2008 Flaherty Seminar Fellows

ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN FILM FELLOWS

TAD DOYLE has been organizing and programming film festivals for over thirteen years. He has a B.A. in Radio, Television and Film from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an M.S. in Communications from Ithaca College. He has continued to work on various film productions, most recently Evans Chan's documentary Sorceress of the New Piano. He has worked on the D.C. Asian Pacific American Film Festival for over six years and serves as Vice President of the organization.

JYOTI JALALI is a filmmaker and currently lives in Oakland, CA.
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CEC ARTSLINK FELLOWS

VASILY GUSAK was born in Leningrad in 1972. In 1996 he graduated from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts with a degree in Theater Production and in 2000 completed his graduate work in Film and Television at the Russian Institute of Art History. In the 1990s, Gusak worked on several projects for major Russian TV networks. During the 2002-2003 season, he curated the Filmobservation project at St. Petersburg's premier contemporary art center Pushkinskaya 10. In 2004 and 2005, he was the artistic director for a film club at Zero Headline Advertising, and directed the program Filmobservation for the well-known radio station Radio Maria. He has collaborated with cultural institutions and film festivals, including Russia's leading documentary film festival Message to Man. Currently, he is teaching film at the Saint Petersburg University for Film and Television and International Film History at Saint Petersburg State University.

IGOR MOROZOV was born in 1968 in Magnitogorsk, a city in the Ural Mountains. In 1997 he entered the School for Film, Theater and Advertising. After graduating, he took a position as assistant director at a film studio where he participated in producing more than twenty reels and videos. He began working as a film editor in 2001, and has edited more than thirty documentary films and television series. Morozov began directing in 2007. His first film, Music on the Ribs, received an award from the Film Experts and Critics Guild of Russia. To date, he has directed six documentary films.

OLGA STEFANOVA was born in 1981 in Moscow. In 2002 she graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in Journalism. Beginning in her first year of college, Stefanova worked as a correspondent for radio and print, and as a writer and editor for television (ORT, TV-6, RTR). In 2006, she graduated from the prestigious Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, with a degree in Film Direction. Currently Stefanova works as a film director, and is the founder and president of the Gamaun Film Studio. Her films have been shown at Russian and international film festivals. In addition, Stefanova directs film projects produced by the other film studios. Currently she is editing her newest documentary film, which she shot on site at the planet's hottest volcano, Kudriavy, in the Kuril Islands in the Russian Far East.

ANASTASIA TARASOVA was born in 1979 in the city of Polevskoy in the Ural Mountains. She graduated with a degree in Journalism from the Urals State University in Yekaterinburg, while also working as a news reporter for regional television. In 2001 she enrolled in the Film Directing program at the Gerasimov All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Tarasova is a founding member of the Gamaun Film Studios, where she has been directing films since 2004. She completed her degree in 2006, with concentration in Documentary Film. Her films The Light of the White Sea (2006), Children of the Great Lake (2006), and The Old Dacha (2005) have been shown and have won prizes at numerous Russian and international film festivals. She is currently working on several historical documentary projects, and preparing for the release of two films.
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FLAHERTY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWS

CHRISTOPHER ALLEN graduated from Columbia University and studied at Trinity College Dublin, and has worked as a director, creative entrepreneur, and new media artist. He directed the interactive documentary Capitol of Punk, recently part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and is the founder/director of UnionDocs, a non-fiction screening space and arts collaborative in Brooklyn. As founding-partner of the start-up, Counts Media, Christopher played a leading role in the invention and execution of many new entertainment concepts, such as Yellow Arrow, a place-based storytelling platform, exhibited online, on mobile phones, and in galleries and museums internationally.

