Producer Miri Navasky

photo of Miri Navasky

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 left her staff position at FRONTLINE to form an independent production company, Mead Street Films. For over a decade, Navasky and O’Connor have defined themselves as filmmakers by their unique ability to take viewers into worlds that are seldom seen and to tell stories that are intimate, original and revealing. They have produced, directed and written a number of ground-breaking FRONTLINE documentaries, including The New Asylums (2005), a provocative and wrenching portrait of the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people incarcerated in jails and prisons across the country. The film was nominated for an Emmy Award and in 2006 it won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Journalism Award.

Their other films include Living Old (2006), an honest and sometimes heartbreaking look at what it really means to grow old in contemporary America, and The Undertaking (2007), a lyrical and moving exploration of death and dying told through the perspective of writer/poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch. Praised by critics as “emotionally haunting” and “remarkably moving,” The Undertaking won the 2008 Emmy Award for Best Arts and Cultural Documentary. Their latest highly acclaimed film, Facing Death (2010), described by the press as “a thoughtful, gripping hour of television,” explores the complex and difficult choices that Americans now face at the end of life. Navasky and O’Connor’s next film for FRONTLINE is a 90-minute journey inside the hidden world of assisted suicide. The Suicide Plan airs Tuesday, November 13 on PBS (check local listings).

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