ABOUT DEMPSEY RICE
 Dempsey
Rice is a documentary filmmaker, producer and educator in
New York City. Dempsey's debut documentary, Daughter
of Suicide, premiered on HBO in May of 2000 and is
distributed on video by Women Make Movies. Daughter
of Suicide is the story of one woman's death by suicide
and the process of her family and friends' healing after that
suicide.
Daughter of Suicide is the recipient of
a National Council on Family Relations Media Awards (First
Place: Mental Health, Stress, Transition, & Crisis Management
Category, 2001), a National Mental Health Association Media
Award, (National Television: Educational or Pubic Service
Programming Category, 2001) and a Cine Golden Eagle (2000)
and received funding from Home Box Office, The Jerome Foundation,
The Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund, The Women in Film Foundation,
From the Heart Productions and R.E.M.
Dempsey is also in production on a new independent documentary
- Forget Me Nots. Sharing the stories of
our lives is an integral part of individual and communal identity
-- our true essence is the memories we have and the stories
we tell. But what happens when amnesia strikes and we forget
those stories or we are no longer able to create new memories?
Who are we in the face of that loss and who do we become?
Forget Me Nots documents amnesiacs and storytellers
alike in their search for identity and meaning in life. Interviews
and cinema verité footage intertwine with commentary,
archival film footage and images evoking the nature of memory
and amnesia and exploring the humor and pathos of how our
memories define whom we are and what happens if we lose those
memories. (Forget Me Nots is the fusion of
two former works in progress - Tell Me a Story
and Memory and Forgetting.)
Dempsey received a New York Emmy Award for being the Series
Producer of IMNY, a youth documentary series
produced by Downtown
Community Television Center (DCTV) for WNYE/Channel
25 in New York City. IMNY featured short
documentaries made by New York City youth that explore the
unique stories, neighborhoods and challenges of their lives.
Dempsey teaches part-time in the Department
of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University-Newark
in addition to teaching workshops and classes about documentary
film proposal writing, budgeting and financing, at Film
Video Arts, Women
Make Movies, Downtown
Community Television, CineWomen
New York and the Association
of Independent Video and Filmmakers. She has taught video
production to New York City youth through the DCTV and Police
Athletic League alliance at the PAL Schwartz Center in Brooklyn,
New York.
Finally, Dempsey has worked full-time and freelanced as a
public radio producer for radio programs including: The
Infinite Mind and Studio
360. She has also written and produced audio tours.
In 1994 Dempsey graduated with her MA (Econ.) from The University
of Manchester in England where she completed her short film
As Long As They're Muslim. She received her
BA from Syracuse University (Magna Cum Laude) in Photojournalism
and Anthropology in 1991.
As a survivor of suicide, Dempsey is committed to advocating
for a proven, effective suicide prevention plan in the United
States. To that end, she is one of a team of people working
with New York State's Office of Mental Health to write the
New York State Suicide Prevention plan.
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