Company founder and president Bill Lichtenstein's award-winning documentary work in television, film and radio spans 26 years. A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Bill began his work in television at ABC and CBS Sports and later worked at ABC News for more than seven years as a producer of investigative reports for the ABC News magazine 20/20 and as a field producer for Nightline, World News Tonight and This Week with David Brinkley, as well as other ABC News programs and specials.
Bill's efforts at ABC focused on compelling human stories with regard to social issues: abused and dying children in Oklahoma state institutions for the mentally retarded; battered women who were convicted of murdering their abusers; victims of faulty automobile design flaws; and an Ohio town fighting back after being taken over by organized crime, among others.
All three 20/20 segments Bill produced in 1983 were nominated for National News Emmy Awards. He also won numerous other honors for his investigative reporting. He later joined the ABC-TV program Jimmy Breslin's People as one of the show's two field producers/directors.
Additionally, since 1979, Bill has been a member of the faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he teaches a course on documentary film production and previously taught a class on Investigative Reporting for Television.
As a journalist, Bill has written on politics, health issues and the media for such publications as The Nation, Newsday, Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, 7 Days, Health, Health Watch, Medical Tribune, and Channels. His feature articles appeared in The Sunday New York Daily News business section. Bill's 1992 investigative report for the Village Voice, The Secret Battle for the NEA, received a National Headliner Award. His recent article for the Journal of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill describes what inspired to Bill's creation of the Voices of an Illness series and encourages those affected by psychiatric disabilities to tell your story as a means of reducing mental health stigma and discrimination.
Bill began his career at the age of 14, as a newscaster and disc jockey at WBCN-FM, in Boston. His 1973 radio documentary What is News? won a National Public Radio Youth Radio Award. Later he worked as Program Director at WBRU-FM, Providence, and co-produced and co-wrote the 1987 Livingston Award-winning NPR documentary Vietnam: Radio First Termer.
