Roger Holzberg

Roger Holzberg spent the majority of his career as a VP / Creative Director at Walt Disney Imagineering “making magic” at Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, The Disney Studios, Disneyland and Hong Kong. Four years after a cancer diagnosis, in 2008, he left Disney to start the healthcare company Reimagine Well and become the first creative director at the National Cancer Institute. As a professor at the California Institute of the Arts he teaches “Healthcare by Design”, training the patient experience designers of tomorrow.

Representative film experience includes writing The Living Sea (narrated by Meryl Streep, music by Sting, Academy Award nomination), Midnight Crossing, which he also directed (starring Faye Dunaway, Ned Beatty, Daniel Travanti), and Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair (with Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Jennifer Aniston and Penn & Teller). In theater his writing includes Desert Fire (co-written with Martin Casella), The Quest for Viracocha and Under the Rainbow.

When asked what put the fire in his belly to write The Trial of Mother Jones he answers, “In the aftermath of January 6th, amid the ongoing labor unrest in America, the lessons of Mother Jones to ‘pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living’ are more important than ever, serving as a rallying cry for those advocating for workers' rights, social justice, and the preservation of democracy”.