The Storytellers

THE
STORYTELLERS

THE
STORYTELLERS

Valentina Vargas

Troy Osaki

Thomas Allen Harris

The Universes

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company

Shaandiin Tome

Sarah Crowell

Sameena Zehra

re:imagine/ATL

Radical Remedies

Pratibha Parmar

Phillip Agnew

Pamela Yates

Paco de Onis

Open Society Foundation

Michèle Stephenson

Martha Redbone

Marlon Riggs

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Macky Alston and Selina Lewis

Lakeesha ‘Keyssh’ Datts

Kelly Whalen

Karen Everett

Just Wondering

Just Jamez, Tony Louie, Big D

Judith Helfand

Joni Whitlock

Jessica Jones

Darius Simpson

Chip Thomas

Chinaka Hodge

Ayodele Casel

Amikaeyla Gaston

Aiya Meilan

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Women and Girls Rising

Valentina Vargas

Valentina Vargas-Sosa is a Colombian storyteller who explores through documentary and performing arts, the complex realities of Colombia, a country where social and political conflict remains latent. She describes her experience as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S as her primary political education, one that shaped her understanding that nothing is fortuitous and that everything obeys an order held together by systematic oppression.

Her documentary film Resiliencia”, that was featured in various festivals worldwide, explores the struggles to find the truth, justice and reparations of the women in la Comuna 13, a big sector in her natal city Medellín, that are looking for their loved ones that were disappeared by State forces and paramilitary forces in the infamous military operation Operación Orión” that took place in 2002.

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Future Wisdom

Troy Osaki

Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese poet, community organizer, and attorney from Seattle, WA. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he has earned fellowships from Kundiman and the Jack Straw Cultural Center. His work has appeared in the Bellingham Review, Hobart, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He is a national co-convener of the Malaya Movement, a U.S. Movement Against Killings and Dictatorship in the Philippines, and writes in hopes to build a safe and just place to live in by uniting the people and reimagining the world through poetry.

Contribution Link: Malaya Movement

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Reclaiming The Past, Owning Our Stories

Thomas Allen Harris

Thomas Allen Harris uses film, video, photography, and performance to explore family and identity in a participatory model of filmmaking that he has been pioneering since 1990. His deeply personal films have received acclaim at international film/art festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, FESPACO, Outfest, and Melbourne Art Festival; have broadcast on PBS, AfroPOP, Sundance Channel, ARTE, CBC, SBN and NZT; exhibited at MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Arts 1995 Biennial, Corcoran Gallery, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and Qwangju Biennale.

In 2019, Harris created and hosted the PBS series Family Pictures USA, a new format of television that examines America through the lens of the family photographic album, garnering an audience of over 5.3 million. The series grew out of Harristouring roadshow Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, which uses family photographs to transform audiences into storytellers.

Mr. Harris has received numerous awards including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and United States Artist Fellowships as well as an NAACP Image Award, African Oscar, and Emmy and Peabody nominations. A graduate of Harvard College and member of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Mr. Harris is on faculty at Yale University, jointly appointed in African American and Film & Media Studies.

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Identity and Belonging

The Universes

UNIVERSES THEATER COMPANY: Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, Steven Sapp, William Ruiz aka Ninja, Gamal Chasten

UNIVERSES is a national Ensemble Theater Company, of multi-disciplined writers and performers of color, who fuse theater, poetry, dance, jazz, hip hop, politics, down home blues and Spanish boleros to create moving, challenging and entertaining works for the stage. The group breaks the traditional theatrical bounds to create its own brand of theater. Founded in The Bronx, New York in 1995, the members of UNIVERSES came together in the urban poetry and music scene of the late 1990s; quickly moving through the down town” performance scene to built a home for themselves in American Theatre. In their 20+ years, UNIVERSES has performed at venues throughout the United States and toured extensively worldwide. 

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Future Wisdom

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company was born in 1982 out of an 11-year collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948–1988). During this time, they redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance. The Company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the dance-theater world.

The Company has distinguished itself through extensive community outreach and educational programs, including partnerships with Bard College, where company members teach an innovative curriculum rooted in the Companys creative model and highly collaborative methods; and with Lincoln Center Institute, which uses Company works in its educator-training and in-school repertory programs. University and college dance programs throughout the U.S. work with the Company to reconstruct significant works for their students. The Company conducts intensive workshops for professional and pre-professional dancers and produces a broad range of discussion events at home and on the road, all born from the strong desire to participate in the world of ideas.

