Bill Lichtenstein
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Bill Lichtenstein is an award-winning former investigative producer for 20/20, World News Tonight and Nightline, and founded Lichtenstein Creative Media (LCM) in 1990, following his diagnosis and recovery from bipolar disorder. The company has distinguished itself by its production of films, TV and radio programs that show that people can — and do — recover from serious mental illness. The work of the company and Lichtenstein has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, United Nations media award, George Foster Peabody Award — television and radio’s highest honor — as well more than 60 major broadcast and health journalism awards.
Lichtenstein's award-winning documentary work in television, film and radio spans more than 35 years. He is president of Lichtenstein Creative Media, Inc. an independent media production company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. LCM has extensive multimedia production, distribution and educational/community outreach experience, particularly with health, human rights and social justice issues.
LCM produces The Infinite Mind, public radio’s most honored and listened to health and science program. The national, weekly public radio series focuses on the scientific and cultural aspects of mental health, neuroscience, access to care, treatment advances and the biology of human behavior. The Infinite Mind airs in more than 250 markets across the U.S. including such Top 10 cities as New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit, and Boston, as well as on statewide public radio networks in states including Utah and West Virginia, reaching more than one million listeners weekly. Since its premiere in 1997, the program has been honored with 30 major broadcast journalism awards, including top media honors from the United Nations, National Headliner Awards, American Women in Radio and Television (Gracie Award), Clarion Award, International Radio Awards, and from such mental health organizations as the American Psychiatric Association, the National Institute of Mental Health, National Mental Health Association and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
Lichtenstein also co-produced with his wife June Peoples the award-winning, cinema verite documentary film, West 47th Street. This warm and intimate production for theatrical and TV release, follows four people with serious mental illness, off the streets and out of homeless shelters, in and out of the hospital, at home and at work, over three years. At times hilarious and at other times tragic, West 47th Street is set at Fountain House, a mental health rehabilitation program located in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. West 47th Street was broadcast nationally on the highly-acclaimed PBS TV program P.O.V. in August 2003, and was accompanied by a major educational outreach campaign, involving over 100 screenings across the country. The film was winner of "Best Documentary" at 2002 Atlanta Film Festival, the "Audience Award" at DC Independent Film Festival, and won "Honorable Mention" at the Woodstock Film Festival. West 47th Street sold out theatres across the U.S., and internationally from Vancouver to Dublin to South Korea. It was called "must see" by Newsweek and "remarkable" by the Washington Post.
Lichtenstein also produced If I Get Out Alive, narrated by Academy Award-winning actress and youth advocate Diane Keaton, a one-hour public radio documentary which examines the conditions and brutality faced by juveniles in the adult prison system and the highly-acclaimed Voices of an Illness radio documentary series which has provided millions with an extraordinary window on living with serious mental illness since the series premiere in 1992.
Current productions of Lichtenstein and LCM include Juveniles in Crisis, a four-part public TV series examining the interconnections between the juvenile justice, juvenile mental health, foster care and education systems which is in the PBS pipeline for 2007 and Hepatitis C: The Stealth Epidemic, the first documentary film to examine the spread of the lethal virus, and related medical, scientific and social issues, through the lives of those affected, for air on PBS in 2007 as part of The Year in Global Health.
A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Lichtenstein began his work in television at ABC and CBS Sports and later worked at ABC News for more than seven years. His 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 against organized crime, among others. All three 20/20 segments he produced in 1983 were nominated for National News Emmy Awards. He won numerous other honors for his investigative reporting at ABC, including two National Headliner awards. He later joined the ABC-TV program Jimmy Breslin's People as one of the show's two producers. For more than 25 years, he has been a member of the faculty of the New School for Social Research, teaching documentary film production and investigative reporting for TV.
As a print journalist, Lichtenstein 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, Medical Tribune, and Channels. His feature articles appeared in the Sunday New York Daily News business section. His 1992 investigative report for the Village Voice, "The Secret Battle for the NEA," received a National Headliner Award. His news photography has appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun.
