Women in Film and Television, and the International Documentary Association. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Cooper Union (BFA, 1970), and later attended the Yale Summer School of Art, earning an MFA from Queens College, CUNY (1972).
In 1984, Rosenblum produced and directed the feature documentary America and Lewis Hine (NEH production grant, PBS broadcast), which premiered at the New York Film Festival and screened widely across the U.S. and Europe—including at Telluride, the Berlin Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize. The film went on to receive numerous awards and was named one of the Ten Best Documentaries of the 1980s by Library Journal.
In 1990, she produced, directed, and wrote Through the Wire, narrated by Susan Sarandon (PBS/POV broadcast), and produced related segments for ABC’s 20/20 and NBC’s Today Show. Her 1992 HBO feature documentary Lock-Up: The Prisoners of Rikers Island, produced for Sheila Nevins’ America Undercover series, further cemented Rosenblum and Daedalus Productions as major forces in nonfiction filmmaking.
Also in 1992, Rosenblum was nominated for an Academy Award for Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, narrated by Denzel Washington and co-produced with William Miles. In 1999, she produced and directed Walter Rosenblum: In Search of Pitt Street, a feature documentary chronicling the fifty-year photographic career of her father, Walter Rosenblum. The film premiered at the D-Day Museum in New Orleans (now the National World War II Museum) and screened at numerous festivals internationally, winning the President’s Award at the Columbus Film Festival.
Her additional credits include The Untold West: The Black West (TBS, 1994) (CableACE and Vision Award nominations), Slaveship: The Testimony of the Henrietta Marie (1995), A History of Women Photographers (1997), narrated by Maureen Stapleton, Jimi and Sly: The Skin I’m In (NYT/Showtime, 2000), and Twin Lenses (2000), about pioneering fashion-photographer twins Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe.
In 2002, Rosenblum produced and directed Unintended Consequences, in association with the Drug Policy Alliance and the Correctional Association of New York. Following 9/11, she produced and directed Code Yellow: Hospital at Ground Zero, documenting the emergency response of NYU Downtown Hospital. In 2005, she spent ten months in Spain producing and directing Zahira, La Que Florece, broadcast on Canal+ Spain. That same year, she was honored with a retrospective celebrating twenty years of her work at Documenta/Madrid.
In 2009, Rosenblum produced In the Name of Democracy: America’s Conscience, A Soldier’s Sacrifice, and in 2012 she co-produced and co-directed Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York with Daniel Allentuck (Van Gogh Prize for Best Documentary, Amsterdam Film Festival). In 2011, a seven-film retrospective of her work traveled to three Italian venues: Rome, Naples, and Sardinia.
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day in 2014, Rosenblum and Allentuck co-curated, with Italian photography expert Manuela Fugenzi, They Fight with Cameras: Walter Rosenblum in WWII from D-Day to Dachau, a traveling exhibition supported by the U.S. Embassies in Vienna and Rome. A companion book, which included an essay by Allentuck, was published by Postcart Edizioni, Rome (2016). The project inspired further research culminating in They Fight with Cameras, a feature documentary incorporating interview footage from the USC Shoah Foundation about the wartime career of her father, Walter Rosenblum—a decorated U.S. Army Signal Corps still photographer and motion picture cameraman. With his five-man Signal Corps unit, he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, fought through France and Germany, and was among the first cameramen to document the liberation of Dachau. He was honored as a liberator by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. They Fight with Cameras won Best Documentary at the 20205 Santa Barbara Indie Film Festival.
