Alexandra Pelosi


Alexandra Corinne Pelosi is an American journalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer. She is a daughter of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi.

Early life and education

Pelosi was born and raised in San Francisco, California. The youngest of five children, she earned a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University. In 1993, she received a master's degree from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Career

Pelosi has produced 12 HBO documentary films with Sheila Nevins.
After a decade working in network news, Pelosi made her first film in 2000, while working as a producer for NBC covering George W. Bush's presidential campaign. She brought along a handheld camcorder documenting 18 months of her experience on the campaign trail; the footage was used to create Journeys with George, a documentary that earned her six Emmy nominations.
In 2001, Sheila Nevins convinced Pelosi to leave network news to work exclusively for HBO. During the 2004 Democratic primaries, Pelosi returned to the campaign trail, this time following the Democratic candidates. Her HBO documentary, Diary of a Political Tourist, was accompanied by her first book Sneaking into the Flying Circus: How the Media Turn Our Presidential Campaigns into Freak Shows, about the process of selecting candidates for President of the United States. She stated that her conversations with Candy Crowley of CNN, Howard Dean, and Wesley Clark inspired her to write a book.
In 2006, Pelosi created the documentary about evangelical Christians called ' which featured former pastor Ted Haggard. After it aired on HBO in 2007, she made a follow-up film, The Trials of Ted Haggard, chronicling the exile of Ted Haggard from New Life Church after his sex and drug scandal, which The New York Times called "strangely intriguing". The LA Times review said, "this heartbreaking little film that may wind up being the most powerful indictment of homophobia since Brokeback Mountain."
Pelosi went back on the campaign trail in 2008 to document the birth of the Tea Party movement at Republican campaign events for her film, ', which premiered on HBO on President's Day 2009. CNN reported in July 2010 that Pelosi was no longer making political documentaries. Her 2010 HBO film, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County follows the children of the working poor in Orange County, California.
The New York Times praised the film for "advancing a theme of the failed American dream."
On July 4, 2011, HBO debuted Pelosi's next film . Pelosi traveled to all 50 states to attend naturalization ceremonies and interviewed immigrants as they became legalized American citizens. The film was released with a coffee table book titled '.
Pelosi was at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival with her film Fall to Grace,
about disgraced former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. She was spotted around Park City with fellow headliner Kenneth Cole.
In 2015, Pelosi returned to San Francisco to make a film about the tech boom's impact on the city. According to Recode, it's "a clear-eyed, sober recap of what's been going on...Pelosi's tale is also deeply personal; she grew up in San Francisco, but she has lived in New York for a long time. A key theme of the documentary is that the San Francisco to which she's returning is very different from the one she left." Variety called San Francisco 2.0 "one of her finest." San Francisco 2.0 was nominated for an Emmy for best business reporting.
In 2016, Pelosi made ' about money's influence in politics. In a profile in Vogue, Pelosi calls her film a "light romp into the road map of the people and places that are funding our elections." The film drops in on a handful of folks who rank on the OpenSecrets.org list of top donors.
Uproxx described it as watching "Pelosi meet with an assortment of billionaire donors, asking them why they give millions to candidates, how this funding affects campaigns, and all the access these hefty donations can get you." On the press tour for the film, Pelosi talked about everything she has learned in her lifetime on the political fundraising circuit
The Words That Built America, Pelosi's eleventh film, premiered on July 4, 2017, narrated by Pulitzer Prize winning David McCullough, is a reading of the U.S. Constitution read by all the living presidents, vice presidents, 50 US senators of both parties, Supreme Court justices, and others. It includes a reading of the Declaration of Independence read by The Rock, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Sean Hannity, Kid Rock, and other celebrities. It closes with middle-school children from the United Nations International School reading the Bill of Rights and summaries of the other amendments. On Anderson Cooper 360, Anderson Cooper talked about hanging out with Pelosi's two sons on the set.
According to The Port Arthur News, Pelosi was spotted in Port Arthur filming a new HBO documentary about Trump's America.
Outside the Bubble: A Roadtrip with Alexandra Pelosi aired on HBO in October 2018. According to IMDB, "Pelosi sets out on a cross-country trip to engage in conversations with fellow Americans in an effort to gain an unfiltered understanding of other perspectives." According to The New York Times,"It’s not just another episode of the learned cosmopolitan descending from the ivory tower to produce anthropological discourses on that strange creature known as the Trump voter and make it back to the big city in time for a martini. Though she is Democratic royalty, Ms. Pelosi has spent much of her career dissecting, with compassion, the psyche of the political right in America."
In January 2019, Pelosi debuted "Goodbye Congress" on HBO's Vice News Tonight - the film that features exit interviews with 14 retiring members of Congress, including Speaker Paul Ryan and 7 other Republicans who explain how Washington works.

Personal life

On June 18, 2005, in Greenwich Village, she married Dutch journalist, lawyer, and United States correspondent Michiel Vos.
In 2006, Pelosi gave birth to their first child, a boy named Paul, named after his grandfather Paul Pelosi. Pelosi had a second son in 2007, named Thomas, after his great grandfather Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times about the charity lemonade stand that Ms. Pelosi’s son Thomas runs in Manhattan. In previous years, the proceeds have gone to Hurricane Harvey and California wildfire victims.
Pelosi lives in Greenwich Village. Her bathroom was featured in Home & Garden section of The New York Times.
In the "In My Library" column for The New York Post, Pelosi cites her two favorite political books: Political Fictions by Joan Didion and The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm.
Pelosi's children are often seen with her on the red carpet. They are often photographed with their grandmother Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi often mentions them in speeches. Pelosi says, 'public service runs in the family'. According to Politico, during the battle to repeal Obamacare, Pelosi's 9-year-old grandson Thomas ambled over to reporters in slacks and a blazer and announced, "It's not going to pass," "He doesn't have the votes!" In a joint interview on CNN, Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi discussed Ryan's friendship with Pelosi's children. "I thought you were going to brag about how much my grandchildren are your big fans," Pelosi said. "That's right, her grandkids actually like me, go figure," Ryan replied.
At Spotlight on Alexandra Pelosi at Lincoln Center, Pelosi talked about the solitary life of a documentary filmmaker and how being naive is the best prescription for a documentary filmmaker: "It feels like every documentary has been made, but it's not true. The next great documentary film is going to be made by someone whose name you don't even know yet."

Filmography