David Bagnall, graduate of the film school at NYU Tisch School of the arts, has been collaborating with documentary filmmaker George Stoney for 15 years. David has worked with George as Director, Editor, and Camera on documentary films about many subjects including: the renowned film and television historian Erik Barnouw; Lloyd Burlingame, Chair, NYU Theatrical Design Department, who was losing his sight and searching for a new form of visual expression; incarcerated participants in a theater program at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility; and Gaston Lachaise, the French-born American sculptor. Other recent collaborations include experimental video/dance theater stage productions with choreographer and Bessie Award winner Chris Yon. He is currently in production on a feature-length biography of Paulo Freire titled “Finding Freire” as well as “Staying Out” a film about recidivism and the New York State Correctional system.  His work has been screened at the National Gallery, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; MOMA; Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center; Donnell Film Library; NYU Cantor Film Center; Irish Film Center, Dublin, as well as universities and festivals around the United States, Canada, Ireland, Brazil, and Chile.

Les Blank

(born Tampa, Florida, 1935) is a documentary filmmaker best known for his portraits of American traditional musicians (though he’s also shot films in Africa, Asia, and Europe). Blank attended Tulane University, where he received a BA in English literature and an MFA in theater. He also studied film for two years at the University of Southern California. Five years after completing his university education Blank founded his own production-distribution company, Flower Films, and most of his films since that time have been independently produced. Most of his films focus on American traditional music forms including blues, Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, Tex-Mex, polka, tamburitza, and Hawaiian. Many represent the only filmed documents of musicians now deceased and musical forms now disappearing. Blank's spirited films capture the cultural context of musical communities, portraying the surroundings from which various styles of roots music emerge. His notable films on non-musical subjects include Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980, now on the National Film Registry, as is his 1976 short, Chulas Fronteras) and another about gap-toothed women (Gap Toothed Women, 1987) as well as two films about a certain German director: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) and the acclaimed Burden of Dreams (1982). His 2007 film All In This Tea, co-directed by Gina Leibrecht and shot in China, is a profile of the Marin County-based tea importer and adventurer David Lee Hoffman. In 2007, Blank was awarded the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal in the Arts. Les's son, Harrod Blank, has also become a documentary filmmaker. Blank lives in Berkeley, California.

Bibi Calderaro is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been shown internationally since 1995 and locally and recently at PS1 MoMA and MinusSpace, NY. She has participated in the Elizabeth Foundation Studio Program and AIM Program, and has received the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant, among other international awards and residencies. With Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and others, she organized “Gift and Commodity, Transactions in Contemporary Art Practice,” a panel discussion for CUNY Queens College at Art in General. Her latest projects include the IWT collaborative at Momenta Art; Librioteca Pineal, a growing library permanently installed at the Center for Artistic Research in Buenos Aires; and a collaborative curatorial project with Julio Grinblatt to be shown in spring 2012 at the Hunter College Galleries, about the effects of John Cage’s oeuvre on contemporary art. Curious about intersubjectivity and the possibilities of communication and change, she questions boundaries -- of subjects, of disciplines, of knowledge -- to create tensions, to problematize, to simplify, to yield new layers of perception and thought. Calderaro critically employs a range of media such as still and moving images, sound, objects, writing, and performative actions. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Helen Hill (1970 - 2007) was an independent filmmaker and activist born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina. She studied experimental animation at Harvard (1988-92) and the California Institute of the Arts (1993-95). After living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she and her husband Paul Gailiunas settled in New Orleans. Helen taught film workshops and courses in Halifax, Columbia, New Orleans, and many other places, and she compiled Recipes For Disaster: A Film Cookbooklet. Helen championed low-budget and do-it-yourself approaches to filmmaking, including Super 8 shooting, handprocessing, and drawing on film. As her alter-ego character Madame Winger tells first-time filmmakers in Madame Winger Makes a Film (2001): “It is a good idea behind a film, and not fancy technology or a big budget, that makes a great film.”

Laura Kissel is a documentary filmmaker and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Her media work explores social/cultural landscapes, the representation of history, and the use of orphan films. She was named the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Media Arts Fellow for 2007-2008 and received a Fulbright Award in 2009. Her educational travelogue Beyond the Classroom: China (2007) was nominated for an Emmy and awarded a CINE Golden Eagle and three Telly Awards. Cabin Field (2005), a nonfiction essay about farm workers in rural Georgia, was honored with three festival awards including the Jurors’ Citation Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. She is at work on Cotton Road, a documentary connecting South Carolina cotton farmers, Chinese textile workers, and global consumers.

Richard Leacock, the legendary filmmaker to whom the 2011 Flaherty Seminar is dedicated, also participated in Film Culture’s bolstering of a new phase in independent film. See “The Frontiers of Realist Cinema: The Work of Ricky Leacock,” and Ricky Leacock, “For an Uncontrolled Cinema,” both in the summer 1961 issue of Film Culture.

