Bio
Steven Lawrence is an award-winning documentary producer/director. Part of the team that launched MTV, he served as the channel’s senior producer-director of long-form programs, introducing viewers to world and hip-hop music. After leaving MTV in 1987 he produced three films with director Michael Apted: The Long Way Home, about the odyssey of Soviet underground rocker Boris Grebenshikov, and Married In America 1 and 2, an ongoing study of 9 couples wed in 2001. Steven was co-producer/director of three VIS à VIS programs for PBS, which used digital dialogues between people in different parts of the world dealing with timely social issues. Among his other credits are Artists United Against Apartheid: The Making Of Sun City, Tell Tchaikovsky The News, about the Soviet underground rock scene and Age 7 In The USSR, the first in a longitudinal series about children in the former USSR. As co-founder and VP of music & cultural programming for Link TV, Steven created its pioneering strand of world music programming and its world cinema series, Cinemondo. For Link he also co-produced Festival In The Desert: The Tent Sessions, co-directed Ethics And The World Crisis: A Dialogue With The Dalai Lama, and produced the Music For Human Rights film series and The Price of Silence music video, both in collaboration with Amnesty International, Rappers, Diva & Virtuoso, about groundbreaking musician/activists in the Muslim world, and produced/directed the TV version of Blueprint for Accountability: Working The Dark Side, about the torture of detainees in the “war on terror,†created by Culture Project and staged by Fisher Stevens. Among his most recent producing credits are The Furious Force of Rhymes, a feature-length documentary by Joshua Litle about how hip-hop emerged from the Bronx to become the protest music of today in France, Germany, Israel/Palestine, Germany and Senegal, and Sarabah, about Senegalese rapper/activist Sister Fa and her grassroots campaign to end female genital cutting. The latter won the 2011 Movies That Matter Golden Butterfly award for best film about a human rights defender.