PAMELA COHN, an independent media producer and project director for the past twenty years, has a broad range of experience in producing projects in all forms of media--print, interactive, broadcast, CG, animation, still photography, video and film, and live events and installations--on behalf of a wide array of corporate, non-profit, design, advertising, and entertainment clients, as well as for individual artists. A documentary filmmaker and DP since 2003, her first nonfiction film, La Fabri_K: The Cuban Hip Hop Factory (2004), was shot on location in Cuba. Now based in New York City, Pamela is also a contributing editor on new media and digital distribution for Tribeca Film Institute's blog Re:Sources, and writes for other arts, media, and film sites, including Re:frame Collection, Filmmaker Magazine, and Spoutblog. She also writes a well-regarded blog dedicated to nonfiction filmmaking called Still in Motion (http://stillinmotion.typepad.com/) where she conducts in-depth interviews with documentary filmmakers and producers, and reports from festivals and other international film events. Currently she is developing and shopping a book project on international female nonfiction filmmakers.

PABLO DE OCAMPO, from Toronto, Canada, was a participant at the 2003 and a Professional Fellow at the 2006 Robert Flaherty Film Seminars. He is currently the Artistic Director of the Images Festival, Canada's largest platform for the exhibition of experimental and innovative media arts practices. Prior to his post at Images, Pablo resided in Portland, Oregon, where he helped to found the experimental film screening series Cinema Project and was the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center.

COURTNEY EGAN mucks in the swampy terrain between the psyche and the mass media with digitally-created short films and video collages. She uses "special effects" techniques to explore the increasingly blurry boundaries between mental states, digital worlds, and consensus reality. Her current work is a series of video installations that contrast organic and urban processes. Courtney holds an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, and lives and works in New Orleans.

MIKE HAZARD, a.k.a. Media Mike, is artist-in-residence at the Center for International Education. He is a current Bush Artist Fellow, awarded a grant to finish a documentary portrait of George Stoney. In development is a film about migration with the people of Pelican Rapids, MN. For more information, visit his website: www.thecie.org.

KELVIN KYUNG KUN PARK was born in South Korea in 1978 and has grown up all around the world. He received an MFA degree in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. His works have been shown in various film and art venues, including Seoul Independent Film Festival, LA Freewaves, Dusseldorf Contemporary, and Walker Art Center, Rencontres International, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin.

CINDI ROWELL is a DVD Producer for New Yorker Films. Her projects have included the DVD releases for Jia Zhang-ke's Platform (2000) (and the forthcoming Still Life [2006]), Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours (2006), Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé (2004), Hong Sang-soo's Woman Is the Future of Man (2004) (and the forthcoming Woman on the Beach [2006]), among many others. Prior to her position at New Yorker Films, she served as the Director of Acquisitions for Milestone Film & Video, following her studies in film preservation at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House. She has also worked for the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, the Philadelphia Independent Film and Videomakers' Association, and the Museum of Modern Art. 2008 marks the final year and volume for The Griffith Project, the twelve-volume series on D.W. Griffith which she has co-edited for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
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FLAHERTY STUDENT FELLOWS

JENNY CHIO is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley. Her current research project is an ethnography of tourism and social change in two rural villages in China. Jenny is particularly interested in the intersection between the visual world and tourism, which is embedded in activities such as photography, tourist advertising, amateur videography, and visual "branding." Additionally, she is working on a documentary film about the contemporary lives of these village residents. Previously, Jenny studied visual anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she completed a short film on the representation of ethnic minorities in China (using archival films produced during the 1950s and 1960s) which screened at several anthropological film festivals in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

ALICE DRIVER is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is interested in contemporary Latin American literature and film. Her most recent academic article, an interview with Colombian film director Victor Gaviria, will be published in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies in January of 2009. Alice is also an avid traveler and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Transitions Abroad, Abroad View, and the travel guide To Vietnam With Love.

IRENE HERRERA is a photographer, documentary filmmaker, and journalist, based in Japan, with more than ten years of experience working on media-related projects in Venezuela, Brazil, Spain, France, Miami, India, and Japan. In the year 2000, upon receiving a Monbukagakusho scholarship, she came to Japan to pursue graduate studies in filmmaking and is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation on photography and anthropology at Nihon University. She also teaches courses on Filmmaking, Media Studies, and the History of Documentary at Temple University Japan. Her work on Japanese Brazilians was featured in a solo photo exhibition at the prestigious Nikon Salon in 2006. In 2005, Irene received the Gran Prix at the Expo Aichi Friendship Film Festival for a documentary on Venezuela and Japan titled Kodo wo Awaseba (2005). Other recent works include Gaijin no Honne: The Story of Five Women in Tokyo(2004) and You can call me Nikkie (2008), a story on a transgender prostitute living in Tokyo. Her articles and photographs have also been featured inVariety, El Nacional, Metropolis, Dune, and The Japan Times.

