Joseph A. Dorman

Courses
History of Documentary Film

Joseph Dorman is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of Riverside Films.  He is a winner of television’s prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence. He is currently working on a film on the 1873 Colfax Massacre and its effect on civil rights in America.

Mr. Dorman wrote and directed the critically acclaimed theatrically released documentary, Arguing the World, about the controversial sixty-year political journey of the eminent political writers and thinkers, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer.  It was named one of the best films of 1998 by The New York Times, and New York Magazine.

Past films include Don Quixote in Newark (2022) on the pediatrician who discovered HIV/AIDS in children; MOYNIHAN (2018) on the late Senator and public intellectual Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (2011) a history of the writer and the birth of modern Jewish culture and Colliding Dream (2016) about the controversial history of the Zionist idea.  Mr. Dorman co-wrote the script of The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Journey, which was named the best documentary of 2001 by the National Board of Review.

Mr. Dorman has also writtten for The New York Times Book Review and other publications. His books include Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in their Own Words (2001) and the forthcoming When Ideas Mattered, The Nathan Glazer Reader, which he co-edited and for which he wrote the introduction.  In 1999 he was invited along with playwright Arthur Miller and director Joan Micklin Silver to give Harvard University’s annual William E. Massey Sr. Lecture in the history of American Civilization. 

He also holds a social work degree and is a practicing clinical therapist in Manhattan.