Karen Ranucci

For the past thirty-five years Karen has worked in the field of independent video/film production. She began working at Downtown Community TV Center in New York, where she taught video production workshops to community groups and started the distribution program for DCTV’s documentaries. In 1978, she traveled with DCTV’s directors, Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno to Vietnam to make the PBS documentary, Vietnam: Picking up the Pieces. In 1979, she co-directed, El Dialogo, a documentary about the Cuban exile community in the United States and their relationship to Cuba. She continued her travel in Latin America, shooting and editing two documentaries for Director, Estella Bravo, Returning to Chile and External Debt. She also shot, edited and directed a documentary about the community video movement in Bolivia entitled Making Waves. Together with Jon Alpert, Karen worked as freelance correspondents for the NBC Nightly News and Today Show where they filed news reports from many regions of the world. In 1985, she won a National Emmy, “Best Investigative Reporting” for a series she developed about the poisoning of workers in the tungston carbide industry. In 1988, she founded the Latin American Video Archives, a non-profit organization which distributed Latin American made film and video to the US educational market. In the days following September 1, 2001, Karen joined the Democracy Now! team, where she worked for over a decade in a variety of positions in both production and administration.