Kathy Eldon
Executive Producer
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a graduate of Wellesley College, Kathy has worked as a teacher, journalist, author and film and television producer in England, Kenya and the United States. In 1998 Kathy launched Creative Visions Foundation, inspired by the life of Kathy's son, Dan Eldon – artist and photojournalist- killed at the age of 22 in 1993, while on assignment for Reuters in Somalia. Since 2004, the organization has acted as an incubator, accelerator and agency for more than 420 projects and productions by artists, filmmakers, playwrights and leaders of social movements. Creative Visions, a United Nations Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), has impacted more than 100 million people.
In 1990, Kathy founded Creative Visions Productions to produce films that would inspire action. Her first feature, Lost in Africa, brought alive the horrors of ivory poaching in Africa. Since then, the company has produced many award-winning films, including Emmy-nominated Dying to Tell the Story, about the risks to frontline correspondents; Soldiers of Peace, a Children's Crusade, CNN documentary focusing on the Children's Peace Movement in Colombia, and Global Tribe, a cutting-edge PBS series featuring grass-roots social entrepreneurs. Global Tribe inspired the development of Creative Visions Foundation’s Rock Your World, a free online human-rights based program for middle and high school students to create media campaigns about local and global issues that matter to them. RYW has touched more than one million students in 72 countries and includes a new RYW At-Home Kit for remote learning.
Kathy is the executive producer of Extraordinary Moms, an Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) special special about the power of mothers to transform the world). The film features actress Julia Roberts, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, correspondent Christiane Amanpour and three lesser known (but extraordinary), mothers. Together with Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Kathy produced The Journey is
the Destination, a feature film about Dan, directed by Bronwen Hughes, which screened at the United Nations and is now on Netflix. Kathy is the Executive Producer of Youth Unstoppable, an award-winning film that shares the ten-year journey of climate change activist and filmmaker Slater Jewell Kemker, who began the project at the age of 14.
Kathy is the author of 17 books, including Angel Catcher, Soul Catcher and Love Catcher (Chronicle), a series of popular self-guided journals written with her daughter Amy. Kathy, editor of a best-selling collection of her son Dan's journals, The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon, has also written popular cookbooks, travel and eating out guides and children's social history books. Harper One published her memoir, In the Heart of Life. Kathy’s latest book, Hope Rising, integrates her spoken word poetry with a guided journal to help people create their own visions of the future.