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Identity and Belonging

Shaandiin Tome

Shaandiin Tome is a filmmaker and director from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Tome was put on the map as a writer/director with her breakout short film, Mud (Hashtł’ishnii), which was selected and premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.  Her film went worldwide.  It received awards from Montana Independent Film Festival, Presence Autochtone (Montreal), LA Skins Fest, and New Filmmakers Los Angeles.

In her upcoming feature, Dibé, she was a participant at the Sundance Creative Producers Summit 2019 and Sundance Talent Forum 2020. At the beginning of 2020, she was selected as a finalist for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

Her current work spans documentary, commercial, and narrative work with National Geographic, Al Jazeera, Vice, Levis, and Merrell.

Her unique perspective allows her to capture other trailblazers in the indigenous community. She lives in Albuquerque, aiming to bring resonating imagery in convergence with story, illustrating her perspective as a Diné woman.

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Calling In The Spirits

Sarah Crowell

Sarah Crowell has taught dance, theater and violence prevention for 30 years. She is currently the Artistic Director at Destiny Arts Center where she has served in different capacities since 1990, including Executive Director from 2002-2007. Since 1993, she has directed the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company, which has been the subject of two documentary films, and won the National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award. Sarah has facilitated arts integration, violence prevention, cultural humility and team building professional development sessions with artists and educators since 2000, both locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the KPFA Peace award, the KQED Womens History Local Hero award, the Bay Area Dance Week award, the Alameda County Arts Leadership award, and the National Guild for Community Arts Education Milestone award. She is also a four-time finalist for a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education.

Sarah is a retired professional dancer, having performed and toured with numerous dance and dance/theater companies including Impulse Jazz Dance Company in Boston and the Dance Brigade in San Francisco.  She also co-created the dance/theater company i am Productions! She believes that the arts are an essential component of the journey to social justice, especially art forms that involve moving the body. She believes that movement must be part of all movements for social change.

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Identity and Belonging

Sameena Zehra

Sameena is a consummate writer and performer and has a great connection with her audience. Her humour is dark and her mind is absurd. She is a storyteller, political satirist, feminist and humanist with a unique take on the world, equally at home exploring the individual experiences of daily life and the larger issues of the world we live in. She has performed her solo shows all over the world, including Edinburgh Fringe, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Brighton Fringe, Adelaide Fringe and New Zealand Fringe.

Her most recent creation is The Magnificent Weirdos, a production house with a focus on access and inclusion, making art commonplace and available to everyone, all the time. The Magnificent Weirdos will be funded in the Maōri spirit of koha- an offering, donation or contribution with connotations of reciprocity. If you fancy it, you can send your koha to paypal.me/sameenazehra

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re:imagine/ATL

re:imagine/ATL is an education and workforce development organization for the creative media industry.

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Radical Remedies

In Radical Remedies, Collective Healing and Power Through Story, Detroit Narrative Agency (DNA) was interested in building collective healing and power in their community. They invited Detroiters and Michigan residents to creatively respond to this question:  As our communities face the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and severe anti-Black racism, what do resilience, resistance, joy, grief, and collective care look like? These four short films emerged from this call to action.

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Women and Girls Rising

Pratibha Parmar

Writer-director-producer Pratibha Parmar has directed numerous award-winning documentary films for BBC, Channel 4, PBS and European broadcasters. Her credits include “Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth,” a feature-length documentary on the life of Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Color Purple” Alice walker and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover and Quincy Jones. The film garnered several awards including the Jury Award at the Napa Valley Film Festival.

Parmar has an exemplary track record for her passionate commitment to making films with integrity and illuminating untold stories with visual flair and imagination. Her work has been widely exhibited at international film festivals and broadcast globally. Pratibha’s dedication in bringing complex subjects into mainstream media has helped change the contours of popular discourse on race, feminism, sexuality and creativity.

