Rory Kennedy

Documentary director and producer Rory Kennedy was the guiding force behind some of the most socially conscious television and theatrical documentaries of the 1990s and 2000s, including "American Hollow" (1999), "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" (HBO, 2007) and "Last Days in Vietnam" (2014). Born Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy on December 12, 1968 in Washington, D.C., she was the youngest of 11 children by U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel Kennedy. She was born six months after her father's assassination on June 5, 1968 and formed a close bond with her older brother, Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, who was also her godparent. A graduate of both The Madeira School and Brown University, Kennedy began to display a political conscience in her teenaged years; during that period, she was arrested during a protest outside the South African Embassy, and later supported migrant workers in Rhode Island by organizing a boycott of produce at a Providence area supermarket. She entered the documentary film business in the 1990s, first in partnership with Vanessa Vadim, daughter of director Roger Vadim and actress Jane Fonda, in the non-profit production company May Day Media, and later with producer/director Liz Garbus in Moxie Firecracker Films. Her first directorial effort was the Emmy-nominated "American Hollow," about an Appalachian family, and was soon followed by a slew of socially informed, politically charged documentary projects for HBO and theatrical release. She tackled the AIDS crisis in the HBO documentary miniseries "Pandemic: Facing AIDS" (2003), which netted another Emmy nomination, and the dangers of nuclear power in "Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable" (HBO, 2004). Kennedy also explored more personal stories: in "A Boy's Life" (HBO, 2004), she examined a family's struggle to raise a child with behavioral issues. "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which interviewed observers and participants in the human rights abuses at the Middle Eastern military prison, won Kennedy a Primetime Emmy, while "The Fence (La Barda" (HBO, 2010) looked at the issues surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border. The following year, Kennedy turned the camera on her own life for "Ethel" (HBO, 2012), a portrait of her mother that featured interviews with her siblings and relatives. In 2014, she wrote, coproduced and directed "Last Days in Vietnam," a harrowing documentary about the frenzied end of the Vietnam War and the attempt by American servicemen to rescue South Vietnamese citizens as the North Vietnamese Army took over the country. The film received a Best Documentary Feature nomination at the 2015 Academy Awards, and was soon followed by "Makers" (2014), a series of documentaries about women's roles in politics and entertainment.