Alan Adelson - Director, Producer, Writer
Alan Adelson works in both film and print. His film and television credits include: One Survivor Remembers, (HBO,) 1995, European production coordinator, winner of the Best Short Documentary Oscar and three Emmy Awards; as producer, director and writer: Lodz Ghetto, (PBS, Channel Four, 9 other countries) short-listed for Best Feature Length Documentary Oscar, 1989, winner, International Film Critics Prize, 8 international film festivals; Two Villages in Kosovo, 2006, (ARTE, RTE), and In Bed With Ulysses, 2012. The People vs. Agent Orange won the Jury Award in the 2020 Eugene Environmental Film Festival. Adelson made worldwide headlines with his investigative articles in Esquire and the Wall Street Journal revealing the disappearance of enriched plutonium from a nuclear reprocessing plant.
Kate Taverna - Director, Producer, Editor, writer
Taverna edited, produced and co-directed In Bed with Ulysses as well as co-directed and edited the feature length Lodz Ghetto, both of which had nationwide theatrical releases. Adelson and Taverna also collaborated on Deux Villages au Kosovo for ARTE France and Germany, and RTE Ireland. Taverna has edited more than 50 films over her career: Asylum and Killing in the Name were Academy award nominees in Best Short Documentary category in 2004 and 2011 respectively. The feature length Pray the Devil Back to Hell won Best Documentary award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. She's Beautiful When She's Angry won the Audience award at the 2014 Boston Independent film festival, released theatrically nationwide and globally on Netflix. Los Sures, a film she edited in 1984, premiered at the NY Film Festival that year and was programmed again for its 30th anniversary in 2014, then went on to a nationwide theatrical release. Her broadcast editing work has been seen on CBS, A&E, BBC, IFC and PBS, among others.
Véronique Bernard - Producer, WRITER
Véronique Bernard is an independent non-fiction film and television producer, director and senior executive whose experience includes WNET Culture & Arts Documentaries, Sundance Channel Original Programming, New York Times Television, National Geographic Television, ABC News Productions and SBS Television in Australia where she was Head of Production. Recent credits include doc series E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious (PBS/Sundance, Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Journalism Award of Merit 2009,) French feature doc co-production The Man Who Invented Himself: Duane Michals (Special Mention Prize International Festival of Film on Art FIFA 2013,) science series Redesign My Brain (ABC Australia, Science Channel, Discovery International 2012, 2014,) PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century (2016), feature docs Enter The Faun (America Reframed, 2017,) The People vs. Agent Orange (Independent Lens, Arte,) Chasing Childhood and Still Not Equal (2020-21.) She teaches in the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College.
BLAKE LEYH - COMPOSER, PERFORMER, ARRANGER
Blake Leyh is an Emmy-winning, Grammy-nominated composer, music supervisor, music producer, and sound designer who lives in New York City. Born in New York but raised in England until age fifteen, Leyh has worked in film post-production sound and music for thirty-five years. His credits include films by James Cameron, The Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Ang Lee, John Waters, Jonathan Demme, Julie Taymor, Mira Nair, and Kasi Lemmons. Leyh was the music supervisor and composer for all five seasons of HBO's acclaimed series The Wire, and has supervised the music for all of David Simon's subsequent television shows. Leyh has written film scores for over twenty feature films, contributed memorable sound work to over fifty movies, produced albums by all-women punk bands and “the voice of New Orleans” John Boutté, performed sound design and guitar live on stage on a twenty-city US tour with Thomas Dolby, and created a sound installation for Steven Spielberg’s underwater-themed restaurant DIVE. With Tony Jarvis he leads the band N to The Power who released their debut album AUTOGENESIS in September 2020. He has also released five albums of solo music, plus film scores and soundtrack albums for David Simon’s HBO shows.
van-anh vanessa vo -
COMPOSER, PERFORMER, VOCALIST
Vân-Ánh Võ is one of the finest performers of Vietnamese traditional instruments in the world and a rapidly emerging composer. She dedicates her life to creating music by blending the wonderfully unique sounds of Vietnamese instruments with other music genres, and fusing deeply rooted Vietnamese musical traditions with fresh new structures and compositions. Vân-Ánh has also been composer, collaborator and guest soloist with the Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Southwest Chamber Music, Oakland Symphony, Monterey Symphony, Golden State Symphony, Apollo Chamber Players, Flyaway Productions for aerial dance works, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Jazz artists, Rap artists, and other World Music artists. She co-composed and arranged the Oscar nominated and Sundance Grand Jury prize winner for Best Documentary, Daughter from Danang (2002), the Emmy Award winning film and soundtrack for Bolinao 52 (2008), and the winner of multiple “Best Documentary” and “Audience Favorite” awards, A Village Called Versailles (2009). Her CDs include the 2002 Twelve Months, Four Seasons; She’s Not She with award-winning composer Bảo Đỗ (2009) and Three-Mountain Pass, with the Kronos Quartet as her guest artist (2013). This work received positive reviews and high praise by NPR, BBC “The World,” L.A. Times among others.