Pratibha’s credits include A Place of Rage, a documentary film on African-American women and the civil rights movement featuring Angela Davis and June Jordan. The film received international critical acclaim and was named Best Historical Documentary at the National Black Programming Consortium in the U.S.
Recognized as a pioneering filmmaker, Parmar directed the ground-breaking film “Khush,” one of the first films to give visibility to and highlight the experiences of LGBT people in India. Parmar made her debut as a narrative director with her award- winning film, “Nina’s Heavenly Delights.”

Parmar made her US debut as a director of scripted television in 2019 when she was invited by Ava DuVernay to direct episode 12 of Season 4 of “Queen Sugar.”

In 2017, Parmar was awarded the ICON award presented by Bagari London Indian Film Festival in Association with the British Film Institute for Outstanding Contribution to Indian and World Cinema. She is the proud recipient of the Frameline Film Festival Award, presented to an individual who has made a significant and outstanding contribution to lesbian and gay media.

Parmar is currently in production on the hybrid feature film, “My Name Is Andrea” featuring Amandla Stenberg, Soko, Ashley Judd, Andrea Riseborough and Christine Lahti.
She is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Film Fatales (SF) and a voting member of Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

She is represented by APA.

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Phillip Agnew

Phillip Agnew co-founded the Dream Defenders in 2012 after the murder of Trayvon Martin and has been dubbed “one of this generation’s leading voices” and recognized by both EBONY magazine and The Root as one of the 100 most influential African Americans in the nation. He emerged as a national activist when he helped to organize students from FAMU, Florida State University, and Tallahassee Community College in the creation of the Student Coalition for Justice, which was formed in response to the Martin Lee Anderson case.

Agnew is the cofounder of Miami’s Smoke Signals Studio — a community based radical artistic space — with his partner, poet Aja Monet. Smoke Signals Studio is a space where those invested in using art, sound, and music as a meeting place for transformation and liberation can come to create together.

In 2018, Agnew transitioned from his role as co-director of the Dream Defenders and now travels the country teaching and organizing outside of the movement bubble. He has spoken at colleges and conferences around the country and was a featured speaker at TEDWomen 2018 and SXSW in 2019. Agnew is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and a Board Member for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

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Identity and Belonging

Pamela Yates

Pamela Yates is the Co-founder and Creative Director of Skylight, a non-profit company dedicated to creating feature-length documentary films and digital media tools that advance awareness of human rights and the quest for justice by implementing multi-year outreach campaigns designed to engage, educate and activate social change.

She is the Director of the Sundance Special Jury award-winning When the Mountains Tremble; the Executive Producer of the Academy Award-winning Witness to War; and the Director of State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism, which has been translated into 47 languages and broadcast in 154 countries. Her film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, for which she awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, was used as key forensic evidence in the genocide trial against Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Her third film in the Guatemalan trilogy, 500 YEARS had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and is currently in wide release.

Yates is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Writers Guild of America, and the International Documentary Association.

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Identity and Belonging

Paco de Onis

Paco grew up in several Latin American countries during periods of dictatorships. He is the Executive Director and Executive Producer of Skylight, a human rights media organization dedicated to advancing social justice through storytelling by creating documentary films and media tools that can applied in long-term strategies for positive social change.

Paco co-created SolidariLabs, a program designed to disseminate Skylight’s innovative model for creating human rights media ecosystems in conjunction with committed media makers, artists, technologists and movement organizations, with the aim of building enduring networks of 21st century human rights defenders. One of the promising initiatives that has emerged from the SolidariLabs network is the Virtual International Volunteers Xchange, VIVX, an app and online platform designed to connect volunteers who will virtually accompany human rights defenders under threat, to support the accompaniment work already being done on the ground by organizations such as Peace Brigades International, with whom Skylight will partner.

Pacos film producing credits include 500 YEARSGranito: How to Nail a DictatorRebel CitizenDisruptionState of Fear, and The Reckoning and he is now producing a new project titled Borderlands on immigration justice in the United States. The project highlights powerful stories of righteous persons” who are motivated by moral conviction and compassion that show how courageous actions can lead to mobilization and the defense of human rights in the face of hate and discrimination.

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Future Wisdom

Open Society Foundation

The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens.

