Rick Litvin

Rick Litvin is a filmmaker, songwriter and educator. His work as a producer or director has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, MTV, VH-1 of MTV Networks, IFC Center, Cooper Gallery at Harvard University, The Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, The Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Montclair State University, Art Basel Miami, African American Museum of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His work has also been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Public Radio International, The BBC, CBS, NBC, PopMatters, The Atlantic and PBS, as well as being reviewed across a spectrum of publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Irish Times and Rolling Stone. In addition, his work has been featured and distributed through The Atlantic, Billboard and The Smithsonian Website Magazine. Rick produced ten music videos for Joan Baez’s final Grammy Nominated album “Whistle Down the Wind.” From that collection of work, “The President Sang Amazing Grace” was distinguished as an Atlantic Selects video (over 640,000 YouTube views) and was published in book form through Cameron + Company and distributed by Abrams Books. He also directed Shawn Colvin’s Grammy Award Winning debut album video, “Steady On” which was designated a  Five Star Video by VH-1 upon release. Rick is currently working on a funded research project which traces the history, evolution and impact of UGFTV’s seminal film production class, Sight and Sound Filmmaking, which will culminate in a public-facing installation at the Tisch School of the Arts. He is also producing and directing an experimental documentary project in collaboration with Joe Gilford. This documentary chronicles the evolving culture of the West Village of the 1960’s and 1970’s and overlaps with never before seen footage featuring Jack Gilford, Zero Mostel, Alan Arkin, Phil Silvers and Buster Keaton during the production of Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Mike Nichol’s Catch-22. Rick recently co-produced his 10th album collaboration with Lucy Kaplansky and her 2025 release of “The Lucy Story,” a two disc anthology tracing Lucy’s 45 year career as a recording and touring musician and her history creating music in a range of American musical idioms (folk, country, roots, jazz and pop) performed and recorded around the world and never previously released.  Rick has originated many of the courses that are part of the UGFTV curriculum (Tisch Summer High  School Filmmakers Workshop, Short Commercial Forms and First Person Narrative). Most recently, his new class, “Ghosts: Memory, Place and the Persistence of Visions” will be offered as a General Education class in the Humanities areas that will be hosted in the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of  Dramatic Writing at Tisch. Additionally, he has created unique programming models such as Making the Documentary in Dublin, Ireland, developed First Person Narrative for the Ghetto Film School (Los Angeles and The Bronx), The Image Nation High School Program collaboration between NYU Abu  Dhabi and the Tisch School of the Arts, The NYU College Career Laboratory (Exploratory and Immersion). Over the years, Rick has played a key leadership role in the evolution of Sight and Sound  Filmmaking and was part of the original working group that created Sight and Sound Studio and established that class as a new addition to the UGFTV curriculum.

Rick is a member of ASCAP, UFVA and The Trebuchet as a Convisero Mentor (The Trebuchet grew out of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University). Rick is a full Arts Professor in the Undergraduate Film & Television Department in the Kanbar Institute of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.