Center for Social Media: Events

Daniel Anker is an award-winning producer and director of documentary films. One of his notable recent credits is Scottsboro: An Amercian Tragedy (2000), about the infamous miscarriage of justice in 1930s Alabama when nine black teens were wrongly accused and judged guilty of rape. Anker produced and co-directed the film with Barak Goodman, and receiving an Emmy Award and an Academy Award nomination. With a Harvard University degree in music, it is not surprising that many of the projects in Anker’s filmography are in collaboration with musicians. He produced the Peabody-Award winning children’s series Marsalis on Music, broadcast on PBS, Bravo and the BBC. For three seasons, he was producer of the PBS series The Metropolitan Opera Presents. n 2005, the film, Music from the Inside Out, will air nationally on public television, grown out of a joint project between Anker Productions and The Philadelphia Orchestra.

Since her work as contributing editor on the classic documentary, Harlan County, USA (1976), Mirra Bank has produced and directed a number of award-winning feature and documentary films including Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1985) a Sundance premiere, Yudie, which has won international awards as a profile of a Jewish woman of the Lower East Side, and a PBS primetime special about women in the Old West, Nobody's Girls (1995), with Cloris Leachman. Her latest work, Last Dance (2002) has been screened at AMPAS (Best Documentaries of 2002-2003), AFI SilverDocs Film Festival, and won an Arts/Merit Award in the Golden Gate competition at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2002. Bank is also the author of "Anonymous Was a Woman," a celebration of folk art creations and the lives of American women of the 18th and 19th centuries. She is based in New York City.

Linda Goode Bryant is an award-winning producer, writer, and director of short experimental and documentary films and videos. Her most recent film, Flag Wars (2003), co-produced with Laura Poitras, won the jury award for Best Documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, the Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and launched the 2003 season of P.O.V. on PBS. Bryant is currently in production on The Vote and Sweet Genius, both verite documentaries. Prior to filmmaking, she was the founding director of Just Above Midtown, Inc. (JAM), a nonprofit interdisciplinary artists’ space in Manhattan that supports work by emerging artists. Bryant is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, anonymous grant(s) from the Arts Development Committee, and project grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Ettinger Foundation.

Peter Broderick is President of Next Wave Films, which provides vital support to independent filmmakers from the U.S. and abroad. A company of the Independent Film Channel, Next Wave Films supplies finishing funds and serves as a producer's rep for emerging filmmakers, helping them implement festival and press strategies and secure distribution. It also finances features shot digitally through its production arm--Agenda 2000. Broderick has played a key role in the growth of the ultra-low budget feature movement. He wrote a catalytic series of articles for Filmmaker magazine that stimulated many filmmakers to make features on micro-budgets. A graduate of Brown University, Cambridge University, and Yale Law School, he practiced law in Washington, DC.

Lori Cheatle is a feature and documentary film producer. She most recently served as a producer on the films "Dashiell Hammett. Detective. Writer." for the PBS series American Masters, Summer in Ivye (dir. Tamar Rogoff and Daisy Wright) and Goddass (dir. by Esther Bell). Other films include American Corner (1988, which she co-directed), Corps Plonge (dir. by Raoul Peck) and Tempest (with Maria de Medeiros and Jackie Berroyer). She has previously worked with Pacific Street on the films "Final Take: The Irvine Fertility Scandal" for Lifetime Television and "Sidney Lumet: An American Director" for Paramount Pictures and Aaron Spelling Television.

