BIO

Jeff Kaufman directed, produced, and wrote the Emmy-nominated American Masters’ documentary TERRENCE MCNALLY: EVERY ACT OF LIFE (with Angela Lansbury, Meryl Streep, Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Christine Baranski, Billy Porter, Rita Moreno, and Bryan Cranston), and the Critic’s Choice-nominated NASRIN (narrated by Olivia Colman) about Iranian human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh. Other documentaries include THE SAVOY KING: CHICK WEBB AND THE MUSIC THAT CHANGED AMERICA (with John Legend, Janet Jackson, Billy Crystal, Tyne Daly, Charlie Watts, and Jeff Goldblum), THE STATE OF MARRIAGE (about the women who launched the marriage equality movement, with Rep. John Lewis), and FATHER JOSEPH (about women’s empowerment in Haiti), plus short films with Time Magazine and Amnesty International. His wife Marcia Ross (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcia_Ross) was the producer of these films. He also contributed cartoons to The New Yorker and illustrations to The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, wrote for The Washington Post, CNN International, and Ms. Magazine, edited and designed a book based on EVERY ACT OF LIFE, illustrated and wrote children’s books, hosted an Associated Press Award-winning live daily radio talk show in Vermont, and exhibited paintings in several Los Angeles galleries. In 2024, he also created a human rights campaign to express solidarity with the women’s rights movement in Iran and around the world, sponsored by Amnesty International, PEN America, Right Livelihood, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and The Feminist Majority Foundation, (among others). A play he wrote, FIRST AID, was a winner of the 2024 Long Beach Playhouse New Works Festival. His short play SENSELESS was a finalist in the 2024 Spectacular Tournament of Playwrights, and his play THE SPARK was a winner of the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights’ 2024 Play Festival.

SOME INSPIRATION

I find the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) endlessly inspiring, and I love the postscript he wrote to his print series “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji:”

“It was not until after my seventieth year that I produced anything of significance. At the age of seventy-three, I began to grasp the underlying structure of birds and animals, insects and fish, and the way trees and plants grow. Thus, if I keep up my efforts, I will have an even better understanding when I am eighty, and by ninety will have penetrated to the heart of things. At one hundred, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live a decade beyond that, everything I paint-every dot and line-will be alive.”

WIKIPEDIA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Kaufman

CONTEMPORARY ART CURATOR INTERVIEW

https://www.contemporaryartcuratormagazine.com/home-2/jeff-kaufman