René Balcer (born February 9, 1954) is a Canadian-American television writer, director, producer, and showrunner, as well as a photographer and documentary film-maker.

[4] He later wrote screenplays for a variety of film producers including Francis Coppola, Lawrence Gordon, Steve Tisch, Michael Gruskoff, Martin Poll and Mace Neufeld.

In 1988, he helped adapt Miguel Pinero's play Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon for KCRW radio, starring Ed Asner and Peter Falk.

This led to writing assignments on other movies of the week and for the series Star Trek: The Next Generation,[6] Capital News, Veronica Clare and Nasty Boys.

In writing about legal issues, Balcer has drawn on his own experiences with law enforcement and his first-hand encounter with the brutal application of authoritarian power - at age 16, he was picked up as a suspected FLQ sympathizer during Quebec's October Crisis in 1970 and held overnight in the Montreal Police's infamous Station 10 where he was interrogated and beaten, before being released the next day.

At the North Dakota Museum of Art, Balcer's Law & Order episodes are played in a continuous loop in the installation Barton Benes Period Room: 21st Century Artist Studio.

"[16] Balcer said of the attacks, "What many of these critics fail to realize is that Law & Order has always been an equal-opportunity offender, and if a Democratic administration had implemented this despicable (torture) policy, our show would have taken them to task for it.

In 2012, Balcer created the series Jo,[20] an English-language cop drama set in Paris and starring Jean Reno, Wunmi Mosaku and Celyn Jones.

[29] In 2015, Balcer wrote and produced For Justice, a pilot for CBS directed by Ava DuVernay,[30] and developed a series about the porn world in the early 1980s with Owen Wilson for the Starz channel entitled WonderWorld.

[34] Created by Balcer, the series stars Edie Falco, Heather Graham, Josh Charles, Elizabeth Reaser and Anthony Edwards.

The series stars Julian McMahon, Kellan Lutz, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Roxy Sternberg and Nathaniel Arcand, and premiered on CBS on January 7, 2020.

[38] During his early days in Hollywood, Balcer was an usher at the Tiffany Theater in 1981 for its famous midnight and 2 am screenings of the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Balcer is a distant cousin of actress Alana de la Garza, sharing a common relative Juan Cortina, a Mexican folk hero known as the Rio Grande Robin Hood.

[40]" Balcer's photo work has appeared in Cinema Canada, Montreal Star, and in Impressions: the Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America Vol.

[45] Balcer's contribution—a poem entitled Backbone using Virginia tobacco plantation brand names as a tribute to the enslaved black women who picked the tobacco—was integrated by Xu Bing into an installation.

In 2010, through his Mattawin Company, Balcer sponsored the publication of a 13-volume catalogue of the works of the Wuming (No Name) Group, a cooperative of underground Chinese artists during the Cultural Revolution.

[51] In the fall of 2011, Balcer and his wife Carolyn organized and sponsored the exhibition Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974–1985 at New York's China Institute, featuring works from the Wuming, Stars and Grass groups of experimental artists.