Katy Chevigny co-founded Big Mouth Productions in 1997 with long-time friend and colleague, Julia Pimsleur. Chevigny’s producing credits include the award-winning documentaries Innocent Until Proven Guilty (1999), Nuyorican Dream (2000), Brother Born Again (2000), and Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America (2001). Chevigny produced and directed the one-hour documentary Journey to the West: Chinese Medicine Today (2001) and most recently completed Deadline (2004) , which premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Before founding Big Mouth Productions, Chevigny produced and directed advocacy videos at the Chicago Video Project, including The Chicago Jobs and Living Wage Campaign and Cabrini Green: Mixed In, not Mixed Out. She also is a co-founder and director of operations of MediaRights.org., a nonprofit organization and Web site dedicated to fostering greater awareness of social-issue documentaries, advocacy videos and the work of activist organizations around the United States

John de Graaf has been producing PBS documentaries for 24 years, with a focus on social and environmental issues. His Affluenza TV programs were seen by 10 million Americans. His book, "Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic," was published by Berrett-Koehler in July 2001. He is also a teacher and activist, recently founding Take Back Your Time Day. He is the editor of "Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork" and "Time Poverty in America." In addition to Affluenza and Escape From Affluenza, he also produced Running Out Of Time, For Earth's Sake: The Life And Times Of David Brower, Circle Of Plenty, Green Plans, and Genetic Time Bomb, among others. Affluenza uses the metaphor of a disease to tackle a very serious subject: the damage done -- to our health, our families, our communities, and our environment -- by the obsessive quest for material gain.

Alice Elliott has been producing documentaries for over ten years. She established her company, Welcome Change Productions in 1991, and started producing the same year. Her first movie, Diamonds in the Rough, is an hour long documentary about a gifted, inner-city high school baseball team located in the largely Dominican, Washington Heights neighborhood, of New York City. Diamonds in the Rough won a Chris Award, a NEMN Apple Award and First Place in the Documentary Category at the South Beach Film Festival. She co-produced Grist for the Mill a personal video diary about the effects of divorce on adult children. Grist for the Mill aired on HBO/Cinemax on Father's Day 1999. Before working in documentary film, Alice Elliott was an actress for over twenty years. She appeared in two feature films, over 100 commercials and had a recurring role on the ABC soap opera, Loving. She teaches as an adjunct professor at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Jon Else is known for his award winning documentaries such as "The Day After Trinity" and "Yosemite," his work on the PBS series "Eyes on the Prize" and "Cadillac Dessert," and as a cinematographer on hundreds of documentaries including "Crumb." His latest documentary, "Sing Faster: The Stagehand's Ring Cycle" is a visually stunning and humorous departure from these more serious docs, as it looks at the Ring Cycle from the point of view of the stagehands who worked on the San Francisco Opera's production in 1990. It won the Filmmaker's Trophy for Documentary (which is awarded by fellow filmmakers) at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

Maria Finitzo's work as an independent documentary director and producer has taken her from Russia to the Galapagos Islands to Antartica exploring subjects as diverse as nuclear weapons, whales, and the first African American woman in space. In addition to 5 GIRLS, Finitzo is currently working on two projects in association with Kartemquin Films, ARSENALS, about the technical dangers posed by nuclear weaponry, and A YEAR ON TEEN STREET, a portrait of a teen theater company.

Peter Gilbert is a filmmaker and director of photography based in Chicago. His film credits include the 1990 Academy Award winning, feature-length documentary, "American Dream," directed by Barbara Kopple; "A Long Way Home," directed by Michael Apted, produced and distributed worldwide by Granada TV; the Peabody Award winning "Age 7 in America," produced by Michael Apted and directed by Phil Joanou, which was broadcast on CBS-TV; and "Bookmark: Day of the Dead," produced and directed for the BBC. Peter Gilbert has co-produced and photographed "Higher Goals," which was nominated for a national Emmy. His work for PBS series include "Nova," "American Master," and "Great Performances."

Documentary video producer specializing in works which explore cross-cultural issues. Her latest documentary is CRUCIBLE OF WAR, a 45-minute video which explores the postwar Balkans from the perspective of ordinary people of many different nationalities, ages, and viewpoints. Her other work-in-progress is AVENUE OF ASPIRATIONS about the history, neighborhoods, architecture, and people of 16th Street, a Washington DC thoroughfare which serves as a microcosm for the great changes in urban development, race relations, religious community, and immigration patterns in the United States over the course of the 20th century.

