Kathryn Dietz

Kathryn Dietz has been a producer, writer, director, and executive producer. She co-founded a New York-based production company, where she produced five feature-length documentaries on modern China, biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary Pickford, and a commissioned film about Japanese-American incarceration in Arkansas during WWII. All of them premiered nationally on PBS to critical acclaim, are shown in international and educational markets, and have won numerous awards. She also produced, wrote, and directed a commissioned film for the New England Journal of Medicine about medical advances over the last 200 years.

Dietz was executive director of Filmmakers Collaborative, where she organized two national media conferences and co-founded the Boston International Kids Film Festival. She also spent three years as a visiting artist at Tufts University’s School of Child Study & Human Development, where she developed a series about teens and adults on the autism spectrum, and completed two short films. During these years I also executive produced two award-winning films, one on Nasser’s Egypt, and one on the author Saul Bellow.

Over the last eight years, she has been producing a six-episode series, Cartoon Kings, about the rise and fall of the Fleischer brothers, creators of the Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman cartoons. In 2024, it won a Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. She and her team are submitting it to festivals, and plan to premiere it in 2027.