Article
Jacob Fertig is a documentary filmmaker working across shorts, features, and interactive media. His films have played at festivals including South by Southwest, Hot Docs, AFI, NOFF, and Doc10, and been published by Scientific American and New York Magazine. He has presented projects at AFO, AIDC, Big Sky Pitch, Edinburgh Pitch, DOK Leipzig, and Ji.hlava New Visions Forum. His archival producing work spans museums to magazines, including permanent exhibits at Ellis Island and The Holocaust Center. His projects have received support from Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Tribeca Institute, Doc Society, Film Independent, Jewish Story Partners, Amnesty International, Forensic Architecture, Docs by the Sea, and thousands of donors. He is a former Doc Society Art & Impact Fellow, Film Independent Producing Lab Fellow, Full Frame Fellow, NYU Feature Development Studio Fellow, and a Senior Fellow at Humanity in Action. He holds a BFA in Film & Television from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and an MPA in Public Policy and Nonprofit Management from NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Jacob is Co-Founder of Denizen Studios in New York.
Updated November 2025
More from Jacob Fertig
-
$30,000 Raised for Senior Fellow Giving Campaign 2022
Each year, Humanity in Action launches a Senior Fellow Giving Campaign which aims to gather support from the Senior Fellow community for Humanity in Action's programming. This year, $30,000 was raised!
-
A Safe Haven on the Sea
Senior Fellow Jacob Fertig’s article on the surprising journeys that Jewish refugees took to Shanghai to escape the Nazis was recently published in Tablet Magazine.
-
Behind the Blood Ban
Senior Fellow Jacob Fertig’s Article on blood donor discrimination was recently published in Tablet Magazine.
-
2019 Warsaw Fellowship Blog
During the 2019 Warsaw Fellowship, our Fellows wrote daily blogs of their experiences during the Fellowship. Read their reflections here.
-
Searching for Aramsayesh Gah - Documentary on Refugee Detention
Senior Fellow Jacob Fertig is producing a new documentary titled "Searching for Aramsayesh Gah," which examines the architecture and trauma of refugee detention.
-
Documentary on How New York's Chinatown is Adapting to Change
Senior Fellow Jacob Fertig, along with Carin Leong and Madeline Chen created a new mini documentary titled Year of the Ox. This film is about how he children who grew up in the neighborhood are harnessing technology to help revive the neighborhood.
-
We thank the members of our Admissions Committee for the Landecker Democracy Fellowship
We thank the members of our Admissions Committee for the Landecker Democracy Fellowship 2020/21. From August 3 to September 28, 2020 members of the Admissions Committee read over 260 applications and interviewed more than 90 finalists.
-
Humanity in Action announces the participants of its Forum on Right-Wing Movements
Humanity in Action is pleased to announce the participants in its Forum "Populism, Nationalism and Right-Wing Movements on the Rise – Societies in Transition," which will take place in Berlin in March 2020!
-
Launching Web Conversations Series with Reflections on Antisemitism
Launching our Web Conversations series: The idea is to take a topic critical to our work and ask Fellows, Senior Fellows, board members, staff members and friends of the organization to present talks, essays, images and suggested readings that deal with the subject.
-
Home is a Nation of Ghosts
For one thousand years, Jews called Poland home. And for one month last summer I ventured back to the country my great-grandparents fled, following the lines of the Warsaw ghetto wall, hoping to rediscover some remnants of home.