As a producer/director, Jill Godmilow has earned a substantial reputation during more than two decades of film and video making. Considered one of the primary theoreticians/practitioners in the American non-fiction genre, she has been interviewed in American Film, Afterimage, In These Times, The Independent, History and Theory, Text Performance Quarterly and featured in international festivals since 1973. Her 1971 TALES (made with Cassandra Gerstein and an all-female crew) is a "performed documentary" about how we tell stories about sexual experiences, which Jonas Mekas called the most interesting film in the Whitney Museum's "New American Filmmakers Series" that year. Her ANTONIA: A PORTRAIT OF THE WOMAN, (co-directed with folksinger Judy Collins in 1973) was the first independently produced American documentary to enjoy extensive theatrical exhibition in the United States and broadcast in eleven foreign countries. Among other honors, it received an Academy Award nomination and the Independent New York Film Critics Award, "Best Documentary".

David Gray has directed music videos for MCA and Jade Tree Records, and edited and wrote Bravo Profiles: Roger Ebert for Stick Figure Productions. In 1999, he teamed up with filmmaker Katie McQuerrey on Never Say Die, a documentary about a Black Sabbath cover band known as Sabbra Cadabra. He is currently developing the documentary "Truly Despicable," about a team of real-life con artists.

Sam Green is director of Oscar-nominated film "Weather Underground." He received his master's degree in journalism from University of California at Berkeley, where he studied with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His documentary film The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and screened at festivals worldwide, winning the Grand Prize at the USA Film Festival in Dallas and Best Documentary awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals. His documentary Pie Fight(directed with Christian Bruno) premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, where it won an honorable mention in the shorts category, and won first prize at the Black Maria Film Festival.

After producing and/or directing more than 50 television movies, miniseries and feature films, director Robert Greenwald expanded his creative focus in 2001 to include documentary filmmaking. Inspired by the controversy over vote counting in Florida, he executive produced Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (directed by Richard Ray Perez and Joan Sekler), which has been widely seen worldwide in film festivals, on the Sundance Channels, and on DVD. The success and political impact of that project led Greenwald to commit to two additional “Un” documentaries – Uncovered, which he produced and directed, and Unconstitutional, directed by Nonny de la Pena, about the erosion of American civil liberties following the events of September 11, released in the fall of 2004. Greenwald’s most recent film is the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which he produced and directed.

Grace Guggenheim has been a producer and executive producer with Guggenheim Productions for the past seventeen years. Most recently, she served as Producer of the documentary Berga: Soldiers of Another War. This co-production with WNET/Thirteen New York debuted in a national broadcast on May 28, 2003 on PBS. It tells the unknown story of a group of American soldiers captured in the Battle of the Bulge who, because they were Jewish or classified as "undesirables," were sent to a slave labor camp in eastern Germany. Guggenheim has produced over twenty documentaries for both television and theatrical release. Many of these films have been finished in 35mm for permanent exhibition at museums and presidential libraries around the country. Most of them involved intensive archival research with private and public resources in the United States and abroad.

Karin Hayes, co-founder of Urcunina Films, is a filmmaker who has worked as a field/associate producer on documentaries for PBS, National Geographic Channel, the Travel Channel, the Discovery Channel, and with The Cronkite Ward Company for TLC. Prior to filmmaking, she attended the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and lived in Costa Rica for a year to attend the Universidad de Costa Rica. After graduating from UCLA's department of Worlds Arts & Cultures, she headed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC to assist with the Grassroots Culture and Development in Latin America Folklife Festival program.

Aviva Kempner is the scriptwriter, director and producer of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. Due to the difficulty in raising funds, Ms. Kempner devoted thirteen years of her life to completing this compelling documentary on the Jewish baseball slugger. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg won the Audience Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Spirit Award for Best Sports Documentary at the International Sports Video and Film Awards. The film also received the Audience Award (Documentary) at the Washington Jewish Film Festival and the CINE Golden Eagle. She was Awarded a 2000 Mayor's Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline based on the theatrical release of her film. The film is the New York Film Critics choice for Best Non-Fiction Film,2000 and was voted Best Documentary, 2000 by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. She writes film criticism and feature articles for numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, Washington Jewish Week and The Washington Post. She also lectures about cinema throughout the country. Ms. Kempner is the Founder and past Director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

Judy Kinberg has been with the PBS affiliate WNET (Channel Thirteen) in New York since 1975. Kinberg was a member of the original production team of Dance in America, the pioneering series currently in its twenty-eighth season as part of Great Performances on PBS. She became the show’s producer in 1977. Since its inception, the series has received a total of nineteen Emmy Awards. In 1981, Dance in America received the coveted Peabody Award and has, during its history, won numerous other accolades.