Scott sinkler -
Director of photography, vietnam
Scott Sinkler is an award-winning producer/director and director of photography. He founded Public Eye Productions in 1994. Sinkler has been working in film and video since the 1980s.He's served as director of photography for documentaries such as Katie Couric’s Fed Up and PBS’s Ice Warriors, as well as for television series such as PBS’s Wide Angle, The Tony Awards Show, Egg: The Arts Show, WNET’s City Arts & City Life—for which he won two New York Emmy awards—as well as Bloomberg Television’s series Muse, Game Changers, Risk Takers and Innovators. While working primarily as a director of photography, Sinkler has also produced and directed documentaries that have been shown in the Whitney Biennial and has a film in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. His films have won more than a dozen awards at international film festivals, and have aired on US and foreign TV networks. Sinkler has produced and directed arts programs, corporate media, commercials and promotional material for Broadway shows, including Thou Shalt Not, Morning’s At Seven, and the Tony Award-winning Contact.He periodically gives a master class in documentary camerawork at New York University.
dyanna taylor - Director of photOGRAPHY - U.S.
Taylor is an Emmy Award winner and the recipient of the MUSE Award for “Outstanding Vision and Achievement in Cinematography” from New York Women in Film and Television. She began in the film business in San Francisco, producing and directing documentaries with her first company, Taylor/Franklin Films. Her first TV network assignment was as co-director and cinematographer for ABC, making a documentary on the first American women’s climbing expedition Annapurna I in the Himalayas. In the Southwest she directed and produced the NHK/Turner film Vanished!, on the writer and artist (and Lange friend) Everett Reuss. In 2007, Taylor directed Monastery, a four-part series for The Learning Channel. Taylor was recently featured in the NEH video initiative Picturing America about her grandmother’s photograph Migrant Mother. Currently, she is directing Territories of the Fresh and Wild: The Life of a Roshi.
SAM SHINN - DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY- OREGON, VERMONT
Sam Shinn is an Emmy Award winning director of photography of documentaries and television series. His work has been broadcast nationally and internationally in over fifteen countries for PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, CBC-Canada and all the major cable outlets. He has filmed Gwyneth Paltrow on a 10,000 mile culinary and cultural tour of Spain, investigated the family roots of Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert, Yo Yo Ma & Eva Longoria, and explored international cuisine with Chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Thomas Keller. He has been the director of photography of over 10 television series and countless documentaries and feature films. Sam's work has also been shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, South by Southwest Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival.
LUCA CHIARI - DIRECTOR OF photOGRAPHY - FRANCE
Camera operator/Sound recordist for documentaries, series and live events on demand for International broadcasters including Arte, BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, Canal+, CBBC, Discovery Channel, France2, France3 and France5. He’s been awarded as Director/Writer of documentaries for French and International broadcasters and festival releases. Location Manager/Fixer on several BBC series working with presenters Francesco da Mosto, Andrew Marr, Brian Cox among others and on top end shows like Blue Peter, Who do you think you are?, and Mastermind. He is the founder of Megafilms.net s.a.r.l. in 2001 and associate (2001-2005) of the company through which he produced documentaries and short films selected at 50 festivals worldwide, winning more than 10 awards and through which he distribute a worldwide catalogue of documentaries and animation series. As Line producer/Production manager/Production team member at Alegria with Christine Camdessus and Serge Gordey, he worked from 2004 —Hammer & Tickle which premiered at Tribeca — to 2011 with 5 BROKEN CAMERAS, Oscar nominee and Emmy award winner.
TOM PAUL - SOUND DESIGN, RE-RECORDING MIXER
Two-time Emmy Award winning Re-Recording Mixer and a highly regarded Sound Designer, Tom Paul is one of New York City's most sought after talents in the field of post production audio. The last few years have been filled with working on wonderful films including The Big Sick, City of Ghosts, Cartel Land, Weiner, The Wolfpack, Particle Fever, The Square, Doris, and Anesthesia, to name just a few. A New York City native, Tom Paul was surrounded by music and sound from the moment he was born. Tom got his professional start as a boom operator in 1988, moving on to production mixing in 1991. Some notable titles of his early years in production sound include: Trust, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Little Odessa, Swoon and The Yards. In 1994, his passion for sound led him to the creative environment of post production. Some highlights of his sound design and re-recordng credits include the Academy Award winning films The Fog of War and Born Into Brothels. Other notable films include: Junebug, Palindromes, The Baxter, The King, and U2 360, the largest selling concert DVD of all time. Tom won his first Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Mixing on Joe Berlinger's Under African Skies, and his second one for Best Sound Editing for Cartel Land.