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Future Wisdom

Michèle Stephenson

As co-founding member of the Rada Film Group, filmmaker, artist, and author Michèle Stephenson draws from her Panamanian and Haitian roots and international experience as a human-rights attorney to tell provocative stories in a variety of media that speak to personal and systemic liberation. Her work has appeared on numerous broadcast and web platforms, including PBS, Showtime, and MTV. Her most recent film, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys, including Best Documentary and Outstanding Coverage of a Current News Story. The film also won the Jury Prize at Sundance, and was selected for the New York Film Festivals’ Main Slate Program. Stephenson was recently awarded the Creative Capital Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, as well as the inaugural Chicken & Egg Pictures Breakthrough Filmmaker Award. She is also a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. Her current feature-documentary work in progress is supported by the National Film Board of Canada and the Sundance Documentary Fund. Her community-engagement accomplishments include the PUMA BritDoc Impact Award for a Film with the Greatest Impact on Society and a Revere Award nomination from the Association of American Publishers, and she is a fellow of the Skoll Stories of Change initiative. Her recent book, Promises Kept, written with co-authors Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.

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Future Wisdom

Martha Redbone

Martha Redbone is a Native & African-American vocalist/songwriter/composer/educator. She is known for her unique gumbo of folk, blues and gospel from her childhood in Harlan County, Kentucky infused with the eclectic grit of pre-gentrified Brooklyn. Inheriting the powerful vocal range of her gospel-singing African American father and the resilient spirit of her mother’s Cherokee/Shawnee/Choctaw culture, Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music. With songs and storytelling that share her life experience as a Native and Black woman and mother in the new millenium, Redbone gives voice to issues of social justice, bridging traditions from past to present, connecting cultures, and celebrating the human spirit. Her latest album “The Garden of Love- Songs of William Blake” is “a brilliant collision of cultures” (New Yorker).

Redbone’s recent work has been predominantly in Theater. Redbone is the Composer of Original Music and Score for the 2019 revival “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf”, choreopoem by the late Ntozake Shange, where Redbone honors the author’s 1976 classic by intertwining her original compositions celebrating the music of the African American diaspora with the beautiful choreography of Tony Award-nominee Camille A. Brown at the Public Theater, NYC. Redbone is currently in development with her own new work “Black Mountain Women” at The Public Theater. It is a timely musical about the ongoing environmental destruction of her ancestral homeland in Appalachia told through the lives of 4 generations of women in her matriarchal Cherokee family.

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Reclaiming The Past, Owning Our Stories

Marlon Riggs

Marlon Troy Riggs (1957–1994) was an award-winning filmmaker, artist, educator, poet, and gay rights activist.

Riggs wrote, produced, and directed eight films and videos. He also wrote numerous scholarly articles and held interviews on identity, politics, censorship, African American culture, and documentary film practice. Working during the height of the culture wars of the 1990s, Riggs examined highly contested topics within the fabric of American identity and African American culture. Riggsapproach to filmmaking—addressing questions of cultural memory and race relations in America—were exhibited in his films, Ethnic Notions and Color Adjustment.

Riggs explored more personal topics such as sexuality and his HIV status in Tongues Untied, Affirmations, No Regret, Black Is…Black Aint. The latter productions made him vulnerable to criticism and political ridicule by right-wing conservatives and individuals who did not share his perspectives on American history, public media, or art. Most significantly, Riggs was able to use his films and writings to shift notions of shame and despair around homosexuality into acts of resistance and agency.  Marlon Riggs died from AIDS-related complications on April 5, 1994.

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Reclaiming The Past, Owning Our Stories

Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. Bamuthis opera libretto, We Shall Not Be Moved, was named one of 2017s Best Classical Music Performances” by The New York Times. His evening length work created in collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, The Just and The Blind,” was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered to a sold out house at Carnegie in March 2019. His upcoming piece, In His Name” is inspired by the forgiveness exhibited by the congregation of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, and will premiere at The Perelman Center in New York in 2021.

While engaging in a deeply fulfilling and successful artistic career, Bamuthi also proudly serves as Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Bamuthi’s community development philosophy, called “The Creative Ecosystem”, has been implemented in dozens of cities across the United States and is the subject of several critical writings, including one of the seminal essays in “Cultural Transformations: Youth and Pedagogies of Possibility”, published by Harvard Education Press.

