User:Kkeckeisen/Anya Verkhovskaya

Anya Verkhovskaya was born in Moscow, the former Soviet Union, in 1969 and came to the United States in 1990 as a political refugee.

Biography

From 1994 through 2001, Anya Verkhovskaya worked with filmmaker Steven Spielberg, heading his eastern European and middle Asian operations of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation [[1]] (currently USC Shoah Foundation Institute) [[2]]. She served as an expert on community outreach in eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, creating an outreach community network in more than 20 countries. The life stories of more than 9,000 Jewish, Romani, and other Holocaust survivors and witnesses were videotaped as a result of Anya Verkhovskaya's work.

From 1999 through 2001, Anya Verkhovskaya served as a consultant for A.B. Data, Ltd., to provide notice of the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation (Swiss Banks), a $1.25 billion class action settlement, to potential class members. Her efforts resulted in the notification of more than two million people, including Jews and Romanies, throughout 109 countries in more than 80 different languages [[3]]. Her work with Spielberg assisted her in creating a comprehensive method of reaching out to Holocaust victims and their families for the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation and the German Forced Labour Compensation Programme. Verkhovskaya was also a consultant to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) on outreach strategies, and she supervised the notification of claimants and face-to-face assistance programs in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

In 2001, Anya Verkhovskaya joined A.B. Data, Ltd., and is currently the senior executive vice president and chief operating officer of its class action administration company, where she oversees class action administration and notice implementation in the United States and abroad. She has provided expert testimony and affidavits concerning class action notice manageability and adequacy, class certification, settlement, and fund distribution issues in a variety of class action litigation areas, including: securities fraud, ERISA, consumer, insurance, employment, civil and human rights, environmental, and antitrust. Anya Verkhovskaya is the only female chief operating officer in the industry and has been named a finalist in 2009 in both the Best Executive—Service Businesses category for The Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Best Executive of the Year—Services category for The American Business Awards[[4]].

Verkhovskaya was the field producer and the production manager in The Last Days, a documentary feature that won an Oscar at the 1999 Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category [[5]] and was nominated for an Eddie at the American Cinema Editors Awards. Steven Spielberg served as the executive producer. The film tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. It focuses on the horrors of life in the concentration camps, but also stresses the optimism and desire to survive of the survivors.

Verkhovskaya coproduced Children from the Abyss, a documentary that won the 54th Annual Christopher Award in the Television & Cable category [[6]]. In Children from the Abyss (part of the Broken Silence five-documentary series produced by Steven Spielberg), Russian Holocaust survivors detail their experience of resistance, betrayal, collaborators, rescuers, bystanders, and the desire for revenge.

Verkhovskaya has served on the Advisory Committee for New Émigrés in New York City and is a founder and member of the Board of Directors of the Archive: Institute of Russian Jewish American Diaspora, New York City, Sir Martin Gilbert, Honorary Chair, a nonprofit organization founded to preserve the history and collective memory of the Jewish immigrant community from the former Soviet Union.

Patents

Patent Title: Reversed Printed Book [[7]]