Robert H. Lieberman is a novelist, film director, and a long-time member of the Physics faculty at Cornell University. Initially he came to Cornell to study to be a veterinarian, but ended up becoming an electrical engineer and doing research in neurophysiology. He has also been professor of mathematics, engineering and the physical sciences and was recently awarded the John M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching at Cornell University.
Lieberman has two grown sons, Zorba Lieberman and Boris Lieberman.
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Most of his novels, though fast paced and entertaining, contain serious underlying social themes. Many of Lieberman’s novels appear to be set in Ithaca, New York, where he continues to live on a 135-acre (0.55 km2) farm. His films also use Ithaca, either for setting, detail, or theme. The feature comedy Green Lights, which he wrote and directed, is the story of a small town swept up into a frenzy by a location scout who is taken for a big film producer. His film Last Stop Kew Gardens[1] is a personal exploration in which he returns to the “small town” within the city of Queens, New York, where he was raised, the child of refugees from Hitler’s Vienna. In Faces in a Famine Lieberman goes to Ethiopia during the height of the famine and provides a novelist’s eye view of the people who descended on the scene, the relief workers, the press and the “disaster groupies.”
Robert H. Lieberman has been awarded a series of Fulbright Lectureships. The first in 1989 was to lecture at the Academy of Performing Arts and Film in Bratislava. In 2002 he was a resident lecturer with the Mowel Film Fund in Manila. As a Senior Specialist with the Fulbright Program he went to Burma to work with young film directors in the country.
Over the last two years, Robert H. Lieberman has been in Burma, filming clandestinely. The result is a film entitled "They Call It Myanmar - Lifting The Curtain." A co-production with PhotoSynthesis Productions, it is presently in the final stages of post-production.
As described by the company on their website: "This 90-minute documentary, including an extensive interview with Aung San Sui Kyi, is drawn from 100 hours of exclusive footage, and will provide a unique look inside Burma, a closed society since 1962. The images are a mix of rare beauty and disturbing brutality, with a modern life set against ancient tradition. Artists working in traditional forms flourish despite an oppressive regime, and muscle power and fabrication of tools from natural materials are still primary ways of life outside of the few urban centers. Echoes of the problems from the development of industrialization in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th-century are portrayed - child labor, parental abandonment of children to orphanages, lack of universal suffrage, and sporadic schooling for young people."