| Ezra Edelman | |
| Birth Name: | Ezra Benjamin Edelman |
| Birth Date: | August 6, 1974 |
| Birth Place: | Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Alma Mater: | Yale University (BA) |
| Occupation: | Television director, television producer |
| Mother: | Marian Wright Edelman |
| Father: | Peter Edelman |
| Relatives: | Jonah Edelman (brother) |
Ezra Benjamin Edelman (born August 6, 1974) is an American documentary producer and director. He won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming for directing (2016). He has also directed a documentary on the musician Prince that remains unreleased.
Edelman was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the son of Marian Wright Edelman, former civil rights leader and aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, and Peter Edelman, former aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, former Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Planning and Evaluation, and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.[1] His father is Jewish. He has two brothers, Joshua, an educational administrator, and Jonah, co-founder and CEO of Stand for Children. His parents were the third interracial marriage in Virginia after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the state's anti-miscegenation law in Loving v. Virginia. His paternal great-grandfather was a Polish rabbi who was killed during the Holocaust and his maternal grandfather was a Baptist minister; he was raised in both faiths.[2] [3]
Edelman graduated from Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C. in July 1992,[4] before going on to earn his bachelor's degree from Yale University.[5]
Edelman is best known for producing and directing the Academy Award-winning 2016 documentary film for ESPN's 30 for 30.[6] [7] [8] In his Oscar acceptance speech, Edelman dedicated the award to Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, whom O. J. Simpson had been tried and acquitted of murdering in 1995. Previously he directed three HBO Sports documentaries: ,[9] [10] [11] The Curious Case of Curt Flood (2011)[9] and the Emmy Award-winning .[10] [5] [12] He also wrote and directed a special on the former Big East Conference called Requiem for the Big East, also a part of the 30 for 30 series.[13] Edelman produced Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas, an HBO documentary series that ran for two seasons.
In 2024, Edelman produced for HBO, revolving around Stax Records.[14] and for Onyx Collective and Hulu, revolving around Indigenous activist Anna Mae Aquash.[15]
In 2018, it was reported that Edelman would be developing a biopic with writer Rowan Ricardo Phillips for Legendary Entertainment, based on the life of baseball player Roberto Clemente.[16]
Edelman directed a nine-hour documentary about the musician Prince.[17] He was recruited to the project for Netflix in 2019 by Lisa Nishimura, then vice president of independent film and documentary features, with the promise of access to "the vault", Prince’s archive of unreleased material. This was negotiated by the bank administering Prince's estate; Netflix reportedly paid tens of millions of dollars for the access, in a deal that gave Edelman and Netflix editorial control of the resulting film. However, while the project was underway, Nishimura was laid off and the estate changed hands, with former Prince attorney L. Londell McMillan leading objections to the depiction of Prince in the documentary, and seeking to block the film's release. In September 2024, The New York Times Magazine reported, "As of today, there is no indication that the film will ever come out."
Edelman lives in Brooklyn, New York City.