SFFS instructors are working professionals with a passion for nurturing moving-image artists at all stages of their careers. They come from the ranks of professional associations like the American Society of Cinematographers, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and include Academy Award and Emmy winners and nominees. They teach at institutions like UC Berkeley, New York University, San Francisco State University, Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

Dominic Angerame
Dominic Angerame has made more than 36 films that have been shown and won awards in film festivals around the world. He has also been honored by two Cine Probe Series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City -- in 1993 and in June 1998 and has had numerous one person screenings around the globe.
His latest film The Soul of Things (2010) premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival and shown at the Pacific Film Archives and the Kabuki Theatre in San Franciso. It also has been shown at the Onion City Festival in Chicago. Angerame teaches filmmaking/cinema studies/criticism, film production, film history.
Among the schools he has taught include the San Francisco Art Institute as a visiting artist. He has also taught film production and cinema studies at the University of California Berkeley, Extension, New College of California; and has been a guest lecturer and visiting artist for Stanford University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Graduate School of Theology in Berkeley, and others. Dominic Angerame has been the Executive Director of Canyon Cinema for the past thirty years. Under his leadership Canyon Cinema has become one of the world's most renowned distributors of avant garde and experimental films. Canyon Cinema's contribution to the field of experimental/avant garde filmmaking is historic and heroic.

Rod Armstrong works with the director of programming on various Film Society endeavors, including SFIFF, New Italian Cinema and the SFFS Screen. He also curates the Late Show section of the Festival, which showcases his affinity for genre cinema. His interest in film started early; at the formative age of 14, when a San Diego newspaper reporter surveyed school kids about future careers, he was the only one to respond “movie critic.” After attending Stanford, he was the editor-in-chief of the popular movie website Reel.com before landing at SFFS where he continues proselytizing his love of cinema.

Steven Arvanites
Steven Arvanites heads NYCscreenwriter.org. He has taught at the Rye Arts Center, the Northwest Screenwriters Guild and in 2010 he will teach at Hollins University’s MFA screenwriting program. Arvanites was a two-time Nicholl semi-finalist, a BlueCat winner, an Atlanta Screenwriting Competition winner, a Djerassi/SFFS Screenwriting Fellowship finalist and a Sundance Screen Lab finalist. In 2006 he was awarded an Artward Bound writing grant. His first narrative feature, I Killed You ‘Cause I Had To, is an entry in the Dark River Film Festival, and his Terror Film Festival–winning script Cadaver is currently in preproduction. Arvanites was a moderator at the Austin Film Festival ’09.

Peter Belsito
Peter Belsito grew up in New York City and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and from the Masters film program at UCLA where he was a graduate teaching assistant at UCLA Film School. He was a founding member of Newsreel, a radical anti war student filmmaking collective. He was a founding member of the Independent Feature Project (IFP) in New York City in 1981 and opened the IFP office in Los Angeles (now FIND). He was a founding member of the Chicano Cinema Coalition. After graduating from UCLA he worked professionally as a cinematographer, produced feature films and feature documentaries and wrote screenplays. His produced documentary Valley of Tears is playing the festival circuit now (LA Latino FF, Margaret Mead FF 2003) and is being distributed US by Seven Arts. He worked in publishing for ten years for Charles T. Munger, Vice Chairman of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, and assisted Sydney Levine in founding FILM FINDERS in 1988 as a blue chip film acquisitions tracking, consulting and publishing firm. He came on board full time in 1995 as a FILM FINDERS partner, Head of Sales and Marketing as Executive Vice President. Fourteen years after Ms. Levine’s successful launch of Film Finders, Peter recently founded the growing Film Finders Consulting division. Both Peter and Sydney have been involved for the last fifteen years in professional education and with young filmmakers via countless festival and market panels and forums and active course involvement with such institutions including Harvard, Wharton, the Maurits Binger Institute of Amsterdam, ACE of Paris, Rotterdam Cinemart, IFP New York, IFP West of Los Angeles etc. Both have originated and coordinated panels and conferences for various institutions as well as Film Finders. He lives in West Hollywood, California and travels extensively throughout the year to film festivals and markets worldwide. In July 2006 FILM FINDERS merged with WITHOUT A BOX to develop new digital services for filmmakers, festivals, and international sales and distribution. In January 2008 FILM FINDERS / WITHOUT A BOX were sold to IMDb / Amazon.com. Belsito joined IMDb then and amicably left IMDb in April 2009 to pursue activities as an independent and today he is a guest blogger on SydneysBuzz which is on Indiewire covering the international independent film business.