ABRAHAM LIFSHITZ was born in Mexico City and emigrated four years ago to Montreal, Canada. He has a Bachelor's degree in Communications from the UNUM University in Mexico City and has been editing and collaborating in documentary films for the last six years. In 2006, he joined the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal in the Film Production Program and is currently starting a new documentary film production company, also based in Montreal.

SIMON TRÉPANIER, originally from Canada, has a Master's degree in Development Studies from Leeds University (U.K.) and worked for the United Nations for seven years in Africa (Burundi, Angola, Gabon), after which he joined the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, Canada, in 2006. His first short film, Perception of Tragedy, won an award in 2007 at the International Student Film Festival (Carpinteria, USA) in the experimental category and participated in the Student World Film Festival in Montreal, Canada. Ants and Elephants, co-directed with Abraham Lifshitz (Flaherty 08), is his first independent documentary film.
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FLEDGLING FUND FELLOWS

TANAZ ESHAGHIAN, who left Iran with her mother at age six, graduated from Brown University in 1996, and has a Master's in Media Studies from The New School. Her latest film, Be Like Others (2008), an examination of the social pressures faced by homosexuals in Iran, played at the Sundance Film Festival, and also won the Jury Prize and the Siegessäule at the Berlin International Film Festival's Teddy Queer Film Awards.

ALFREDO GUZMAN is the co-director of Dot Fiftyones, one the most promising art galleries in Miami; its focus is promoting emerging and young established artists from the USA and other regions.. Previously he was part of the academic staff of the Buenos Aires State University, where he taught the "Expressive Medium I & II" courses for the "BA in Fashion & Textile Design". Between 1991 and 1996, Alfredo worked in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as Fashion Producer and Art Director for different local TV networks, magazines, the San Martin Theater, and for Latin MTV Networks. From 1990 to 1994, Alfredo was the Creative Designer at Tedeum, an avant-garde boutique where he developed his own clothing line. After that he moved to Miami to open Pachamama, a laboratory for emerging artists and furniture designers, and in 1997 he created The Flower Bazaar, a flower boutique where he worked as the Chief Creative Designer until 2004. Alfredo also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the Buenos Aires State University.

THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS, raised in the Bronx and Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, is an award-winning filmmaker and cultural warrior whose documentary films, installations, and experimental videos have been featured in venues across the international landscape on television, at festivals, museums, and galleries. For over six years, Harris produced for public television, which included two Emmy nominations (in 1991) for his work as a staff producer at WNET (New York's PBS affiliate) on The Eleventh Hour and Thirteen Live. Among his films areTwelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2005), which won Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, and That's My Face (2001), which won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury of Christian Churches at the Berlin Film Festival.

LAURIE KOH is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, and filmmaker. She is Managing Editor of Publications at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Formerly, she was Managing Editor of Film Arts, the magazine of San Francisco's Film Arts Foundation, and has also worked as Copy Chief of Girlfriends magazine and Calendar Listings Assistant for leading alternative weekly The San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her short documentary Sisterz of the Underground: Extra Credit(2003) has screened around the Bay Area, and her short narrative Between the Lines (2005) has screened at film festivals including the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and Inside/Out Toronto Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Recently she served as a member of the shorts screening committee for the 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and as a Documentary Juror for the 2008 Slamdance Film Festival.

INGRID KOPP is Director of Shooting People in the U.S., an international networking community for independent filmmakers. She began her career in television in the Documentaries department at Channel 4 Television in the U.K. While there, she worked across both original commissions and documentary acquisitions and ran a series of workshops for young filmmakers. She moved to New York in 2004 to work as an Associate Producer for a number of independent production companies before taking her current post at Shooting People. She also works as an events producer for the Britdoc festival in the U.K. and as a documentary programming consultant, and is currently writing a series of articles about independent film for MovieScope magazine in the U.K.

