Jeremy S. Levine is an award-winning filmmaker and an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University. His films explore race, class, and trauma, and seek to unearth buried tragedies in a society in active denial of its own past. An Emmy award-winning filmmaker and two-time Sundance Institute fellow, his work has screened at over one hundred film festivals around the world including the Berlinale, Sundance, and Tribeca, streamed on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sundance Now, Starz, and Hulu, broadcast nationally in nine countries, and received over 25 festival awards.
Levine’s latest feature film For Ahkeem, is a love story set against the backdrop of the Ferguson uprising and the school-to-prison pipeline. For Ahkeem played as an official selection of over 60 film festivals—including the Berlinale, Tribeca, and Hot Docs —where it won 12 awards, including 8 “Best Documentary Awards.” During its select theatrical run, For Ahkeem was named in the Top 10 Lists by both Entertainment Weekly and People and was included on the “Unforgettables” List by the Cinema Eye Honors, a list that IndieWire wrote “helped to define documentary cinema in 2017.”
He released The Panola Project in 2021, a short film that chronicles how an often-overlooked rural Black community came together in creative ways to survive the pandemic. The film was released with The New Yorker, featured on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell and Morning Joe and written about in over 50 publications, including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, and Insider. The Panola Project was an official selection of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Full Frame, BlackStar, Hot Docs, and the DOC NYC Shortlist. The film received seven Jury Prizes, three Audience Awards, and two Grand Jury Prizes, including the Oscar-qualifying Best Documentary Short Award at the Florida Film Festival.
In 2010, Levine produced and edited Good Fortune, a feature documentary about how efforts to aid Africa may be undermining the very communities they aim to serve. AFI Silverdocs honored the film with the Witness Award for Human Rights at its 2009 festival premiere and the Overseas Press Club recognized Good Fortune with the 2010 Carl Spielvogel Award for international reporting. The film screened at over 30 festivals including IDFA, the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and CPH:DOX. Good Fortune was broadcast on the award-winning PBS series, POV, where it won a 2010 News & Documentary Emmy.
He directed and produced Walking the Line, a mid-length documentary about vigilantes along the U.S.-Mexico border. He has also produced for National Geographic and PBS NewsHour. In 2014, Levine directed/produced Am I Next, a short film about a teenager navigating the protests on the streets of Ferguson for Time. The short was also featured on Upworthy and Dazed Magazine and selected as a Vimeo Staff pick, with over 500K combined views.
Levine received a B.S. from Ithaca College, where his work was nominated for a Student Academy Award. He received his M.F.A. from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College. He was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama and has guest lectured at colleges around the country including Syracuse University, American University, and Pratt.
He is currently in production on a feature film, tentatively titled Nine, highlighting the deep bond between two men who met in prison. Nine was an official selection of the LEF/CIFF Fellowship and the Big Sky Pitch and is supported by the Ford Foundation and the LEF Foundation. He is in post-production on a short film about a father and son from Guatemala working to rebuild their lives after being forcibly separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. He is developing projects about a former white supremacist turned vagabond clown and is in production on a personal documentary-horror film about the horrors of mental illness.
In 2006, Levine co-founded the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective (BFC), a community of professional filmmakers dedicated to collaboration and mutual support. Collectively, the group has produced work that has screened at Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Slamdance, A&E, PBS, IFC, and HBO. BFC members have received awards from Sundance, the Independent Spirit Awards, Gotham Awards, and their work has been nominated for the National Academy Awards.
Alongside Landon Van Soest, Levine launched the Emmy award-winning production company Transient Pictures in the fall of 2006. The company has produced a wide range of original content for non-profits like Unicef, the Dramatists Guild Fund, and Covenant House, international companies like 23&Me, Brooklyn Brewery, and Ben & Jerry’s, and major broadcasters like ABC, National Geographic Channel, and PBS.