User:Socmedcur/Anne Nelson

Anne Nelson (born 1954 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma) is an American author and media analyst. She graduated from Yale University and has taught at Columbia University since 1995. She has published extensively on the subjects of international affairs, human rights, and media issues.

In the early 1980s Nelson worked as a journalist, covering the conflicts in Central America. She won the 1988 Livingston Award for her reporting on the Philippines. Following a stint as a researcher and editor at Human Rights Watch, she served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists from 1988-1992.

Nelson’s first non-fiction book, Murder Under Two Flags: the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the Cerro Maravilla Cover-up (1986), was produced as the feature film “A Show of Force,” starring Amy Irving and Robert Duvall. According to Library Journal, the book provided “a fascinating back-drop of political violence related to Puerto Rico's ambiguous status.”

In 2001, Nelson wrote a play called “The Guys” based on her experience helping a New York City fire captain write eulogies for the men he lost in the World Trade Center attacks. It opened at New York’s Flea Theater in December 2001, starring Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, and ran for over a year. Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia starred in a feature film version by the same name. Other prominent actors who appeared in the play included Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy, and Felicity Huffman. The audio version, featuring Swoosie Kurtz and Bill Irwin, received the 2003 Audie Award for best audio drama. Stage versions of the “The Guys” have been produced across the US -- often as a benefit for local fire companies – and in a number of foreign countries. 2006, Nelson’s 2006 play “Savages” was produced off-Broadway, depicting U.S. counter-insurgency practices, war crimes, and trauma in the Philippines War. The New Yorker called it a work of “lacerating beauty,” but the New York Times criticized the production as “stiff” with “too much information to impart.”

Her most recent book, Red Orchestra: the Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (2009), was named as an “Editors Choice” by the New York Times Book Review, and called “a literary and historical masterwork” by German historian Hans Mommsen in the Frankfurter Rundschau.

Nelson consults extensively for foundations on international media issues. Her articles on the subject have appeared in the Carnegie Reporter, the Center for International Media Assistance, and PBS MediaShift. Nelson has taught at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs since 2002. She lives in New York with her husband, British author and environmentalist George Black. They have two children, David and Julia. Nelson is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was named a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.

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