Janet Tobias is a media executive specializing in healthcare as well as an Emmy Award-winning director, producer, and writer. She directed most notably No Place On Earth in 2012, a docudrama about two caves in the Ukraine in which three dozen Jews escaping the Holocaust successfully hid for a total of 511 days. Her screenplay, co-written with Paul Laikin, was a finalist for the 2014 Award for Documentary Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America. More recently, Tobias directed Unseen Enemy, a documentary on the threat of pandemics in the 21st century which initially aired on CNN in 2017. 2018 saw the release of her documentary Memory Games, a glimpse into the brain's vast potential for memorization through the eyes of four memory competition participants.
Career
After growing up in Indiana, graduating from Yale University, and working in radio news, Tobias started her television career at CBS's 60 Minutes as Diane Sawyer's associate producer. She then moved to ABC's Prime Time Live, where she produced, wrote, and directed both domestic and international stories ranging from a case study of organ donation to a portrait of the Kuwaiti royal family after the Gulf War. In 1992, Tobias moved to Dateline NBC to work as a national producer, supervising pieces on medical ethics and the home health care industry. Following Dateline, she worked as an editorial producer of ABC News' Law and Justice unit where she developed stories for Nightline, 20/20, and World News Tonight; she was also the executive producer for PBS's Emmy Award-winning program Life 360. In 2001, she founded a television and film production company called Sierra/Tango Productions with former ABC anchor Forrest Sawyer. Sierra/Tango has produced over a dozen documentaries on social issues ranging from medical ethics to the life of teenagers in America. Tobias is also the founder of , which focuses on the mobile web, social media and video as it relates to healthcare information and improving patient outcomes. In 2009, Tobias was appointed to the Forum on Drug Discovery, Development and Translation of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, serving two terms until 2015. In 2010, she became an adjunct professor of Medicine in the Department of HealthEvidence & Policy at Mount Sinai School of Medicine where she works on preventing diabetes in minority populations. In 2014, she became a research professor of Global Public Health in New York University's College of Global Public Health. Ms. Tobias is a member of the Writer’s Guild of America and currently resides in New York City.
Filmography
The following are among Tobias's commercial films:
