Grinberg was CEO of the Sherman Grinberg Film Libraries,[3] "the world's largest independent film news and stock footage library".[4] She was a co-founder and vice-president of the
International Documentary Association.[5][6]
Grinberg sold the film archive in the 1990s to focus her full-time attentions on HIV/AIDS activism and fundraising.[4] She served on the board of
Project Inform, was founder of the Coalition for
Salvage Therapy,[7] co-founder of the FAIR Pricing Coalition,[8] and founder and president of the Foundation for AIDS and Immune Research (FAIR).[9] She helped to lead a broad coalition of patients, activists, and medical practitioners, concerned for expediting new treatments for AIDS and ensuring access to experimental therapies,[10][11] especially for late-stage patients with limited prognoses.[12][13] "The side effects of AIDS [are] death," she told
KQED about the urgency of her work. "We can gather data until hell freezes over, but we will be burying people daily. At a certain point we have to act."[14]
Grinberg was honored with the Project Inform Activism Award in 1996.[5]
Personal life
Grinberg married journalist Philip Melnick in 1974; they divorced in 1981[15] Grinberg caught HIV in the 1980s,[16][17] and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991. With access to new treatments, she lived far longer than her doctors expected.[18] She died at home in Los Angeles, from a heart attack related to her AIDS diagnosis and treatment,[19] in 2002, aged 51 years.[2][9]
^Collins, Huntly; Vedantam, Shankar (1996-03-18).
"A New Drug in the Race with Death". The Philadelphia Inquirer. pp. 1,
8. Retrieved 2022-06-06 – via Newspapers.com.
^Driscoll, James (1996-07-07).
"Private Sector Research Delivers". The Los Angeles Times. p. 181. Retrieved 2022-06-06 – via Newspapers.com.
^Stone, Keith (1996-09-09).
"AIDS Drugs Restoring Hope". The Daily Advertiser. p. 15. Retrieved 2022-06-06 – via Newspapers.com.
^Gonsalves, Gregg. "AIDS activism's message in a bottle. (Last Word)." Research Initiative/Treatment Action!, vol. 8, no. 1, summer 2002, pp. 30+.