Rory Kennedy

Rory Kennedy
Rory Kennedy (2011)
Born	Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy (1968-12-12) December 12, 1968 (age 48) Washington, D.C., United States
Alma mater	Brown University
Occupation	Documentary filmmaker
Years active	1990–present
Spouse(s)	Mark Bailey (m. 1999)
Children	3
Parent(s)	Robert Francis Kennedy Ethel Skakel
Relatives	See Kennedy family

Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy (born December 12, 1968) is an American documentary filmmaker, and youngest child of U.S. Senator Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.

Although her father was assassinated before she was born, Kennedy consciously relates to his philanthropic mission, and her core activity is the making of documentary films that centre on social issues. These include addiction, nuclear radiation, the treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the politics of the Mexican border-fence, and her films have been featured on many TV networks. It was to her wedding that her cousin John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife, and his sister in law were flying when they were killed in a plane crash.

She was born in Washington, D.C. six months after her father was assassinated. Her mother chose the name "Rory" because she felt it bore resemblance to her father's nickname "Bobby." On December 19, 1968, a week after Kennedy was born, her mother took her to her father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's older brother Michael LeMoyne Kennedy was assigned as her godparent by their mother. Friends of the Kennedy family said the pair spoke almost every day of their lives. When Rory was a teenager, she was arrested outside the South African Embassy. When she was 15, her brother David died in 1984 from a drug overdose. Rory graduated from The Madeira School and then Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her sophomore year there, she organized a rally in front of a Providence, Rhode Island supermarket. She urged shoppers to boycott grapes in solidarity with migrant farm workers.

In the 1990s, Rory and fellow Brown classmate Vanessa Vadim (daughter of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda) formed May Day Media, a non-profit organization that specializes in the production and distribution of films with a social conscience, based in Washington, D.C. Kennedy's first documentary was Women of Substance. Released in 1994, the idea came out of a paper she wrote while a student at Brown on female addicts. In 1998 Kennedy and another fellow Brown graduate Liz Garbus founded Moxie Firecracker Films which specializes in documentaries that highlight pressing social issues. The television networks that have shown its films include: A&E, the UK's Channel 4, Court TV, Discovery Channel, HBO, Lifetime, MTV, Oxygen, PBS, Sundance Channel, and TLC.