Women Behind the Scenes Spotlight: Kaleena Kiff

Kaleena Kiff

Today’s Women Behind the Scenes spotlight is focused on former child star turned producer, writer and director Kaleena Kiff.

Kaleena was born and raised in Santa Monica, California and began working as an actress while she was a child, appearing in 1980’s TV shows like The Jeffersons, Family Ties, Three’s Company and the comedy series Love, Sidney for which she co-starred alongside Tony Randall and Swoosie Kurtz and then later starred in the revival series The New Leave It to Beaver, starring with Tony Dow and Janice Kent, for several years.

As an adult, Kaleena turned her attention to behind the scenes positions, first working as a producer’s assistant on the 2001 movie Suddenly Naked that starred Wendy Crewson and Peter Coyote. That same year she was a producer’s assistant on Smallville and then was Director Brian Levant’s assistant on the 2002 movie Snow Dogs.

A few years later she was the executive producer on a short film called When Jesse Was Born that starred Ryan Robbins (Sanctuary and Caprica) and then in 2006 she was the field producer on Smallville: 100th Episode – The Making of a Milestone. The following year she was a producer on the independent film Locked Out and then was producer and director of the short film Alice & Huck, which starred actress Sharon Taylor (Stargate Atlantis), Smallville alum Allison Mack and, once again with, Ryan Robbins.

In 2009, she partnered with Ryan Copple to create the online phenomenon Riese for which she acted as writer, executive producer and director for this unique steam-punk-inspired web series that starred Christine Chatelain (Sanctuary), Patrick Gilmore (Stargate Universe), Ben Cotton (Stargate Atlantis), Emilie Ullerup (Sanctuary), Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica) and reunited Kaleena with Sharon Taylor, Allison Mack and Ryan Robbins.

This widely popular online series Riese was picked up by Syfy.com, adding Amanda Tapping (Stargate: SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Sanctuary) as the narrator of the story of Riese, a seemingly random wanderer, who is being hunted by a terrifying religious cult called The Sect. As she travels from nation to nation, she is accompanied only by a wolf, Fenrir. Together they must evade the assassins sent by the Sect – who’ll stop at nothing to complete the task they failed to achieve many years ago. Riese’s past is shrouded in mystery, as even she can’t recall the events of the tragic night when her entire family was slaughtered and she was forced to flee into the wilderness. On her journey, she’ll piece together her past, and her destiny, in a conflict that will hold the fate of the world in the balance – and the once peaceful kingdom of Eleysia will be the battlefield.