Jodie Mack is an independent animator, curator, and historian-in-training who received her MFA in film, video and new media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and currently teaches animation at Dartmouth College. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Mack’s 16mm films and music videos have screened at a variety of venues -- from backyards, basements, and classrooms to Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center; Los Angeles’ Velaslavasay Panorama; New York City’s School of Visual Arts Theater; and on tour with Ok Go. She has also worked as a curator and administrator with the Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival, Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Eye and Ear Clinic, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Chicago’s favorite microcinema, The Nightingale. Additionally, Mack is an Illinois Arts Council media arts fellow and the 2010 co-recipient of the Orphan Film Symposium’s Helen Hill Award.

Caroline Martel is an independent documentary filmmaker, artist and researcher whose work has been presented to critical acclaim internationally – in diverse places such as at the Toronto International Film Festival, Amsterdam’s IDFA, on SRC, NHK, and SVT, at the MoMA in New York and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, as well as at the Flaherty Seminar. Her first feature documentary, The Phantom of the Operator, showed in some 50 venues and was reviewed as “... an enormously imaginative docu ... an hour of nonstop visual and intellectual stimulation.” (Variety). Martel has been synthesizing documentary theory and practice for the last decade, with a special interest in archives, invisible histories, and audio/visual technologies : Dernier appel (National Film Bord of Canada, 52min, 2001), The Phantom of the Operator (productions artifact, 65min, 2004), FilmingMeFilmed(2min22, 2006), Wavemakers (feature documentary upcoming in 2011). À St-Henri, the 26th of August (Parabola Films, 2011) a collective documentary Martel took a good part in as a director, was a box-office hit theatrically in Canada. Her first gallery show, the montage installation Industry/Cinema, will be presented at the Museum of Moving Images in New York in 2012. She was the main researcher/writer of the Cinémathèque québécoise’s virtual exhibit De Nanook à l’Oumigmag on the history of documentary in Canada (Boomerang Prize, 2001). In 2002, she directed the interactive workshop Documentary Visions about documentary movements at the National Film Board of Canada since 1939. She serves as a member of the Québec chapter of the Documentary Organization of Canada. She holds a BA in Communications and an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University, and is starting a research-creation PhD in Communications Studies.

Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director whose work spans almost thirty years.  He recently served as Producer and Supervising Editor on the Spike Lee directed HBO documentary If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, a five year follow up to the Emmy and Peabody award winning When The Levees Broke. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton's Blackside production Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads. For one of his episodes in this series, he received an Emmy.  Eight years later, he returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton's last documentary series I'll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community. For the series, Mr. Pollard received The George Peabody Award.  Between 1990 and 2000, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee's films: Mo' Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, and Bamboozled.  As well, Mr. Pollard and Mr. Lee co-produced a couple of documentary productions for the small and big screen: Spike Lee Presents Mike Tyson, a biographical sketch for HBO for which Mr. Pollard received an Emmy, and Four Little Girls, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award. Mr. Pollard recently won his sixth Emmy for Best Editing on the HBO documentary By The People: The Election of Barack Obama.

Frank Scheffer, born in The Netherlands in 1956, is internationally recognized as a master of sound and image. Scheffer was schooled at the Academy for Industrial Design, Eindhoven, “Vrije Academie” Art College, in The Hague, where he studied with the filmmaker Frans Zwartjes. He is also a graduate of the Dutch Film Academy. Scheffer’s early films include Zoetrope People (1982), about Francis Ford Coppola, as well as documentaries on the Dalai Lama and other cultural subjects. In 1985 he directed the music video A Day for the band XYMOX, leading him toward musical subjects. Wagner’s Ring (1987), a condensed version of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungen, began his work with John Cage. Collaborations with Cage continued with the conceptual Chessfilmnoise (1988), Time Is Music (1988), and From Zero (1995), done in collaboration with Andrew Culver. Scheffer’s films on music constitute an overview of the great composers of the 20th century, from Conducting Mahler(1996), to Five Orchestral Pieces (1994) on Arnold Schönberg, and The Final Chorale (1990), on Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Wind Instruments conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. The history of electronic music, from Stockhausen to DJ Spooky and Squarepusher, was the subject of Sonic Acts (1998). The sprawling In the Ocean (2001) features Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter, John Cage and Brian Eno. In addition to numerous critical and festival awards, Scheffer was honored with a complete retrospective of his films at the 2001 Holland Festival and the 2007 festival Wien Modern in Vienna, Austria.

Lillian F. Schwartz pioneered the use of different types of computers and original peripherals in art, animation, optical, effects, kinetics, perception, and analysis. In 1968 she used her doctor-husband’s X-ray light boxes and painted acrylics that she laminated and placed over the fluorescent tubes. She constructed sculptures, eventually kinetic, and then her most complex piece to that date, Proxima Centauri. It catapulted her to MoMA’s “the machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age.” Leon Harmon, an expert in visual perception at Bell Labs, asked her to drop by and that visit did not end until the demise of the Labs. The Labs embodied experimentation, foresight, a breeding ground for Nobelists. She branched into art, archaeological analyses and electronic restoration. In 184 and ’85 she worked with Richard Voss at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson research center to input part of MoMA’s art collection and the architecture of the new building, using teraflops of power to scan in sculpture, paintings, graphics, frames from films by famous artists while maintaining perspective and color. The result in 1985 was the creation of the first computer-generated Public Service Announcement and was the first PSA in this medium to win an Emmy. With Unix-based machines, she proved indisputably that Leonardo used himself as the final model for the Mona Lisa.

