Biography — Aviva Slesin Art

Film Biography

Aviva Slesin is a documentary filmmaker. She received an Academy Award for The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table (1987). A member of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, she has been a MacDowell Fellow and had a special retrospective, The Long and Short of It, featured at the Sundance Film Festival.

Aviva was born in Lithuania. She was hidden as a baby during the last years of World War II by a Christian family who risked their lives by hiding her. After the war, she was reunited with her mother, a concentration camp survivor, and emigrated to America in the mid-1950s. They moved to Canada soon after and in the late 1960s Aviva returned to New York to go to Parsons School of Design.

Aviva’s film career began as a film editor on Shirley MacLaine’s The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (nominated for an Oscar in 1975). She went on to edit Making Television Dance, about choreographer Twyla Tharp and The Rutles, a Beatles satire directed by Gary Weis and Eric Idle of Monty Python. She produced and directed comedy shorts for Saturday Night Live, then founded Aviva Films NY and directed and edited Directed by William Wyler (PBS American Masters), which earned an Emmy nomination.

Aviva’s subsequent films include Stood Up! (ABC After School Special), Voices in Celebration (for the National Gallery of Art’s 50th anniversary), Hot on the Trail: Sex, Love and Romance in the Old West (TBS), and Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During World War II (HBO/Cinemax). Secret Lives won the Christopher Award, was nominated for two Emmys, and was named one of the year’s top ten documentaries by critic Andrew Sarris.

After retiring from filmmaking, Aviva taught a master class in documentary as well as social-issue courses at New York University where she received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award for teaching excellence and commitment to social justice.

She now devotes her time to volunteering with newcomers to the U.S. at the International Center, painting and leading several documentary screening and discussion groups with friends and former students.

Aviva lives in New York and shares her home with two rescue cats, Alfie and Lorenzo.

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