NEVINS, SHEILA

NEVINS, SHEILA (1939– ), U.S. television executive. Born in New York, Nevins earned a bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College and a master of fine arts from the Yale University School of Drama. She began her career with the United States Information Service, which produced and distributed documentaries about American life. After producing children's shows and documentaries for television, she joined Home Box Office, a pay television cable network, in 1979 as director of documentary programming and was named executive vice president, original programming, for HBO and Cinemax, a related company, in 1999. In that role, Nevins oversaw production of nearly 200 documentaries. They earned nine Oscars, 13 Primetime Emmy awards, 22 news and documentary Emmys, and 14 George Foster Peabody awards for HBO and one personal Peabody award. She was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame in 2000. Among the notable documentaries she was involved in were The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), the story of a gay political activist in San Francisco who was murdered along with the city's mayor; One Day in September, the recounting of the events at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, where 11 Israeli athletes were killed; and Protocols of Zion (2005), a film that traces the history of the notorious fake antisemitic book. She has had an impressive record of awards with Holocaust-related documentaries based on survivor testimonies. Among her most memorable were One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissmann Klein Story and Into the Arms of Strangers, a film on the Kindertransport. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)