Melinda Stone, a somewhat anachronistic filmmaker, curator, and researcher, dabbles in it all to create an eclectic show that highlights her on-going interest in homesteading, land use, amateur filmmaking and film extravaganzas. A kind of present day film impresario, Stone borrows from the past and infuses each of her unique shows with sing-alongs and other participatory fare. A recipient of the Phelan Award in Filmmaking, a San Francisco Goldie and numerous grants for her work, including San Francisco Arts Commission, Fleishhaker Foundation, Gerbode Foundation, and the Pioneer Fund, for the past fifteen years Stone has been showing her films and creating film events beyond the black box– she loves musing upon and experimenting with accepted distribution/exhibition models. These events include Fleur Power (1998), Sink or Swim (2001), The California Tour (2003), Market Street 1905/2005 (2005),Return to Canyon (2010), and 11 in 11 (2011). A founding member of the Center For Land Use Interpretation and the Barbie Liberation Organization, Stone is now an associate professor, director of Film Studies, and co-director of the Garden Project at USF. She is currently working on a long-term video project entitled The How-To Homestead Serial.

George C. Stoney is a veteran filmmaker of over a hundred documentaries, a lifelong media activist and professor of film at New York University. A journalism student at the University of North Carolina, he worked as a photo intelligence officer in World War II and as an information officer for the Farm Security Administration. In 1946, Stoney joined the Southern Educational Film Service as writer and director and in 1953 started his own production company that made many documentary films on a multitude of subjects. All My Babies, one of his first efforts and a pioneering look at childbirth, received numerous accolades and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2002. Stoney was the director of the Challenge for Change project, a socially active documentary production wing of the National Film Board of Canada from 1968-70 and is perhaps most famous as the "godfather of public access to cable television," a title he characteristically declines. Still, his advocacy for every citizen's right to use the new media for public expression helped create the federal legislation which now enables community media. Stoney believes "films should do, not just be."

Tan Pin Pin’s films are explorations of Singapore's histories, contexts, and limits. They have screened at notable festivals including Berlin, Pusan, Full Frame, South by Southwest, Rotterdam and Visions du Reel. They have also screened internationally on Discovery Channel and received sold out theatrical releases in Singapore, toured Singapore schools and was acquired by Singapore Airlines. Meanwhile, her video art was shown in the President’s Young Talent, Singapore Art Show and Aedes Gallery, Berlin. She has won or been nominated for more than 20 awards, most recently for Invisible City. The citation from Cinema du Reel describes it as “A witty, intellectually challenging essay on history and memory as tools of civil resistance.” Singapore GaGa, the Best Film, 2006 according to The Straits Times, is described as “A subtly subversive yet thoroughly celebratory film.” Pin Pin who has an MA from Oxford University, won a scholarship to Northwestern University where she earned an MFA. Moving House, her thesis film won the Student Academy Award for Best Documentary. Her latest works The Impossibility of Knowing and Snow City were both shown.

Roger Tilton taught film courses at Columbia University after making Jazz Dance. In Confessions of a Cultist, critic Andrew Sarris cites Tilton as the mentor who directed him to the Mekas brothers. In 1955, Tilton was one of several “sponsors” (along with David and Francis Flaherty, Willard Van Dyke, Hans Richter, et al.) of the first issue of the journal Film Culture.

Jane Weiner was born in Manhattan in 1947 and grew up in the Arizona desert. She received her first photojournalist press card at 17 years old; studied biology and American History; BA English Literature and MA in Film Studies from San Francisco State University (special studies at MIT with Richard Leacock). 1973-75: Artist-in-Residence with the NEA’s Artist-in-the-Schools Program and The Communications Experience in Philadelphia offered workshops in film, video, and photography to rural and inner-city public schools. Mid-1970s: started as assistant editor on 35mm features in New York City; become a supervising editor at the National Film Board of Canada for the U.N. Habitat Conference in Vancouver. 1980s: While working abroad with Corporation for Public Broadcasting, INPUT and European broadcasters (BBC in London, NOS in Holland, SVT in Stockholm, La Sept-Arte in Paris), Jane began organizing international co-productions and, for over 25 years, has written, directed, and produced award-winning films on both sides of the Atlantic. She is currently working on a book entitled, PRIMARY: L’héritage du cinéma documentaire based on her video conversations with Ricky Leacock, DA Pennebaker, Bob Drew, Terry Macartney-Filgate and Al Maysles – on the beginnings of cinema vérité in America.