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Reclaiming The Past, Owning Our Stories

Macky Alston and Selina Lewis

Macky Alston is currently co-directing and producing ACTS OF REPARATION, a documentary feature and impact campaign following grassroots reparations initiatives aimed at healing historic injury caused by slavery and the Native American genocide across the US. Macky most recently produced and directed LOVE FREE OR DIE which premiered and won the Special Jury Prize for an Agent of Change at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens. Alstons first film, FAMILY NAME, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 where it won the Freedom of Expression Award and later aired on PBSPOV. Since then he has produced and directed QUESTIONING FAITH (premiered Full Frame & Hot Docs International Film Festivals, aired HBO/Cinemax 2002),THE KILLER WITHIN (premiered Toronto International Film Festival 2006, aired Discovery Times 2007), and HARD ROAD HOME (premiered South by Southwest 2007, aired PBSIndependent Lens 2008). Alstons awards include the Gotham Open Palm Award and Emmy nominations for three of his films. He has appeared in press around the world, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, and The New York Times.

Alston founded and directed Auburn Media, a program of Auburn Seminary that equipped more than 10,000 leaders of faith and moral courage to speak out for justice through the media. With Sarah Masters, he founded the Hartley Media Impact Initiative at Auburn Seminary, designed to equip communities of faith with documentary content that can help them advance justice. Previously, Alston served as Executive Director of the Hartley Film Foundation, a granting organization supporting documentaries on faith and justice.


 

Selina Lewis Davidson has been Director of Documentary Programming at Mixed Greens, where she produced films including Macky Alston’s Questioning Faith, George Ratliff’s Hell House, Hannah Weyer’s La Escuela, Bryan Gunnar Cole’s Boomtown, and Sarah Price’s Caesar’s Park. Prior to Mixed Greens, Selina produced documentary film and television in for more than ten years. Her producer credits include the documentary Family Name, by Macky Alston, which won the 1998 Freedom of Expression Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy after airing on P.O.V.Selina also produced several projects with the production company World of Wonder including LA Stories: From the Eye of the Storm, a feature-length documentary commissioned by the BBC that aired in 1994, following the Los Angeles riots.

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Lakeesha ‘Keyssh’ Datts

Keyssh Datts is a Philadelphia-based artist, a self-described Blacktivist, writer and photographer. They recently completed the Arts2Work Multimedia Producer Pre-Apprenticeship program at PhillyCAM and was interviewed by the Philadelphia Tribune.  For Keyssh, art is the expression of social justice. https://kkeyssh.com/

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Identity and Belonging

Kelly Whalen

Kelly Whalen is a national Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker (“Tulia, Texas”) who has primarily worked in public media for more than 20 years. Her nationally-broadcasted work has explored racial injustices in Americas war on drugs,” community organizing against hate and intolerance, and rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In her role as Visiting Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami, Kelly senior-produced a series of short documentaries exploring challenges for Roma communities in Eastern Europe. She was multimedia producer for the University of California Press book “Women’s Empowerment and Global Health: A Twenty-First-Century Agenda,” producing case studies of women-centered health initiatives around the world; and producer/cinematographer/editor for the award winning PBS documentary “Everything Comes from the Streets,” tracing the origins and history of the Chicano lowrider culture in Kelly’s hometown of San Diego and greater border region. In 2015, Kelly joined KQED Arts, where she creates and curates short documentaries, often amplifying the stories of emerging and unrepresented artists. For her KQED Arts work, she has been awarded two Webbys, three regional Northern California Emmys, and two Society of Professional Journalism awards in video journalism. As senior producer, she manages a diverse and talented pool of staff and contributing filmmakers.

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Reclaiming The Past, Owning Our Stories

Karen Everett

Karen Everett is one of the world’s leading documentary story consultants, as well as an award-winning documentary filmmaker. She taught editing for 18 years at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, named the #1-ranked documentary program in America by Documentary Magazine. Karen founded New Doc Editing LLC, an editing and story consulting business that helps filmmakers structure compelling documentaries for venues such as PBS, HBO, Sundance, and other top film festivals. Author of Documentary Editing, she has directed and produced six of her own documentaries, including the award-winning PBS biography I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs. She can be reached at Karen@newdocediting.com.

