Rebecca Richman Cohen

Rebecca Richman Cohen is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker who has taught at Harvard Law School since 2011. Her courses examine the intersections of criminal justice, human rights, and visual culture, exploring how documentary film constructs legal meaning and shapes the stories we tell about accountability and harm. In addition, she serves as a faculty affiliate at the Shorenstein Center’s Documentary Film in the Public Interest (DFPI) initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School.

As a filmmaker, she has explored a wide range of topics, including the prosecution of war crimes in Sierra Leone, responses to sexual violence in the United States, cannabis legalization, and biodynamic winemaking. Her work has won awards at top-tier festivals including SXSW and Tribeca, and has been featured on platforms such as public television, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, MSNBC, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Al Jazeera. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Inquest, Talkhouse, and The Emancipator, addressing themes ranging from judicial accountability to the ethics of storytelling. She co-authored the 2025 Shorenstein Center report Ethics, Power, and Possibility: Insights from the Documentary Ideas Symposium with Pooja Rangan

She has also taught at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), American University’s Human Rights Institute, and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and has held fellowships with the Open Society Foundations, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Harvard Film Study Center, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her very good dog and some nice humans too.