producers Rachel Dretzin

Rachel Dretzin is an award-winning filmmaker who has been producing documentaries for FRONTLINE since the mid-1990s, with a focus on films that critically explore contemporary American life and culture. Her latest project, Digital Nation, was a year-long, multiplatform initiative investigating how new technologies impact the way we live. Digital Nation, which is a follow-up to Dretzin's Emmy-nominated film Growing Up Online, makes use of user-generated content and an ongoing, transparent reporting process in a unique collaboration with the online audience.

Dretzin first came to FRONTLINE in 1990 to work with renowned producer Ofra Bikel on the epic series Innocence Lost, about a group of childcare workers accused of molesting children in a North Carolina daycare center. In 1995, she produced and directed her first film for FRONTLINE, Hillary's Class, about the Wellesley College graduating class of 1969 and their coming of age during the second wave of the women's movement.

Dretzin and her husband, filmmaker Barak Goodman, are joint partners in Ark Media, a documentary production company based in Brooklyn, New York. Together, they have produced and directed numerous documentaries for FRONTLINE, including: The Lost Children of Rockdale County (1999), which was the recipient of the George Foster Peabody Award, and the three-part series Failure to Protect (2003), winner of the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize. Dretzin and Goodman's other films for FRONTLINE include Merchants of Cool (2001); The Persuaders (2004); and A Hidden Life (2006). Independently, Dretzin's films for FRONTLINE include Hillary's Class (1994); Betting on the Market (1997); The High Price of Health (1998); The Search for Satan (1995) and Growing Up Online (2008). She has also produced for WNET New York, NPR's All Things Considered, MSNBC's Edgewise and most recently, a 15-minute film for The New York Times Magazine on the Web.

Dretzin has a degree in history from Yale University and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with Goodman and their three children, ages 12, 9 and 7.

recent films

Football High watch »

Digital Nation watch »

Growing Up Online watch »