Richard Beggs
Sound designer/mixer Richard Beggs has worked on over 50 features with Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, Sophia Coppola, Alfonso Cuaron and other directors. In 1980 Beggs received the Academy Award for his work on Apocalypse Now and has been nominated for the Golden Reel Award by the Motion Picture Sound Editors numerous times. Recent film credits include The Darjeeling Limited, Children of Men, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This fall, he will work on Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere, now in pre-production. Beggs received a B.F.A in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts, and is an associate fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University.

Michael A. Behrens
Michael A. Behrens programs the Film Society’s Filmmaker Education classes. Most recently he ran the Education Program at Film Arts Foundation.  He has produced, acted and directed in the U.S., Europe and Asia for the last 18 years working in theater, film and TV. Behrens has taught at the National Theater School of Finland and Sun Yat-Sen University. He is currently producing My Garbage My Neighborhood and pursuing a Masters in Nonprofit Administration at the University of San Francisco.

Brian Benson
Brian Benson is an award-winning Bay Area producer and assistant director with over two dozen films under his belt. After his film Haiku Tunnel screened at the Sundance Film Festival he was awarded the prestigious Sundance Producing Fellowship. He maintains strong ties with festivals and industry. Recently Brian assistant directed La Mission and produced All About Evil and Howl which was directed by Academy-Award winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco.

Les Blank
Since the mid 1960s, director, producer, and cinematographer Les Blank has made films about American idioms. Blank’s first films, produced in the mid-1960s, looked at subjects such as Texas blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins (The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins) and the advent of the California “flower child” movement (God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance). From his earliest films to the present, he has largely focused on American-based musicians, artists, filmmakers, and local characters who inspire others through their own creative outlook on life. This retrospective also features new films, including music videos directed by Blank with collaborator Maureen Gosling, and works in progress about Alabama-based sculptor Butch Anthony and legendary direct-cinema filmmaker Ricky Leacock.

David L. Brown
David L. Brown is a two-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who has produced, written and directed more than 80 productions and ten broadcast documentaries. His recent works include The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story (two Emmys, including best documentary), Seniors for Peace, Surfing for Life, Bound by the Wind and Digital Divide.

Debbie Brubaker
Debbie Brubaker is a seasoned producer in the world of indie feature films, including Peter Bratt’s La Mission, which premiered at Sundance and opened the San Francisco International. Feature narratives she has produced include The Darwin Awards,  Dopamine, Unflinching Triumph: The Phillip Rockhammer Story, Swing, Teknolust, Bartleby, and The Californians. Recent projects include All About Evil and One Way to Valhalla. Currently Brubaker is working on a documentary with Jennifer Seibel Newsom, Miss Representation.

Carey Burens
Carey Burens has over 10 years of postproduction experience, starting his career at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic. Working with the Editorial Department there he learned the benefits of organization within a large workflow pipeline that included editing, film scanning, naming conventions, computer graphics and deliverables. After leaving ILM he landed at Spy Post Digital in San Francisco working in telecine/film transfer and color correction. Now a full time colorist, he has color graded with many formats, including film, SD and HD video and RED camera footage on feature length films, shorts, music videos and commercial spots.