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Just Wondering

Just wondering is a collective of three individuals located in Eastern Europe that creates short animated essays. They aim to provide a glimpse of some of the vast theoretical developments in various philosophical and sociological fields by dedicating themselves to the process of researching, writing, illustrating, animating, composing and collaborating with others in presenting radical and critical approaches to the current status-quo.
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Calling In The Spirits

Just Jamez, Tony Louie, Big D

-Daniel “Big D” Nanamkin is an enrolled member of The Colville Confederated Tribes and a 2019  Native American Music Awards Winner for “Best Rap/Hip Hop Video.”  His music emulates the resilience he possesses from overcoming the traumas of addiction and his past.  Big D continues to empower people from all walks of life by sharing his powerful story through his music.

-Tony “Tone Down” Louie is an international, award-winning performance artist currently gracing stages across the world.  He is an enrolled member of The Colville Confederated Tribes. Whether performing soulful, original music or paying tribute to his favorite artists when playing cover songs, he brings his own unique flavor to every song he plays.  Where the sounds of Chris Stapleton & John Fogerty intersect, you’ll find Tony Louie’s raw, genuine, unfiltered style.

-James “Just Jamez” Pakootas is an influential, multi-award winning hip hop artist who cultivates change in the world through the power of performance and inspirational music. He is an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and a consulting producer with The Alliance for Media, Arts + Culture. He delivers attention-commanding shows, leaving audiences of all ages and cultures impacted by his story-telling capabilities.

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Women and Girls Rising

Judith Helfand

Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior and environmental injustice and make them personal, highly-charged and entertaining. Three of her films premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, with national broadcasts on PBS (POV), HBO and The Sundance Channel. In addition to THE UPRISING OF 34 (co-directed with George Stoney), her films include the Sundance award-winning and 2X Emmy nominated film BLUE VINYL (co-directed with Daniel B. Gold and co-produced with Julie Parker Benello) and its Peabody Award-winning nominated prequel A HEALTHY BABY GIRL, as well as EVERYTHINGS COOL, also co-directed with Gold.

A committed field-builder and educator, Helfand co-founded Working Films, one of the nations first non-profits dedicated to engagement in 2009, and Chicken & Egg Pictures, a non-profit film fund dedicated to supporting women documentary directors with strategic grants and creative mentorship in 2005. In her Chicken & Egg Pictures role, where she served as Creative Director for a decade,Helfand was Producer on the Oscar-nominated, Dupont winning short, THE BARBER OF BIRMINGHAM, and Executive Producer for the award-winning films BROOKLYN CASTLE, SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL, PRIVATE VIOLENCE and HOT GIRLS WANTED. In 2007 a Rockefeller Media Fellowship and a United States Artist Fellowship, one of 50 awarded annually to Americas finest living artists.” Along with LOVE & STUFF, Helfand is deep in post-production on COOKED, a film about the politics of disaster, extreme weather and survival by zip code, set for completion and launch in 2017, and slated for broadcast on Independent Lens. She lives on the UWS with her toddler daughter Theodora.

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Joni Whitlock

Bio coming soon!

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Jessica Jones

Jessica Jones is an Emmy® nominated documentary filmmaker with a passion for creating powerful and engaging visual content. She is a part of two-time Webby award-winning If Cities Could Dance filmmaking team and in 2016, she received an Emmy® nomination for Women Dancers Redefine Oaklands Street Dancing Scene”, published on KQED Arts. She is a part of the creative team behind Mixed Peoples History, and in 2019 she founded Mae Shore Productions. Currently, she is a part of the Re-Take Oakland program, where she is directing the short documentary WOMEN WHO RIDE, and she is a video editor on the @instagram editorial team, where she creates micro-documentaries for the IGTV platform.

She was the 2011 George Stoney Fellow at Working Films, and a 2013 BAVC Mediamaker Fellow. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, and George Washington Universitys Institute for Documentary Filmmaking.

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Calling In The Spirits

Darius Simpson

Darius Simpson is a spoken word artist, writer, proud wearer of crocs, poet, and social justice advocate born in Akron, Ohio. He received his bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Conversion Theory (2018), and uses poetry as a tool with which to heal, inform, and challenge his audience in their awareness of social, political, and economic oppression.

