Natasha Lance Rogoff is an award-winning American director and TV producer who has written and produced documentaries, broadcast news and children’s television shows for more than 25 years. She executive produced Ulitsa Sezam (Sesame Street in Russia) and produced Plaza Sesamo (Sesame Street in Mexico) from 1992-1997. Her 2017 video Russian Millennials Speak Openly About America has several million views on YouTube. You can find articles by Natasha on Huffington Post and Medium.
Natasha moved to the USSR in the early 1980s to study at Leningrad State University. She wrote about Soviet underground culture, including publishing in the San Francisco Chronicle, an early exposé of Soviet government persecution of the Russian LGBTQ community. In 1985, Natasha was featured on ABC TV’s “20/20” episode, “Rock Around the Kremlin,” speaking about the censorship and persecution of Russian rock musicians which she had written about for major European press.
During the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit, Natasha served as Special Consultant to NBC Nightly News, producing coverage for Tom Brokaw. In 1989, Natasha joined Pulitzer Prize-winning Hedrick Smith to produce the four-part PBS television series, “Inside Gorbachev’s USSR,” which received a Dupont Columbia Award for Journalism.
From 1989-1991, Natasha embedded herself with hardline Russian nationalists and made the film, “Russia for Sale: The Rough Road to Capitalism” which aired on PBS. ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel also broadcast excerpts from her film on the night of the 1991 Moscow Coup when the Soviet Union fell. Natasha is the CEO of an Ed-Tech startup that distributes, KickinNutrition.TV, a musical comedy cooking show for children to promote nutrition education and health equity. Natasha is currently an Associate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies Department at Harvard University and lives between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City.
