Robert (Bob) Arnove is a Chancellor’s Professor emeritus of education. He is an award-winning scholar and filmmaker. His latest co-directed/produced documentary with Susanne Schwibs received the Jury’s Choice Award at the San Francisco 2024 SuperFest; was a featured documentary at the Lincoln Center’s 2024 Diversity and Inclusion Film Festival; and a selection of the SlamDance 2025 Unstoppable Disability Film Festival with screenings in Salt Lake City, and Chicago. His latest book is Talent Abounds: Profiles of Master Teachers and Peak Performers.
Jacky Comforty is an internationally acclaimed and award winning independent documentary producer and director, oral historian and researcher who has worked for over thirty-five years creating films and videos in the United States, Germany, Israel, and Bulgaria.His directorial work has garnered hundreds of prestigious international honors, reflecting his commitment to excellence and his unique ability to illuminate the human experience.
His work is focused on inclusion, education, history and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He developed methodologies for documentation and interviewing. His work on the survival of the Holocaust in Bulgaria and his large private archive of oral histories, photographs, archival film, and audio archives are of historical and scholarly significance to Holocaust Studies and have been acquired by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Writer, director, editor, producer of the award-winning Trilogy about Bulgaria’s Jews and the Holocaust Stories We Were Never Told (coming January 2026) Balkan Jazz (2024), Monument to Love, (2023), The Optimists (2001), and In the Shadow of Memory (1998), Step by Step Heather’s Story (1995) and Through a Glass, Lightly (1993). Comforty has recently received more than 100 international awards for his film Monument to Love. Among numerous other past distinctions, the Berlin Festival Peace Prize, the Jerusalem Film Festival’s Jewish Experience Award, a CINE Golden Eagle award, the American Association of Museums MUSE award, and the Chicago International Gold Hugo Award.
Author of The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocausts with Martha Aladjem Bloomfield. Academic Advisor and organizer of a International Conference with The International Institute for Holocaust Research, at Yad Vashem; The Dahan Center, at Bar Ilan University, and the Tel Aviv Cinematheque: Persecution and Collaboration, Rescue and Survival: New Perspectives on Bulgaria and the Holocaust After 80 Years, May 2023
Creator, producer and distributor of the best-selling Inclusion Series , which helped implement inclusive practices in U.S. school districts and is used in hundreds of universities around the country. I currently create educational programs for U.S. universities and institutions and develop collaborative work with diverse scholars and disciplines. www.inclusionseries.org. Documentation of early childhood education around the world www.earlychildhoodmedia.org
Jacky Comforty has taught Documentation and Media Creation courses at Indiana University CLLC, for faculty and graduate students for the School of Ethnomusicology and Folklore.