Vivian Kleiman is a member of the adjunct faculty at Stanford University’s Department of Communication Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video Production and a former member of the board of directors of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF). She is the recipient of many distinguished awards, including the George Foster Peabody Award, International Documentary Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award, Organization of American Historians’ Eric Barnouw Award, and a national Emmy Nomination.

Rena Kosersky is a music supervisor for documentaries. Among her numerous award-winning projects are those for PBS' The American Experience: the six-hour series Abraham and Mary Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, America 1900, Soldiers without Swords: the Black Press, Joe DiMaggio and The Jubilee Singers. She was also music supervisor for Blackside, Inc's award-winning series Eyes on the Prize II, I'll Make Me a World, A Century of American Arts, The Great Depression, America's War on Poverty, and Malcolm X. Her work includes licensing rights to music and researching music for specific historic events documented in these films. In addition, she selects and guides composers in producing original scores and companion CDs. She has worked on several documentaries with the composer Brian Keane including the Academy Award nominated The Battle Over Citizen Kane, and she was a consultant for Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary. Other projects include Journey of the African-American Athlete for HBO and the four-hour series School: the Story of American Public Education that aired on PBS.

Jan Krawitz has been independently producing and directing documentary films since l975. Her most recent film, Big Enough, provides an intimate and insightful perspective on the world of dwarfism, following up on her earlier film, Little People. Krawitz's other films explore diverse subjects including the demise of drive-in movie theatres (Drive-In Blues) and womens' quest for the ideal body (Mirror Mirror). In Harm's Way is a personal memoir in which the filmmaker re-examines her formative experiences of the world through the prism of an adult encounter with random violence. Little People was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Documentary. Jan Krawitz received a B.A. in film and photography from Cornell University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in film from Temple University. She taught for eight years at The University of Texas at Austin and spent one year on a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University where she directs and teaches in the graduate documentary film and video program.

Jeff Krulik is an eclectic producer and director whose unconventional, darkly comedic documentaries underscore the cliché “truth is stranger than fiction.” A self-described “collector, hoarder,” Krulik has produced some cult favorites, such as Hitler’s Hat, with a obscure, vintage film footage. His work on such short films as Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Ernest Borgnine on the Bus are also underground classics. His latest project, Parking Lot is a series spinning off on his earlier success with Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It premiered on the new cable network TRIO in January 2004. Watch clips online>>

Tia Lessin, a New York-based documentary filmmaker, received the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award for her work as producer and director of Behind The Labels. Tia was the supervising producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary film Bowling for Columbine and associate producer of the Academy Award-nominated Shadows of Hate. She has twice been nominated for Emmy Awards for her work in television. Tia is current co-producing Michael Moore's latest film Fahrenheit 911. She dedicates the UNAFF screening of Behind the Labels to her grandmother, a seamstress and member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, who died earlier this year.

McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from Brown University and later from MIT where he received MS in filmmaking in a program headed by documentarian Richard Leacock. His career began in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina where he was a studio cameraman. Later, he worked freelance shooting films for documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and then John Marshall, in Namibia. McElwee started producing and directing documentaries in 1976. His body of work includes five feature-length documentaries as well as several shorter films most of them shot in his homeland of the South. His work has played nationally in arthouse theaters and has been broadcast on Cinemax and PBS. In three of his films, "Backyard," "Sherman's March," and "Time Indefinite," he experimented with a personal autobiographical approach to non-fiction filmmaking, filming as a one-person film crew and weaving into the final film a highly subjective narration along with on-camera experiences by the filmmaker. His films have won many awards, including "Best Documentary" at the Sundance Film Festival ("Sherman's March"). "Six O'Clock News" recently was named best documentary at the Hawaii International Film Festival. McElwee has been a visiting filmmaker at Harvard University for ten years and has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ron Merk has been an independent producer, director, writer and distributor of animated and live action feature films and TV specials for the family and children’s market since 1967. Among his works are: Marco Polo—Return to Xanadu (2001, animated feature); Tooth Fairy Town (1992, animated television pilot film); Ribald Classics (1991, live action television special); Looking for Lennon (1991, live action Czech language feature); Animania (1988-90, animated feature); Hello, I’m Here (1987, live action/animated pilot film); Rumpelstiltskin (1975, live action feature); Pinocchio in Magic Land (1974, live action/animated feature); and, Pinocchio’s Birthday Party (1973, live action/animated feature). Marco Polo—Return to Xanadu has won numerous awards, and was one of the nine films that qualified for the very first Animated Feature Oscar in 2001. Merk’s co-production with Czech director Milan Cieslar, Lebensborn, has been screened at more than fifty festivals and won several prizes.

Mark Moskowitz is the Michael Moore of the used-bookstore set. He is a meek, balding dad living in the leafiest part of Chester County, Pa. He works in the lucrative but hectic business of making TV ads for election campaigns (one client of his company was former San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer). Indeed, visually, Moskowitz's Stone Reader resembles a political commercial. The film is actually a detective story, but it's set against happy-looking homes, setting suns, the broken hills of Colorado and anise swallowtails supping on wildflower nectar. (In one lepidopteric inside reference, when the death of the director's father is mentioned, we see a shot of another butterfly: a mourning cloak.) It is all fit to make you sigh, "Damn, what a pretty country we live in."

One of the original founders of Kartemquin Films in 1966, Gordon has served as executive producer, producer, director, cameraman and editor on a wide variety of documentary, educational and commercial films. His full resume covers 30 years of filmmaking. Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun Times, called his first film Home For Life "...an extraordinarily moving documentary." With this film, Gordon and Kartemquin established the direction they would take over the next three decades, making films that investigate and critique society by following the lives of real people. Gordon was the executive producer and co-producer of Hoop Dreams, a PBS feature length documentary that followed two inner-city high school basketball players for four and a half years as they pursued their NBA dreams. The film received overwhelming critical and audience acclaim and in its theatrical release went on to become the most commercially successful documentary of all time. Gordon has been a long time supporter of national and community based independent media groups, and served on the boards of several organizations including: National Coalition of Public Broadcast Producers and the Chicago Public Access Corporation.

Kenn Rabin, Fulcrum Media Services, is known around the U.S. and in the English- speaking world for his audio-visual research and archival coordination of such projects as WGBH's landmark series, Vietnam: A Television History, which involved over 90 archives from a dozen countries, and for his Emmy-nominated work on the series Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, considered by many to be the best historical series presented on PBS and still used, almost two decades after its original broadcast in many high school history curricula around the country. Other film research and consulting projects include Marlon T. Riggs' Color Adjustment, the history of the portrayal of African-Americans in prime- time television, 500 Nations, Kevin Costner's saga of Native American tribes done for CBS, and a wide variety of documentaries, television shows, and feature films, including Sean Penn's The Indian Runner, China Beach, Making Sense of the Sixties, the ABC News/NHK series The 20th Century Project, and many others. He also has had extensive experience doing audiovisual research and archiving, as well as rights clearance work, for educational and corporate multimedia projects in the United States and internationally.)

Kevin Rafferty is perhaps best known for his films Atomic Café (1982) that he and co-directored with Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty. It resourcefully depicts an era in history and culture entirely constructed from previously recorded footage Rafferty acquired. His current project is of the same ilk, a retelling of U.S. history using nothing but Hollywood films. Rafferty has also worked as a cinematographer, Blood in the Face with co-directors Anne Bohlen and James Ridgeway about the neo-nazis and KKK; Hurry Tomorrow (1975) with Richard Cohen; Feed (1992) with Jim Ridgeway; and Who Wants to be President with co-director Frank Keraudren and Ridgeway for The Learning Channel in 2000.

