executive producer of Ben Shahn: Passion for Justice

Nila Aronow has been with NJN since 1980 and joined the staff of STATE OF THE ARTS within a month of the show's beginning in 1982. She became series producer three years later and executive producer in 1991. Under her direction, STATE OF THE ARTS grew from a monthly to a weekly show, winner of numerous Mid-Atlantic and New York Emmys—most recently, in 2001, for Outstanding Talk Show series. The program has also received awards for Outstanding Magazine Format Broadcast, Documentary, Cultural Programming, Programming Feature and Production design. The series is recognized as one of the leading arts magazines in the country.

Her responsibilities include the NJN arts unit, which produces STATE OF THE ARTS and other cultural programming for the network. She is currently executive producer of three major national documentaries. Ben Shahn: Passion for Justice is airing on PBS in June, 2002. George Segal: American Still Life was broadcast on PBS in 2001. Willie the Lion, about the legendary jazz pianist Willie the Lion Smith, premiered in February, 2002. Other prize-winning national documentaries produced under her supervision include New Stage for a City, about the rise of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark; Against the Odds/The Artists of the Harlem Renaissance; Journey From Home: Vladimir Feltsman in Moscow; and Toshiko Takaezu: Portrait of an Artist.

She supervised production of the Emmy-winning documentary Crossroads—The Story of a Theatre, and From Gulag to Glasnost, which won a CEN National Programming Award in and was selected for screening at the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal. She was also executive producer of Greensboro—a Public Dialogue, a documentary which dealt with issues of racism and violence and which won a Bronze Apple from the National Educational Media Network for its educational outreach component.

Ms. Aronow also serves as Executive Producer for Images/ Imagenes, NJN’s weekly series on Hispanic public and cultural affairs, and of the award-winning Hispanic Youth Showcase. In addition, she is Executive Producer for NJN of the weekly series Classroom Close-Up NJ and of Another View, a program that focuses on issues of diversity.

She initiated and has directed every phase of development of ARTS FOR EVERYKID, an innovative, multi-faceted arts education advocacy campaign funded by the NEA, the N.J. State Council on the Arts and the Alliance for Arts Education/NJ, an affiliate of the Kennedy Center. She also served on the national CPB /Kennedy Center Committee to develop arts programming for classroom use.

Before coming to NJN, she worked as a feature writer and restaurant critic for the Camden Courier-Post; an English teacher at Moorestown (N.J.) High School; and assistant training director at Strawbridge and Clothier, a department store in Cherry Hill.

She is a former member of the N.J. Council for the Humanities, a member of the Leadership New Jersey Class of 1997, and of the Board of Directors of the Arts & Business Partnership of SouthSouthern New Jersey. A graduate of Vassar College, she lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey.