Filmmaking wasn’t at all what alumnus Ross Kauffman ’89 set out to do when he enrolled at the University of Rhode Island. But the former marketing major’s interest in film was piqued the summer after his junior year when he read an obscure second-hand book, Elements of Film.

After a series of stepping-stone jobs and a decade as a film editor in New York, Kauffman hit the big time with Born into Brothels, his documentary about the children of Calcutta prostitutes, which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 2004. It won two dozen other awards, too, from the likes of the Los Angeles Film Critics, Human Rights Watch and the International Documentary Association, among many others.

Today Kauffman is a professor at the Rutgers University Center for Digital Filmmaking, where he continues to make documentaries and win awards. His latest film, The E-Team, is being screened at numerous film festivals this year, and it won the cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The story of Human Rights Watch activists investigating atrocities around the world, it’s a gritty drama that has Kauffman and co-director Katy Chevigny following the activists as they risk their lives in Libya and Syria.

While Kauffman’s best known films tackle challenging or disturbing topics, he says he tries to bring joy and humor to even the darkest stories. And as he told one interviewer, “I don’t expect people to go out and be activists. I want to connect people with other people around the world. Hopefully they will care enough about the characters to care about what the characters care about.”