Ronit Avni
Just Vision
www.justvision.org
Just Vision serves as a platform to inform, connect, and engage people in Palestinian-Israeli civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently. Using film and cutting-edge multi-media tools, Just Vision shines a spotlight on vital initiatives, builds bridges from awareness to action, and inspires civic participation in grassroots peace building. Just Vision fills a critical void by creating a media and educational platform for Palestinian and Israeli civic leaders and connecting them to high-profile print and broadcast outlets, community leaders, and networks of supporters around the world. In addition, the organization has engaged thousands of educators, students, and community leaders in the United States, Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories to raise awareness about, and spark engagement in, the most promising conflict resolution initiatives happening today.
Bio
Ronit Avni is the founder and executive director of Just Vision. She directed and produced the documentary film, Encounter Point, which received the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary and was an official selection at many prestigious film festivals around the world. Ronit appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005 with her colleague, Joline Makhlouf, and her work was featured on Oprah.com. She is currently producing a new documentary film, Budrus Has a Hammer (working title), which received the competitive 2009 Sundance Documentary Fund award, and was featured as a work-in-progress at Independent Film Week’s Spotlight on Documentaries series and at the Good Pitch at Silverdocs.
From 2000-2003, Ronit co-produced short videos and online video advocacy features in collaboration with filmmakers in Senegal, Burkina Faso, the United States, and Brazil as part of her work for the human rights organization WITNESS. Ronit has trained non-governmental organizations from Honduras to the Gambia to produce videos as a tool for public education and grassroots mobilizing, as a deterrent to further abuse, and as evidence before courts and tribunals. She wrote and produced a short documentary film, Rise, with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. She co-edited the book, Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press, UK), with staff from WITNESS. Her work has also been published in the spring 2006 edition of American Anthropologist. She is currently a UN Global Expert through the Alliance of Civilizations, a resource for journalists looking for reliable, thoughtful commentators on issues pertaining to East-West divides. Ronit has lectured at universities across North America.
Ronit graduated with honors with a BA in Political Science from Vassar College. She received a Burnam Fellowship to intern at B’Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Concurrently, Ronit volunteered for the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI).