In 2002, David Waxman asked a successful filmmaker during a film festival Q&A how one ought to start a career in independent documentary filmmaking.  The simple reply: “just make a film on something you care about.”  David, who was then dating a girl he’d just met, decided to make a film about her passion:  disability rights and the Independent Living movement.  Before long, her passion became his cause as well.

David and Susie married in 2004 and moved to Northern California in 2005 to be near the birthplace of the Independent Living movement, which began in Berkeley, California in the late 1960s before expanding throughout the US in the 1970s and 80s.

KRCB hired David in 2006.  In 2008, KRCB applied for an outreach grant to promote the broadcast of a documentary on disability culture, and David leveraged it to also produce 3 short films and 5 short radio segments for broadcast on KRCB.  These stories became the “1 in 5 Stories” project and live on at krcb.org and 1in5stories.com.  The couple lives in El Cerrito, California; David is KRCB's Staff TV Producer and Susie is a social worker in Oakland.