Professor Jeremy Kagan is an award winning film and TV director /writer /producer, and artist with movies about Jewish subjects including THE CHOSEN from Chaim Potok’s classic novel, CROWN HEIGHTS, which won the Humanitas Award, and GOLDA’S BALCONY. He draws storyboards for all of his films.
He has for decades been painting responses to the weekly parshas of the Torah and readings of the Haftorah based on a variety of commentaries. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The ongoing collection of multiple sets of 100s of paintings and drawings is online here.
He is a tenured professor at The School of Cinematic Arts at USC and has created the Change Making Media Lab – www.cmml-usc.org – which creates narrative dramas and comedies and documentaries and animated art films to motivate behavior change. He has made 11 feature films and won Emmy’s for his work in television.
He has served as the Artistic Director of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and is Chairperson of Special Projects for The Directors Guild of America, which provides artistic, educational, cultural, and technological information and events for its 19,000 members. A Graduate Fellow of the American Film Institute, he has an M.F.A. from NYU and a B.A. from Harvard University with his thesis about the artist Sergei Eisenstein.
