Olivia Lichtenstein

Olivia Lichtenstein is a BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker and novelist. At the BBC, she was editor of BBC ONE flagship documentary strand Inside Story, where she commissioned and oversaw over a hundred single documentaries and numerous other series. Her films include Silent Twins; Broadmoor; Melvyn Bragg: Wigton to Westminster and the feature-length theatrical documentaries, Teddy Pendergrass: If You Don’t Know Me; The Last Mountain and My Old School. Covering a range from patients in Broadmoor Hospital to acclaimed musicians and members of the British royal family, her film work has afforded her the unique opportunity to engage with people from many walks of life and enable them to tell their stories. She has also directed television drama, including The Bill and Holby City. As well as writing the scripts for all her documentaries, she is the author of two novels, Mrs Zhivago of Queen’s Park (Orion 2007) and Things Your Mother Never Told You (Orion 2010). She co-authored Comrades: Portraits of Soviet Life (BBC Books, 1985) to accompany the award-winning documentary series of the same name and writes regularly for the British national press on a variety of topics.

In 2014 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sussex in recognition of her services to the media industry. She spent a year teaching Film, Television and Screenwriting at the University of Hertfordshire and is currently in training as a psychotherapist at The Minster Centre.