Biography

Vivian Kleiman is a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. She has received a National Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Research and executive produced an Academy Award nominated documentary.Kleiman directed and produced the feature documentary No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics (2021), which chronicles queer history in the U.S. through the stories of five featured comic book artists — Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Howard Cruse, Rupert Kinnard, and Mary Wings. The film premiered in June 2021 at Tribeca Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and AFI DOCS. It has screened at film festivals worldwide, and took home the Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize at Outfest and the NLGJA: Association of LGBTQ Journalists Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism. No Straight Lines was broadcast on the National PBS award-winning series Independent Lens January 2023.

In 2019, Kleiman was awarded a Eureka Fellowship of the Fleishhacker Foundation, a fellowship program for visual artists by invitation only.

Also an educator, she served as Adjunct Faculty at Stanford University's Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video Production from 1995–2004.

Kleiman was a long time collaborator with Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs. They founded Signifyin' Works in 1991, which creates and distributes films about the experiences of African Americans. Directed by Riggs, their 1992 film Color Adjustment screened at the Sundance Film Festival and received the International Documentary Association's IDA Award, the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians and the George Foster Peabody Award in 1993.