Elizabeth Rodgers

Elizabeth Rodgers is an award-winning filmmaker and novelist who co-produced the PBS documentary Exodus 1947 and is finishing a Young Adult novel inspired by its true story.

Elizabeth Rodgers is an award-winning filmmaker, novelist and screenwriter. She co-produced Exodus 1947, the PBS documentary narrated by Morley Safer, which also aired on educational television across Europe, Canada, and Israel and won a CINE Golden Eagle. She has developed screenplays and teleplays for Showtime, Carsey-Werner and Paramount Pictures, and has taught screenwriting at Boise State University. She is finishing a Young Adult historical novel inspired by a real American crew member of the Exodus, and brings the story to schools and communities in her illustrated talk, How a Bunch of Nobodies Changed the World. July 2027 marks the 80-year anniversary of the voyage.

Elizabeth Rodgers is an award-winning filmmaker, novelist, screenwriter, essayist and travel writer whose work has reached audiences through film festivals and educational television around the world.

She co-produced Exodus 1947, a one-hour documentary narrated by Morley Safer with a score by Ilan Rechtman. It aired nationally on PBS in 1997 and on broadcasters including Channel 4 in the UK, WDR in Germany, RAI in Italy and the History Channel in Canada. It won a CINE Golden Eagle, a Silver Apple from the National Educational Media Network and the David Wolper Documentary Competition at the Wine Country Film Festival. It screened at the Leipzig documentary festival and Jewish film festivals across the country, and drew praise from the Los Angeles Times and The Hollywood Reporter.

The film tells the true story of the American volunteers who crewed a worn-out steamship to carry 4,500 Holocaust survivors toward Palestine in 1947. Elizabeth has spent 35 years with that story, and with Bill Bernstein, the young American crew member who was killed when British forces boarded the ship.

She is finishing a Young Adult historical novel inspired by a real crew member of the Exodus. She also speaks to schools, congregations, and community groups with her illustrated talk, How a Bunch of Nobodies Changed the World, ahead of the voyage’s 80-year anniversary in July 2027.

Elizabeth has developed screenplays and teleplays for Showtime, Carsey-Werner, and Paramount Pictures, and has taught screenwriting at Boise State University. Her essays include work in the anthology What Doesn’t Kill Her. She has received grants from state humanities and arts councils and private foundations, and is often commissioned to make short documentaries about fellow artists.