KIRTHI NATH is an award-winning South Asian filmmaker, writer, educator, and curator. As an artist, her body of inspired creative work fluidly straddles genres, occupying a fertile hybrid landscape of cultural poetics, experimentalism, and hybrid narrative. Tactile and dreamlike, her work explores female subjectivity, memory, desire, spirituality, and racial and sexual identities. Nath's films have shown in several festivals and events. As an educator, Kirthi teaches video at the Bay Area Video Coalition to marginalized youth communities and is constantly exploring multiple ways of empowering young people to become both producer and audience: to understand genre and go beyond it. Kirthi's curatorial work reflects her interest in promoting women, people of color, youth, and queer perspectives. Also an active member in the art community, Kirthi has appeared on several panels and has been guest juror for film festivals.

JASON SANDERS is an archivist and writer at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA. He is also a writer for film festivals around North America, including the Tribeca, Miami, Seattle, and San Francisco International Film Festivals, and is the editor of the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival Catalog. His writings have appeared in Filmmaker Magazine,Cinema Scope, Release Print, and International Documentary.

TANYA SLEIMAN is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker, currently earning her MFA at Stanford University's Documentary Film and Video Program. She is drawn to character portraits and visual essays. In her work, she explores themes of culture, transformation, history, and memory. She has a background in Middle East Studies and International Education, and is pursuing the documentary medium for its ability to cross borders through storytelling.

LUCIA SMALL has been an independent filmmaker/producer for over fifteen years, working in both documentary and fiction form. In 2005, she teamed up with Ed Pincus to co-direct, co-produce, and edit The Axe in the Attic (2007), a story about the largest internal migration in U.S. History--Hurricane Katrina--which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival and went on to screen at various festivals. In 2002, Small's directorial debut, My Father, The Genius, garnered several top festival awards, including the Grand Jury Prizes for Best Documentary and Best Editing at the Slamdance Film Festival. Small's producing credits include The Jew in the Lotus (1997), The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles (1995), Mississippi: River of Song (1998), and Damrell's Fire (2005). Her company, small angst films, recently opened offices in New York, and is currently developing several film projects, including a doc/fiction hybrid, War Stories, about the generational consequences of war on families and communities.

HARRIETTE YAHR is a filmmaker and writer. Her short films have screened at festivals worldwide, including Telluride, and her latest, Baker's Men, aired on both the Sundance Channel and Logo, and is distributed on DVD by the Spiritual Cinema Circle. Her writings and interviews have appeared in numerous periodicals and websites, including IndieWIRE, the Advocate, Salon.com, and the Miami Herald. She has received several grants for her work, including a Florida Individual Artists Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship, and a U.S. Embassy (Ankara, Turkey) Travel Grant. She has sat on film festival panels, taught filmmaking at the University of Miami, and has been a guest lecturer at Dartmouth College, Columbia College Chicago, and is part of the Mobile Film School. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego.

JUAN CARLOS ZALDIVAR completed both his BFA and MFA at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he has also taught as an adjunct faculty member. Zaldivar's work is often interactive and crosses boundaries in mediums and disciplines, and has been screened at many festivals worldwide. A Sundance Film Institute Fellow, Zaldívar has also served as a Juror for the Sundance Film Festival and for the Miami 'International Film Festival, and has served on several boards of directors for arts organizations. He is the co-founder and programming director of the Florida Room Documentary Film Festival, an event solely dedicated to social issue documentaries. His directing credits also include 90 Miles (2001), The Story of the Red Rose (1998),Palingenesis (1989), and Soldiers Pay (2004) (co-directed with David O. Russell and Tricia Regan). His art has also been exhibited at Scope Miami, Deluxe Arts Gallery, Marina Kessler Gallery, Dot Fiftyone Gallery, and Chelsea Art Space in London.
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PHILADELPHIA FOUNDATION FELLOWS

GERARD HOOPER is a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. He has also been a director and cinematographer for over twenty years. His work has been broadcast on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and has been shown in theaters in the U.S. and abroad.

