Rachel Watanabe-Batton
- Producer
- Production Manager
- Additional Crew
Rachel Watanabe-Batton is an Emmy Award winning film and television producer and founder of Contradiction and Struggle, which tells stories that reframe history and culture, and connects cinema, causes and capital. Watanabe-Batton executive produced the musical "Sneakerella" for Disney Plus starring Chosen Jacobs, Lexi Underwood and John Salley. Released May 2022, the film was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards and won 4 Emmys 2022 including Outstanding Fiction Special.
She recently produced the film installation(s) "Seeking" by legendary filmmaker Julie Dash ("Daughters of the Dust") for the International African American Museum opening in Charleston, S.C. in 2023; and "Out/Side of Time" by artist Jenn Nkiru for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Afrofuturist Period Room Before Yesterday We Could Fly; and was Consulting Producer on EPIX docu-series "By Whatever Means Necessary" by Director-Exec Producer, Keith McQuirter, which received the 2021 NAACP Award for Outstanding Directing in a Documentary.
Watanabe-Batton is producing partners with Dash on multiple film and television projects. The two recently resumed production on documentary feature "Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl" based on the cookbook "Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl" by Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a renaissance woman, chef, cultural anthropologist and pioneer of modern-day food writing. The film has received funding from Black Public Media, Field of Vision, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Southern Documentary Fund. She also produced Dash's exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for "In America" Spring 2022 Costume Institute exhibition highlighting fashion designers Ann Lowe and Mme. Etta Hentz in the American Wing's Renaissance Revival Room and Greek Revival Parlor.
Watanabe-Batton's producing credits include non-fiction series "I Pity the Fool" with Mr. T (TV Land/ Lionsgate), barbershop documentary "Cutting Edge" (Cinemax/HBO), and sports docu-series "Insider Training" (Discovery). She has produced narrative films with numerous writer-directors including features "Ripe" (Mo Ogrodnik), "Book of Love" (Jeff Byrd), and shorts "The Killers" (Tanya Hamilton) and "Bajo del Perro" (Polish Brothers). Her directing-producing credits reflect her wide range of interests, like documentary "Crisis in the Crib: Saving Our Nation's Babies" linking infant mortality to systemic racism, which featured Exec Producer and campaign spokeswoman for The Office of Minority Health, Tonya Lewis-Lee; and "Blueprint" lifestyle makeover series for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Her debut narrative film "Once You're In," co-directed with Lauren Greenfield stars undocumented Irish immigrants in Boston, aired on WGBH while she was an undergraduate at Harvard-Radcliffe and features then poet laureate of Ireland, Seamus Heaney.
Watanabe-Batton's fluency with intersectional storytelling is rooted in a lifetime of crossing class, race, gender and demographic lines, and is strengthened by years of collaborations with musical and visual artists. Her first jobs in film were as a temp development assistant at Danny Glover's Carrie Productions and story researcher for Quincy Jones Entertainment. Many of the stories she researched in Beverly Hills Library in a pre-digital world have yet to be or are just being produced. Her breakthrough job was working in creative development for veteran producers Paula Weinstein, Mark Rosenberg, Peter Heller and Julie Bergman at Spring Creek Productions on the Warner Bros lot. While there, she organized demonstrations from the studio lot during the L.A. Rebellion. She then assisted acclaimed Australian film director Peter Weir on "Fearless" starring Jeff Bridges, and worked at the groundbreaking Propaganda Films on iconic commercial campaigns, music videos and sci-fi series "Thunderbirds Are Go."
In the heyday of hip hop music videos, Watanabe-Batton co-founded NY production company Department of Film at Goldcrest Post with filmmaker Nick Quested. She has produced content for top recording artists like Diddy, DMX, Faith Evans, Fat Joe, Lil Jon, Nas, Trick Daddy, Trina, Usher, Wu-Tang Clan, and executive produced numerous celebrity promo campaigns for BET, Centric, VH1 and Logo. Watanabe-Batton has directed top ten videos in the U.S. ("Play No Games") and MTV Base Ghana ("Incomplete"), and helmed many international productions.
