About David S. Levitt Waxman
David is an experienced television production professional living in Northern California.
Growing up, his favorite television shows were (in a somewhat sequential order):
“This Old House” (back when it had Norm Abrams), “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” (especially the episode that takes the curious viewer behind the scenes), “You Can’t Do That On Television” (only for the year or so his parents had cable TV), and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (but never the original series).
A Chicago area native, he first became involved in media production as a high school student in 1994, and spent a good portion of his teenage years shooting bar and bat mitzvahs in suburban Chicago.
He attended Southern Illinois University (TV major, film minor), where he also worked at the local PBS station as an assistant editor.
After school, he interned at Towers Productions in Chicago, known for a number of documentary-style productions broadcast on cable television (A&E, Discovery, The Weather Channel, etc.).
His full-time career started in the world of public and government access television, where he managed a number of TV facilities in the suburbs of Chicago, and offered mentorship and guidance to new media producers.
Meanwhile, he did freelance editing work for a variety of clients, using his home video editing suite based on Final Cut Pro.
That led to his position as a full-time video and multimedia editor at Looking Glass Productions, in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked on projects like promotional videos and awards show video elements.
He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004, settling in the North Bay town of San Anselmo. As the Education Director at Petaluma Community Access, he trained budding media producers in the art and technique of television production.
Since 2006, David has been a staff television producer at KRCB Public Television, the Bay Area's Sonoma County-based PBS station.
In 2008, David organized the first-ever Best Seat in the House Film Festival through a grant he received for KRCB Television. As part of this project, he shot a number of short documentaries as a proof-of-concept for his ongoing multimedia project, “1 in 5 Stories.” The shorts highlight the lives of individuals with mobility disabilities from the North and East Bay.
“Tengo La Voz – I Have The Voice,” a half-hour documentary produced by David, will have its broadcast premiere in 2009. It takes a behind-the-scenes look at the innovative 2-year initiative of the same name that offered Latino youth in Sonoma County a chance to learn media production, writing, and other expressive arts.
He lives in El Cerrito with his wife Susie, a disability rights advocate at the Center for Independent Living.