LOIS CUNNIFF
President – LC Productions, Inc.

Lois Cunniff is an independent film producer and writer, specializing in history, cultural and environmental subjects. Before forming her own company in 1991, she was the senior production executive for Voices and Visions, the acclaimed PBS series on American poetry. As senior producer of the films on Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson, and as producer of the Hart Crane film, she was directly involved in developing the art-directed documentary techniques that distinguished this critically acclaimed series.

Ms. Cunniff's long free lance career as a researcher, writer and producer has included print, television and the Internet, a myriad of subjects from science to art, and has taken her throughout the world. After graduating from Denison University (B.A. with highest honors in creative writing) and working briefly in local television as an on-air spokesperson and continuity writer, Ms. Cunniff moved to New York, and began her network television career during the eventful 1960's. As a researcher at CBS News in New York, and then at NET, as part of the first weekly documentary unit in public television, she covered stories from civil rights in Georgia to Hiroshima, 20 years after the bomb. An early volunteer at the Alternate Media Center at NYU, she produced community video documentaries in Greenwich Village, and then returned to public television for five years as head of program planning and children's programming at WNET/l3.

During the 1980's and early 90's, Ms. Cunniff worked as field producer and reporter for "How Much Is Enough? Decision-making in the Nuclear Age" (PBS; George Polk Award) and "Inside Story" with Hodding Carter (EMMY nomination). Her interest in children's television and educational media continued with "Awakening and Enlightenment: Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, produced for Yale University, and distributed by the PBS Adult Learning Service. Her experience with film was deepened by co-producing (with National Geographic cinematographer Ken Nelson and FilmFair Communications) many short movies for primary and secondary grades on acid rain, Washington, DC, and Western Europe.

Ms. Cunniff's broadcast writing credits include radio essays for Barbara Walters (NBC "Monitor") and host commentary for George Plimpton (Disney Channel's Mouseterpiece Theatre). She is the author of The Book of Fees (William Morrow) and a contributor to The Experts Speak (Random House). Her articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, the American Museum of Natural History children's magazine Faces, the National Enquirer and the Los Angeles Times. She has written book jacket copy for Doubleday, movie notes for Showtime, marketing studies for the U.S. Delegation of the European Union, and a white paper on the future of children's television for PBS. Public policy reports she drafted during graduate study in urban planning at NYU helped shape the cable telecommunications franchise rules in New York and Chicago.