Associate Professor Boaz Dvir is a Donald P. Bellisario Career Advancement Professor in the Department of Journalism. He’s the founding director of the University’s Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative and the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative.
He’s an award-winning filmmaker and writer. He tells the stories of ordinary people who, under extraordinary circumstances, transform into trailblazers who change the world around them. They include a teacher in a high-need school who transformed into a disruptive innovator and a national model ("Class of Her Own"); an uneducated truck driver who becomes a highly effective child-protection activist ("Jessie’s Dad"); and a French business consultant who sets out to kill former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie and ends up playing a pivotal role in one of history’s most daring hostage-rescue operations ("Cojot").
His films have been distributed by PBS, The New York Times, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other outlets, and have received coverage by such media as the Huffington Post, The Guardian, and Forbes. He’s written for many publications, including New York’s Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and TIME magazine.
Dvir wrote a syllabus on multimedia journalism ethics for Harvard University’s Kennedy School. He has also taught journalism and documentary filmmaking at the University of Florida.
Dvir wrote a chapter for “Homegrown in Florida” (University Press of Florida, 2012), an anthology edited by William McKeen that includes childhood stories by Carl Hiaasen, Zora Neale Hurston and Tom Petty. He served as editor of the Jacksonville Business Journal and managing editor of the South Florida Business Journal. He appeared on “Week in Review” and wrote commentaries for WJCT, Jacksonville’s NPR/PBS station.
Dvir created a documentary short about PALS, which helped the nonprofit that aids troubled teens receive an official nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. Dvir received a Lilly Endowment grant from the Religion News Service to research spiritual aspects of the Holocaust.
