Paul Anka: His Way – World Premiere at TIFF 2024
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Rachel Dretzin
Executive Producer · Producer/Director · Writer

Rachel Dretzin is a co-founder of Ark Media and a principal producer, director, and writer with the company.

She directed the four-part Netflix original limited series "Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey," released June 8, 2022.  The series details the story of women who survived and escaped the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints and the despotic rule of its' self-proclaimed Prophet, Warren Jeffs.

Together with Ark Media producer/ director Phil Bertelsen, she directed the six-part Netflix original series "Who Killed Malcolm X" which debuted on Netflix in February 2020. Her acclaimed feature documentary "Far From the Tree," which was produced in partnership with Participant Media, was released theatrically in 2018 and is now streaming on Hulu. Rachel has been producing and directing documentaries since 1994, many of them for the acclaimed PBS documentary series FRONTLINE. Rachel's films have won the Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize for Journalism, the Columbia DuPont Award, the NAACP Image Award, and the Emmy. She was senior producer on the six-part PBS series "Many Rivers to Cross," a history of African Americans hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and also senior produced "And Still I Rise," a four-hour series on the last 50 years of black history, also for PBS.

She senior produced the first season of Finding Your Roots, which premiered in the spring of 2012. Among the many films she has produced and directed for PBS' FRONTLINE are: Football High, Digital Nation, Growing Up Online, Failure to Protect, The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool, The Lost Children of Rockdale County, and Hillary's Class. Together with Bertelsen, she produced the two hour primetime NBC documentary "Hope and Fury: MLK, the Media and the Movement" which was nominated for an Emmy as well as an NAACP Image Award. She has also produced and directed for WNET New York, MSNBC's Edgewise, and NPR's "All Things Considered," as well as the NY Times Magazine on the Web.