Kahane Cooperman


Kahane Cooperman is an American documentary filmmaker and television director and producer.

Early life

Cooperman was born Kahane Rachel Corn, the daughter of Beatrice and Dr. David Corn. She is a graduate of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.

Education

Cooperman graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago and later a Masters of Fine Arts in film from Columbia University.

Career

Her film Joe’s Violin received a nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 2017 Academy Awards. After its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and screenings worldwide, Joe’s Violin had its broadcast premiere on the PBS series POV in July 2017, and can be seen online at NewYorker.com. Currently, Kahane is directing and producing a feature documentary about kindness and decency in America at Radical Media. Prior, she executive produced seven short documentaries about autism, directing two of them, for Jon Stewart’s Emmy-nominated Night of Too Many Stars on HBO. That same year, Kahane was the showrunner, executive producer, and a director of the 4-hour non-fiction series Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders with Joe Berlinger and Radical Media. The series had its broadcast premiere on SundanceTV in November 2017. Kahane was also the executive producer and showrunner of The New Yorker Presents, a series for Amazon with Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. From 1996-2015, she had an integral role on the acclaimed television program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where she was originally hired as a field producer in 1996 and rose through the ranks to become Co-Executive Producer from 2005-2015. For her work at The Daily Show, she received eleven Primetime Emmy awards and three Peabody awards. Kahane was honored in 2017 by Variety as a Woman of Impact.
Kahane began her documentary career at the renowned Maysles Films studios in NYC. Prior to Joe's Violin, she directed and produced several other documentaries including Cool Water, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Making Dazed, about Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, which was broadcast on AMC and acquired by the Criterion Collection. She also produced the feature doc Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, directed by Nick Broomfield. Kahane received an MFA in Film from Columbia University. She lives outside of New York City with her husband and two children.

Personal life

In 1999, she married Jeffrey Cooperman at the Pratt Mansion in New York.