Nancy Schiesari learned the business of filmmaking while looking through the lens as director of photography on over 30 documentaries and feature films. She added producing and directing to her credits in 1984, with the feature length documentary Green Flutes, made for Channel Four Television in the United Kingdom. Her recent documentary Hansel Mieth-Vagabond Photographer premiered on PBS’ series Independent Lens in 2003. That project also marked Schiesari’s first American producing experience, having worked for 22 years in the UK. She currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin documentary program.

John Sorensen is the producer of the weekly award-winning PBS series Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. John produced the one-hour PBS special called The Giving Boom: How the New Philanthropy Will Change America and was a writer and producer on New River's three hour PBS special The First Measured Century (aired December 2000). Before joining New River, John worked in Chicago as a writer, producer, and editor on several documentaries for A&E television including the series American Justice and Biography. His two-hour special J. Edgar Hoover: Personal and Confidential won a Bronze Chris Award at the 1999 Columbus International Film Festival. He has also produced several independent documentaries including The Road to Yucca Mountain, a look at the proposed nuclear waste storage site near Las Vegas. Prior to working in television, John taught English in rural Japan. He received a BA in International Service from American University in Washington, D.C. and an MFA in Film from Columbia College Chicago.

Meema Spadola is an award-winning producer, director and writer in film, television and radio. Her latest documentary Red Hook Justice, about an experimental courthouse in Brooklyn will premiere on PBS’ Independent Lens in the spring of 2005. Spadola and Thom Powers, principles of Sugar Pictures, a NewYork City-based production company, collaborated on such socially progressive film projects as Guns & Mothers (2003), Our House (2000), Private Dicks: Men Exposed (1999) and Breasts (1997).

Ellen Spiro & Karen Bernstein Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein are co-founders of Mobilus Media, and are internationally recognized filmmakers with world-wide distribution. Spiro's unconventional approach to documentary is fueled by a history of working in experimental film, art, and activist video; she produces, directs, shoots and edits her own work. Known as a pioneer in small format video technology, Spiro made her first documentary for $564 while studying at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. Her awards include two Rockefeller Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship, First Prize in the USA Film Festival, Golden Gate Award, Prized Pieces Award from the National Black Programming Consortium, Paul Clere Humanitarian Award of Excellence, and others. Bernstein won a national Emmy award as producer of Ella Fitzgerald - Something To Live For (1999) while working as Series Producer for WNET1s AMERICAN MASTERS. She won a Grammy award in the category of Best Long Form Music Video as producer of Lou Reed - Rock and Roll Heart (1998).

Robert Stone

Robert Stone Robert Stone was born in England and educated in the United States. He studied history and film production at the University of Wisconsin/Madison and also attended Sorbonne University in Paris. He later studied acting and directing at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in New York. His first film was the Oscar-nominated feature documentary RADIO BIKINI (which screened at Sundance in 1988). This was followed by the feature documentaries, THE SATELLITE SKY (1990), FAREWELL GOOD BROTHERS (1992), WORLD WAR THREE (a fake documentary, 1998), and AMERICAN BABYLON (2000). He has also shot several documentaries, including THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY, which won the Filmmakers Trophy at Sundance in 1994. He lives north of New York City with his wife and two sons.

Karen Thomas

Karen Thomas is president and founder of Film Odyssey. Thomas has made the popular four-part series The Dinosaurs! and over a dozen more hours of programming for the PBS prime-time service, on topics ranging from literature and history to music and anthropology. Works include the company's most recent production is Isaac Stern: Life’s Virtuoso, as well as Robert Rauschenberg: Inventive Genius, Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, The GI Bill: The Law That Changed America, Washington National Cathedral, Search and Seizure: The Supreme Court and the Police, and The Supreme Court’s Holy Battles.

