Jacoba Atlas is an American executive producer in television, also publishing as a journalist, music critic, novelist, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. She won a Peabody Award, an Emmy Award and a CableACE Award for Survivors of the Holocaust (1996), a TV documentary made for TBS. Atlas was a rock critic and film critic in the 1970s, serving as the West Coast correspondent of Melody Maker in the UK. She wrote for KRLA Beat, the Los Angeles Free Press and several other publications. She moved to television, working for NBC News in the 1980s, rising to senior producer on the Today show. She co-founded VU Productions with Pat Mitchell in 1990, writing and producing documentaries. Turner Broadcasting System hired her as an executive, after which she was an executive producer for CNN, then vice president at PBS in the 2000s. In 2019, Atlas made Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, airing on PBS. Early life and education Atlas is the daughter of Jewish dramatist Dorothy Cohen and Guggenheim Fellow playwright, Hollywood screenwriter Leopold Atlas. Her father was investigated as a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was blacklisted. He testified and named 37 names in 1953. Atlas was seven years old when her father died in 1954 of a heart attack. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement, then shifted to the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television for graduate studies. In 1976, she wrote a dissertation on labor unions in the Hollywood film industry. Writing career Atlas first published as a journalist. She wrote an article about hippies in the KRLA Beat in August 1967. She praised Harry Nilsson in early 1968. For TeenSet magazine in 1968 she interviewed Jimi Hendrix at his "rented house in Benedict Canyon," recognized by Atlas as the house where the Beatles rested between concert legs in 1965. She wrote reviews of the Doors in 1968 and Steppenwolf in 1969 for Hullabaloo, an early name for Circus rock magazine. She published frequently in Melody Maker in the UK – she was their West Coast correspondent – including a piece based on a lengthy, relaxed interview with neighbor Joni Mitchell at her Laurel Canyon home in early 1970. Atlas described her own Laurel Canyon house as small, with an inoperative fireplace, in an area recently plagued by smog. Atlas previewed the upcoming Nilsson Sings Newman album