Steve Rivo is an award-winning documentary maker known for powerful and intelligent storytelling, expert craftsmanship and high production value projects. Across a 30-year career, he has executive produced, written and directed dozens of hours of premium non-fiction television for most major linear and streaming networks, as well as numerous independent documentary films.
Recent work includes showrunning the Hulu hip-hop docuseries RapCaviar Presents (a co-production of Spotify, a companion to their influential weekly playlist), producing and writing the Showtime documentary films You’re Watching Video Music Box (directed by Nas), Rolling Like Thunder and Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James (nominated for Critics Choice Documentary and Hollywood Critics Association awards), directing on the final season of the Emmy and Peabody-winning documentary series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, and directing multiple episodes of Broken, an investigative docuseries on consumer products for Netflix.
Steve has filmed on five continents and worked with a range of filmmakers including Sacha Jenkins, Alex Gibney, Robert Redford, Morgan Spurlock and Ric Burns. Projects he has produced have won Emmys, duPont-Columbia, Peabody, IDA, Telly and Cine Golden Eagle awards, and his work has screened at numerous festivals including SXSW, Tribeca, Full Frame and the Nashville Film Festival.
Some of Steve’s other broadcast credits include executive producing and directing multiple shows for Court TV, VH1 and MTV, senior producing The Vice Guide to Everything for VICE and MTV, directing and producing episodes of Death Row Stories and Morgan Spurlock Inside Man for CNN, directing Invisible Killers, a three-part special on viruses for Discovery, and producing New York: A Documentary Film and Eugene O’Neill for PBS’s American Experience.
Steve’s feature-length documentary Carvalho’s Journey premiered in July 2015 at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and played at over two dozen festivals around the world, including the Portland Film Festival, the New York Jewish Film Festival and the Festival des Cultures Juives in Paris. It won the Audience Choice Award at the Maine Jewish Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Houston Jewish Film Festival, and aired nationally on PBS.
Steve has also completed film projects for brands and clients including Red Bull, Domus, the American Institute of Architects and Random House. A graduate of Columbia University, he is a member of the Writers Guild of America, East, and an adjunct assistant professor at Hofstra University, where he has taught in the MFA program. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his family.