Jeffrey Tuchman

Tuchman, founder of Documania Films is an award-winning documentary producer, director and writer who has spent his career creating innovative documentary film and television. In that time, working with a long list of talented collaborators, he has built a formidable body of long-form documentary work, with over 30 films to his credit. His films have aired on A&E, PBS, The History Channel, ABC, Discovery/TLC, Court TV, CBS, MSNBC and HBO among others. During the past two decades, Tuchman has made documentaries on issues as far-ranging as AIDS policy, Teen Gambling, and the HMO crisis, and characters as diverse as a polygamist in Utah dying of cancer, a sixteen year-old heroin addict, and a White House photographer.

David Van Taylor

David is Vice President of Lumiere Productions, where he recently completed LOCAL NEWS, the PBS verite series about a TV newsroom in Charlotte, NC. He began in the company as Series Producer of WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE (ITVS), the 1996 history of the Religious Right. Van Taylor's feature documentary A PERFECT CANDIDATE (directed with RJ Cutler), screened theatrically in over 70 cities and was nominated for an Emmy. Since 1986, Van Taylor has written, directed and edited for PBS, HBO (SHE'S HAVING A BABY BROTHER), Discovery (HOLLYWOOD TALENT AGENTS), MTV (I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE), and TV NATION with Michael Moore. His first film, DREAM DECEIVERS: THE STORY BEHIND JAMES VANCE VS. JUDAS PRIEST, won an IDA Distinguished Achievement Award.

Jane Wagner

Jane Wagner & Tina DiFeliciantonio Jane Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio have been partners in Naked Eye Productions, Ltd. since 1988. Their critically acclaimed work has been screened at museums, film festivals and educational institutions and has been broadcast internationally. Their films include Girls Like Us, which has garnered a number of top honors including a National Emmy Award for Outstanding Cultural Program and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival.

Jack Walsh

Jack Walsh is an independent filmmaker and producer living in San Francisco. During the past twelve years, he produced and directed six films (THE SECOND COMING, 1995; PRESENT TENSE, 1987; WORKING CLASS CHRONICLE, 1985; DOCUMENT UNEARTHED..., 1984; BASIC TRAINING, 1984; Beachwalk, 1983) and one videotape (DEAR ROCK, 1993) that have shown at film festivals throughout the United States, Finland and Australia. His film PRESENT TENSE is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modem Art, NY. Other of his works have been broadcast over public and cable television in New York and California. Walsh has been awarded two Golden Gate Awards from the San Francisco International Film Festival (1986, 1988); a Grand Prize (1987) and two Jurors' Citations (1986, 1993) from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival; and an Experimental Film Award from the Palo Alto Film Festival (1986). He is a recipient of film production grants from the Jerome Foundation, The Pacific Pioneer Fund, and the Western States Regional NEA Media Fellowship Program.

Christopher Wilcha

Christopher Wilcha’s work is grounded in themes of alternative music culture and in found art. His first movie, The Target Shoots First, which was his graduate school thesis at CalArts, was an indie hit in several film festivals, winning Best Documentary awards at the Slamdance, South By Southwest and New York Underground festivals. The film has screened internationally and was broadcast on Cinemax in 2001. It is currently being rebroadcast on the Sundance Channel. Wilcha has conceived and directed two pilots for MTV: So Five Minutes Ago and The Social History of the Mosh Pit. He also conceived and directed MTV’s 20th Anniversary image campaign entitled “Places” and has directed commercials and music videos. In collaboration with PBS, Wilcha completed a pilot for an upcoming series, Secondhand Stories a “first person documentary about the thriving shadow economy of used goods across the United States.”

Gerardine Wurzburg

Gerardine Wurzburg is the founder and president of State of the Art, Inc., an Academy Award® winning multimedia communications company that creates products for ordinary people facing health and educational challenges. Among her achievements are the Academy Award-winning documentary Educating Peter, about the mainstreamed education of a mentally challenged boy, and its sequel, Graduating Peter.)