Aviva Zimmerman

BIOGRAPHIE

Aviva Zimmerman is a filmmaker and theatre artist. Raised in Calgary, she studied acting at Ryerson University and Education at U of T and has worked as a director, producer, and teacher of theatre across Canada. She worked for a number of years in Toronto and Calgary running several “artist-in-residence” programs at various homeless and immigrant shelters across, working with homeless youth and adults to turn their personal stories into theatre plays. In 2011, she moved to the Middle East for a documentary internship and she has been travelling between Tel Aviv and Canada ever since, working with Israeli, Palestinian and international filmmakers and theatre artists on a variety of projects. Her film credits include co-producing Art/Violence (Fairbindet Award, Berlinale Film Festival), a documentary about Palestinian-Israeli director Juliano Mer-Khamis who was assassinated outside his theatre in 2011, and associate producing the award winning Write Down I am an Arab (HotDocs) about poet Mahmoud Darwish. Her first short film He Died Five Months Before My Bat Mitzvah screened at festivals around the world and her Borat inspired satirical web-series Avi Does the Holy Land gained hundreds of thousands of views on social media and was nominated for Best Web-Series at the NYC Webfest. Beyond her filmmaking, she has produced and facilitated a number of theatre projects and workshops across Israel and Palestine. After completing her MFA in Film Directing at Tel Aviv University, she was selected to take part in the Israeli New Fund for Cinema and TV female directors fellowship and in 2018 was selected for a film residency at the Jacob Burns Film Center. In 2019 her TV series in development was awarded a grant from Keshet International, one of Israel’s biggest broadcasters. She is currently working on a new TV series - a satirical comedy about Americans in Israel (Israel/US co-production).

FILMOGRAPHIE