Darius is featured as a protagonist in the film Finding the Gold Within, a documentary by Karina Epperlein on what it means to be a young black male in America. He has appeared on a wide array of stages and including ABC News (WXYZ-TV), University of Akron’s Black Male Summit, TEDxDetroit, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. His work has also been featured online via Huffington Post,Mic, Odyssey, Worldstar Hip Hop, and Button Poetry. In 2018 Darius made history as the first spoken word artist to open the annual Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, UK. His work has been promoted by Hollywood stars such as Ashton Kutcher and Kerry Washington.  By intertwining personal narratives of life experience, humor, and historical events, he brings an  authentically vulnerable voice to his poetry.

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Identity and Belonging

Chip Thomas

Chip Thomas is a photographer, public artist, and physician who has been working between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon in the Navajo Reservation for the last 28 years. There, he coordinates the Painted Desert Project – a constellation of murals across the Navajo Nation painted by artists from all around the world. These murals aim to reflect the love, culture and rich history shared by the Navajo people back on to the community.

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Reclaiming The Past, Owning Our Stories

Chinaka Hodge

Chinaka Hodge is a poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. Originally from Oakland, California, she graduated from NYUs Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May of 2006, and was honored to be the student speaker at the 174th Commencement exercise. In 2010, Chinaka received USCs prestigious Annenberg Fellowship to continue her studies at its School of Cinematic Arts. She received her MFA in Writing for Film and TV in 2012. In the fall of that year, she received the SF Foundations Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent. Chinaka was also a 2012 Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA. In January 2013, Hodge was a Sundance Feature Film lab Fellow for her script, 700th&Intl.  In June of 2013 Chinaka began as a first year fellow at Cave Canems prestigious summer retreat.

For over a decade, Hodge has worked in various capacities at Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, the nations leading literary arts non-profit.  During her tenure there, Chinaka served as Program Director, Associate Artistic Director, and worked directly with Youth Speakscore population as a teaching artist and poet mentor. She has acted in comparable capacities in New York and Los Angeles at Urban Word NYC and Get Lit: Words Ignite.  When not educating or writing for the page, Chinaka rocks mics as a founding member of a collaborative Hip Hop ensemble, The Getback. Her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have been featured in Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, Believer Magazine, PBSNPR, CNN, C-Span, and in two seasons of HBOs Def Poetry.

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Calling In The Spirits

Ayodele Casel

One of The New York Times’ “Biggest Breakout Stars of 2019”, Ayodele Casel, “a tap dancer of fine-grained musicianship” (The New Yorker), has been named a 2019-2020 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she will be writing her next theatrical work. Ayodele recently collaborated with legendary latin jazz composer Arturo O’Farrill premiering a show at The Joyce Theater to sold out audiences and “making a triumphant debut as a leader there” (The New York Times) in September of 2019. The 2017 recipient of the “Hoofer Award”, Ayodele premiered her one-woman show While I Have The Floor at the Spoleto Arts Festival with rave reviews. Her work is rooted in the expression of identity, culture, language, and communication. A frequent New York City Center collaborator, she was selected to create an interactive performance engaging NYC communities for their On The Move five borough tour. Hailed by the legendary Gregory Hines as “one of the top young tap dancers in the world,” Casel has become an internationally sought- after artist and powerful voice for the art form. Read more about Casel’s work at www.ayodelecasel.com.

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Calling In The Spirits

Amikaeyla Gaston

Amikaeyla Gaston is an award-winning singer, activist, and executive director/founder of the International Cultural Arts & Healing Sciences Institute (ICAHSI). ICAHSI partners with government, NGO, and educational institutions, as well as corporations and individuals to provide innovative programs that unlock expression through music and the arts. ICAHSI conducts workshops, presentations, and multimedia events around the world – from classrooms & boardrooms to concert halls and refugee camps. Ami was a featured speaker at TEDx Gramercy 2014. She is the winner of eight Washington Area Music Association Awards for Best Jazz, World and Urban Contemporary Vocalist.

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Women and Girls Rising

Aiya Meilan

Aiya is a 20 year old spoken word poet from San Leandro, California. Outside of poetry and performing arts, Aiya is a second year college student majoring in Communications with an interest in community studies. She hopes to establish a non-profit organization with the mission of supporting and liberating youth POC creatively and mentally.

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the National Day of Storytelling

Although the National Day of Storytelling is open to the public, registering will grant you access to exclusive Zoom Conversations with our featured guests, and subscribe you to The Alliance's email listerv. You'll be provided with a link to the Zoom Conversations via email. We look forward to seeing you on October 10th!