Dempsey Rice

Last Name: 
Rice
First Name: 
Dempsey

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.