BREONNE LUDRICK is a writer, media consultant, and avid lover of cinema. Her writings have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She often centers her work around media, including coverage of NBC's diversity initiatives, and has served as a media relations consultant for the Association of Multiethnic American's National Loving Decision Conference in 2007. She has also worked in programming and promotions at the home shopping network, QVC. Breonne's passion for cinema has been lifelong, but reached its peak during her studies at the university level where she was in the Phi Eta Sigma National Honor Society. Breonne received a B.A. in Communications from Temple University, and will be pursuing her M.A. in Media Studies at The New School this fall. She is also a member of New York Women in Film and Television.

HANNAH IRELAND is currently an MFA candidate at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, and received her B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Upon graduating in 2001, she moved to New York City with a grant from the Hodson Trust to do a summer internship at the Doc Tank with filmmaker Immy Humes. In 2003, Hannah collaborated with artist Annie Vought to createSimple Pleasures, a documentary about the inhabitants of a café. Her recent work includes cinematography for Barrel Children by Cara Weir, assistant directing Cowboys and Indians at the Duke City Shootout with Patrick Mehaffy, and recording an audio piece about a mule-packing trip her parents took in the early seventies.

SHERAE RIMPSEY is a visual artist living and working in Philadelphia.

ANDREA SCOTT is a New York City-based documentary filmmaker and writer, and a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a degree in Communication. As a student at Penn, she directed, edited, wrote, and shot an autobiographical documentary about Jewish women and Mah Jongg, Mah Jongg (Neither Mah, Nor Jongg: Discuss) (2006), which was an official documentary selection at the 2006 Philadelphia Student Film Festival. She won "Best Screenwriter" and "Best Short Screenplay" at the 2006 Ivy League Film Festival for The Infamous Gabi Garcia. Currently, she is adapting "Gabi" into a feature-length screenplay. Andrea has also worked as an intern for ABC News 20/20 and for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In its first season, she worked as a post-production assistant for the Emmy-winning television show 30 Rock. Currently, Andrea is in post production on Hillel's Angels, a short documentary about Jewish motorcyclists, which she directed, shot, and edited, and which will premiere at festivals in the fall. She lives and works in Brooklyn as production coordinator and in-house editor for Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Cynthia Wade.

GARY YONG was born in Malaysia, raised partly in Singapore, and lived in Canada before moving to the U.S.; he is currently based in Philadelphia. Grounded in the physical experience of border-crossing, his work attempts to describe a fluid state of being outside and between borders, unprotected and unclaimed, yet also liberated. He is an MFA candidate in Film & Media Arts at Temple University, and is currently at work on his first feature. The film utilizes a hybrid form that sometimes documents, and other times elaborately stages and fantasizes, the experiences of a group of foreigners in Philadelphia, played by a company of professional and non-professional actors whose specific national/ethnic origins resemble those of their characters. Gary also works commercially as a freelance motion designer and produces design-centered multimedia content for web/print/broadcast. Please visit: www.fluidrace.com/yot and www.garyyong.com for more information.
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SOUTHWEST ALTERNATE MEDIA PROJECT FELLOWS

MARY LAMPE is the Executive Director of Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), a 31-year-old nonprofit media arts organization based in Houston, TX. She also serves as the Co-Executive Producer for The Territory, an international short film showcase series, broadcast on Texas PBS stations. She has produced award-winning, short documentaries about art and artists for museums and has programmed film series of all genres. In addition, Mary has also taught film history to high school and university students. During her nine-year tenure at SWAMP, she has helped filmmakers raise nearly $2 million for their non-commercial projects. Lampe also regularly serves on grant panels, including Texas Commission on the Arts, the Houston Arts Alliance, Latino Public Broadcasting Corporation, Independent Television Service (ITVS, San Francisco), Anthony Radziwill Documentary Film Grant, and Media Arts grants panels for the City of Austin and the City of Houston.

TISH STRINGER is a Houston-based anthropologist and filmmaker. She is an expert on radical cinema collectives and video activism's role in social movements and is currently working on a feature documentary about Iraqi artists. Tish is the proud mother of a daughter on whom she's pinned her hopes for a better world, and also works as the Film and Video Technician in the Department of Visual Arts at Rice University.
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