Biography

Yoav Potash is an award-winning writer, director, and producer of documentary films, including, most recently, Among Neighbors (2024), as well as Crime After Crime (2011) (Sundance Film Festival premiere), and Food Stamped (2010) (winner of the Jury Prize at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival).

In Among Neighbors (2024), Potash uses animation to bring the past to life as the filmmaker unearths the dark secrets of a small Polish town where survivors of the Holocaust were murdered six months after the end of World War II. The film had its World Premiere in November 2024 at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival, where it took home the Special Prize, a cash award of 10,000 Polish zlotys, funded by TVP, one of Poland's largest broadcasters. The film was updated slightly in 2025 as it hit the festival circuit and picked up more awards including the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Awards, the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Berkshire International Film Festival, and the Envision Award from the Jewish Film Institute. The film had a theatrical release and national broadcast in Israel in April 2025, and will be released in theaters in the United States starting in October 2025.

Also in 2025, Potash's short film, A Great Big Secret (2025), screened at Lincoln Center as one of only two films in the New York Jewish Film Festival. The film, which blends animation with interviews and archival footage to tell the story of a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, has also screened at the Berkshire International Film Festival, the Joyce Forum Jewish Short Film Festival (in La Jolla, California), the Columbus Jewish Film Festival, the San Francisco Community-wide Yom Hashoah Commemoration, and Philadelphia Jewish Film + Media's Jewish Resilience Film and Media Series at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.

Potash previously produced and directed the Sundance premiere documentary Crime After Crime (2011), a New York Times Critics' Pick and winner of 25 honors, including a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the National Board of Review Freedom of Expression Award, and six audience awards. The documentary, which tracks the legal battle to free a wrongfully incarcerated survivor of domestic violence from a life sentence in a California prison, had a national prime-time broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network, then streamed on Netflix for two years and is now available on Amazon Prime. The film and its engagement campaign helped change domestic violence law in multiple US states, including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California.

Collaborating with his wife Shira Potash, a health educator, Potash directed the San Francisco IndieFest Jury Prize-winning documentary Food Stamped (2010), which examines the challenges of eating a nutritious diet on a food stamp budget. The film premiered at The Mill Valley Film Festival, had a national broadcast in the US, was featured on CNN Money, and has screened in coordination with many nutrition programs, universities, and food banks across the country.

Potash's earliest works include the half-hour documentary Life on the Inside, about rehabilitative programs inside a women's prison, which began airing on PBS stations in 2007, and a short narrative comedy entitled Minute Matrimony (2002), which earned a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and a Grand Festival Award at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival. In 2000, collaborated with PBS station KQED to complete his first documentary From the Ground Up, which followed a multicultural group of UC Berkeley students who helped rebuild burned-down Black churches in Alabama.

Yoav is an alumnus of UC Berkeley, where he received the university's top prize in creative writing. He is married to Shira Potash, and together they have two children, a dog, and a cat, and they make their home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As of 2025, Potash is developing Diary from the Ashes, a film about the diary of Rywka Lipszyc. The diary, now published by HarperCollins, was written in the Lodz ghetto during World War II and was later found in the ruins of Auschwitz. The project has the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Laszlo N. Tauber Family Foundation, the Berkeley Film Foundation, and the Claims Conference.

- IMDb mini biography by: Summit Pictures