During Watanabe-Batton's time as Chair of the Board of Directors (2018-2022) of Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN), the organization won a media-influencing Supreme Court decision. Investing in the future of media equity and empowerment, during her tenure, MNN developed a new two-story studio facility in Hudson Yards, which opened doors in February 2023. She continues to lead the MNN Advisory Board. Active on the boards of New York Women in Film & Television and co-founder of Women Independent Producers, Watanabe-Batton is an advocate for more sustainable and inclusive business models and was honored by New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment with a MADE IN NY Award for her service as Producers Guild of America (PGA East) Vice Chair (2012-2018) Diversity Chair (2008-2018) and co-founder of PGA Women's Impact Network. She is a member of the PGA, Gold House, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Black TV and Film Collective.
Born in New York City, during early childhood she lived in a log cabin in the woods of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, then on a Catholic Worker Farm in Western Massachusetts with her adopted/foster Swedish family who are renowned stained glass makers. She returned to city life as a toddler, and grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx with her New York City public school teacher parents. Her Japanese American mother and African American father taught her to be interested in all types of music, movies, languages and struggles of working people. Surrounded by an extended family of multi-cultural progressive educators and activists, her independent spirit is rooted in her mother her mother's imprisonment at Heart Mountain Japanese American internment camp during WW II, her Nigerian Igbo biological father, a retired university sociology professor whose family survived the genocide in Nigeria during the Biafran War. Watanabe-Batton's parents met in graduate school at Columbia University. That innate appreciation of the marginalized gave her a clear understanding that branding can change one from an "enemy alien" to "model minority" in a lifetime. Storytelling has the power to create compassion and freedom or bias and fear.
As a commercial and promos producer, she has helmed major award-winning international ad campaigns for brands like Olay, Miller Lite (Cannes Lion winning director, Frank Budgen), Retail Me Not, Samsung and Viacom, and managed production and art departments for hundreds of commercials and music videos for companies including 1st Ave Machine, Station Films, Radical Media, RSA, FM Rocks and Propaganda Films. Her American Identity series for Global Hue puts Harvard Professor Homi K. Bhabha's hybrid-cultural-identity theory into practice featuring interviews with diverse artists and scholars following the election of President Obama. Her MTV Africa music video "Incomplete" and behind-the-scenes episode for Ghanaian hip-life artist Tinny won an MTV Award on the continent; and her Miami frat video "Play No Games," for recording artist and mega producer Lil Jon stayed in top-ten rotation for several weeks.
She recently produced the film installation(s) "Seeking" by legendary filmmaker Julie Dash ("Daughters of the Dust") for the International African American Museum opening in Charleston, S.C. in 2023; and "Out/Side of Time" by artist Jenn Nkiru for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Afrofuturist Period Room Before Yesterday We Could Fly; and was Consulting Producer on EPIX docu-series "By Whatever Means Necessary" by Director-Exec Producer, Keith McQuirter, which received the 2021 NAACP Award for Outstanding Directing in a Documentary.
Watanabe-Batton is producing partners with Dash on multiple film and television projects. The two recently resumed production on documentary feature "Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl" based on the cookbook "Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl" by Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a renaissance woman, chef, cultural anthropologist and pioneer of modern-day food writing. The film has received funding from Black Public Media, Field of Vision, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Southern Documentary Fund. She also produced Dash's exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for "In America" Spring 2022 Costume Institute exhibition highlighting fashion designers Ann Lowe and Mme. Etta Hentz in the American Wing's Renaissance Revival Room and Greek Revival Parlor.
Watanabe-Batton's producing credits include non-fiction series "I Pity the Fool" with Mr. T (TV Land/ Lionsgate), barbershop documentary "Cutting Edge" (Cinemax/HBO), and sports docu-series "Insider Training" (Discovery). She has produced narrative films with numerous writer-directors including features "Ripe" (Mo Ogrodnik), "Book of Love" (Jeff Byrd), and shorts "The Killers" (Tanya Hamilton) and "Bajo del Perro" (Polish Brothers). Her directing-producing credits reflect her wide range of interests, like documentary "Crisis in the Crib: Saving Our Nation's Babies" linking infant mortality to systemic racism, which featured Exec Producer and campaign spokeswoman for The Office of Minority Health, Tonya Lewis-Lee; and "Blueprint" lifestyle makeover series for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Her debut narrative film "Once You're In," co-directed with Lauren Greenfield stars undocumented Irish immigrants in Boston, aired on WGBH while she was an undergraduate at Harvard-Radcliffe and features then poet laureate of Ireland, Seamus Heaney.
