Biography
Vivian Kleiman is a documentary filmmaker, producer and director whose work has been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals including Sundance, Toronto and Berlin. She served as additional cinematographer on Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989/1990) and collaborated with him as producer and research director on Color Adjustment (1992). Together they co-founded the production company Signifyin’ Works.
Kleiman has produced or executive produced several documentaries for national PBS broadcast, including Roam Sweet Home (1996), The Key of G (2007) and the series The Meaning of Food (2004), on which she also served as senior producer and series director. Her later credits as director and producer include the feature No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics (2021), which premiered at Tribeca and aired on Independent Lens. She taught in Stanford University’s Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video Production from 1995 to 2004.
Her work has received a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Association Outstanding Achievement Award, the Organization of American Historians’ Eric Barnouw Award and a National Emmy Award nomination for research. She also supervised completion of Riggs’s final film, Black Is…Black Ain’t.