Watanabe-Batton's fluency with intersectional storytelling is rooted in a lifetime of crossing class, race, gender and demographic lines, and is strengthened by years of collaborations with musical and visual artists. Her first jobs in film were as a temp development assistant at Danny Glover's Carrie Productions and story researcher for Quincy Jones Entertainment. Many of the stories she researched in Beverly Hills Library in a pre-digital world have yet to be or are just being produced. Her breakthrough job was working in creative development for veteran producers Paula Weinstein, Mark Rosenberg, Peter Heller and Julie Bergman at Spring Creek Productions on the Warner Bros lot. While there, she organized demonstrations from the studio lot during the L.A. Rebellion. She then assisted acclaimed Australian film director Peter Weir on "Fearless" starring Jeff Bridges, and worked at the groundbreaking Propaganda Films on iconic commercial campaigns, music videos and sci-fi series "Thunderbirds Are Go."
In the heyday of hip hop music videos, Watanabe-Batton co-founded NY production company Department of Film at Goldcrest Post with filmmaker Nick Quested. She has produced content for top recording artists like Diddy, DMX, Faith Evans, Fat Joe, Lil Jon, Nas, Trick Daddy, Trina, Usher, Wu-Tang Clan, and executive produced numerous celebrity promo campaigns for BET, Centric, VH1 and Logo. Watanabe-Batton has directed top ten videos in the U.S. ("Play No Games") and MTV Base Ghana ("Incomplete"), and helmed many international productions.
During Watanabe-Batton's time as Chair of the Board of Directors (2018-2022) of Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN), the organization won a media-influencing Supreme Court decision. Investing in the future of media equity and empowerment, during her tenure, MNN developed a new two-story studio facility in Hudson Yards, which opened doors in February 2023. She continues to lead the MNN Advisory Board. Active on the boards of New York Women in Film & Television and co-founder of Women Independent Producers, Watanabe-Batton is an advocate for more sustainable and inclusive business models and was honored by New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment with a MADE IN NY Award for her service as Producers Guild of America (PGA East) Vice Chair (2012-2018) Diversity Chair (2008-2018) and co-founder of PGA Women's Impact Network. She is a member of the PGA, Gold House, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Black TV and Film Collective.
Born in New York City, during early childhood she lived in a log cabin in the woods of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, then on a Catholic Worker Farm in Western Massachusetts with her adopted/foster Swedish family who are renowned stained glass makers. She returned to city life as a toddler, and grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx with her New York City public school teacher parents. Her Japanese American mother and African American father taught her to be interested in all types of music, movies, languages and struggles of working people. Surrounded by an extended family of multi-cultural progressive educators and activists, her independent spirit is rooted in her mother her mother's imprisonment at Heart Mountain Japanese American internment camp during WW II, her Nigerian Igbo biological father, a retired university sociology professor whose family survived the genocide in Nigeria during the Biafran War. Watanabe-Batton's parents met in graduate school at Columbia University. That innate appreciation of the marginalized gave her a clear understanding that branding can change one from an "enemy alien" to "model minority" in a lifetime. Storytelling has the power to create compassion and freedom or bias and fear.
As a commercial and promos producer, she has helmed major award-winning international ad campaigns for brands like Olay, Miller Lite (Cannes Lion winning director, Frank Budgen), Retail Me Not, Samsung and Viacom, and managed production and art departments for hundreds of commercials and music videos for companies including 1st Ave Machine, Station Films, Radical Media, RSA, FM Rocks and Propaganda Films. Her American Identity series for Global Hue puts Harvard Professor Homi K. Bhabha's hybrid-cultural-identity theory into practice featuring interviews with diverse artists and scholars following the election of President Obama. Her MTV Africa music video "Incomplete" and behind-the-scenes episode for Ghanaian hip-life artist Tinny won an MTV Award on the continent; and her Miami frat video "Play No Games," for recording artist and mega producer Lil Jon stayed in top-ten rotation for several weeks.