Edward Burns
Lauded by critics and audiences alike, Burns gained international recognition for his first feature The Brothers McMullen, which premiered in competition at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury prize. The film, which Burns wrote, directed and starred in, was shot on a budget of only $25,000 and went on to gross over $10 million at the domestic box office, making it the most profitable film of 1995. The film also won "Best First Feature" at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards. Burns' second film, the romantic comedy She's the One starring Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz, reinforced Burns' versatile talent as a writer, director, and actor able to simultaneously and successfully wear multiple hats. Burns continues to write, direct, star in and produce his films, including the Paramount Classics relationship comedy Sidewalks of New York, Purple Violets, and most recently, Nice Guy Johnny. In a groundbreaking deal, Purple Violets was the first feature film to premiere exclusively on iTunes. Burns built on this platform and successfully released Nice Guy Johnny via digital distribution in 2010. His 10th feature film as a writer, director and actor is the romantic drama Newlyweds, which premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. Burns has been involved with TFF since the festival’s inception in 2002. Newlyweds was his 6th film to be featured at TFF and closed the festival. As an actor, Burns starred opposite Tom Hanks and Matt Damon in Steven Spielberg’s critically acclaimed World War II epic Saving Private Ryan. He also starred in the thriller 15 Minutes opposite Robert De Niro, Confidence opposite Dustin Hoffman, and the 20th Century Fox romantic comedy hit 27 Dresses opposite Katherine Heigl. Burns can be seen in the upcoming feature film Man on a Ledge opposite Sam Worthington and Elizabeth Banks, as well as in Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends with Kids. Additionally, he will star in ‘40’, Doug Ellin’s much buzzed about new HBO series. Ed Burns was born in Woodside, Queens and raised on Long Island. While at Hunter College in New York City, Burns switched his focus from English to filmmaking before quickly moving on to make The Brothers McMullen, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

Linda Butler
As Marketing Manager at the San Francisco Film Society, Linda Butler fuses print, digital, social and viral media campaigns cohesively and concisely to spread the word about SFFS events year round. Previously, she managed marketing campaigns and pioneered social media efforts for various corporate and non-profit companies and annual events, including Nightclub & Bar, the largest tradeshow catering to bar and nightclub owners across the country and the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

John Carlson
John Carlson is the Vice President of Monaco Digital Film Labs, President of the local post facilities group, Northern California Production Community, and Second Vice President of the international group, Association of Cinema and Video Laboratories. An experienced film-to-tape colorist and film timer, John has taught a unique class in film and video postproduction at CCSF, The Academy of Art University, and San Francisco State for 18 years.

Eugene Corr
An accomplished fiction and non-fiction filmmaker, Eugene Corr wrote and directed the documentary Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (with Robert Hillmann), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991, and the dramatic feature, Desert Bloom, an official selection of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. As an instructor, Corr founded the San Quentin Writers Group to support convict screenwriters and has taught the same course to student screenwriters at Stanford University. Corr’s writing credits include both film (Prefontaine) and TV (Getting Out). In addition he has directed episodic television (Arli$$) and served as a second unit director on motion pictures (Bull Durham). Most recently he co-wrote the documentary Butte, America: The Saga of a Hard Rock Mining Town (2008). He is currently working on his documentary, From Ghost Town to Havana, examining the role of coaches and mentors in the lives of young boys living in poor neighborhoods in Havana, Cuba and West Oakland.

Lawrence Daressa
For the past 35 years, Lawrence Daressa has been the Co-Director of California Newsreel, the nation's oldest non-profit film distribution company. In that capacity, he reviews daily sales activity of Newsreel's 250 titles from dozens of DVD and digital distribution outlets. He was a founder of the Independent Television Service and has written widely on the impact of new technology on independent media.

John Dilley
John Dilley is a director and filmmaker whose films have screened at the Sundance, Clermont-Ferrand, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Independent film festivals among many others. His work has been broadcast on PBS and featured at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. John is involved in several local youth programs teaching filmmaking and media literacy to Bay Area teens.

Michael Dougan
A U.S.C. graduate and George Cukor scholarship winner, Michael Feit Dougan's screenwriting credits began with Public Access, which earned the Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture at Sundance. His current feature-length thriller 647 is in pre-production and slated for 2009. A freelance story consultant, Michael has presented story design at Dreamworks Animation. As an academic, Dougan earned both the 2003 Presidential and ASB Teacher of the Year Award at Cogswell College and was featured in the San Jose Mercury News. Dougan currently lectures at the University of San Francisco. Dougan co-wrote Developing Digital Short Films with Sherri Sheridan in 2004. As part of his Masters Class in Screenwriting, Michael works alongside Charles Pogue (The Fly re-make, Dragonheart and Psycho III) and as a founding member of The Kentucky Film Lab, ran the Advanced Screenwriter’s Lab at the Idea Festival with Jack Epps Jr. (Top Gun, Dick Tracy, Anaconda).

Jack Curtis Dubowsky
Jack Curtis Dubowsky has scored four feature films including Rock Haven, That Man Peter Berlin and Under One Roof, as well as projects for television and advertising. He has also worked in the music department at Pixar Animation Studios. He has a MM in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has received grants from Meet the Composer, Zellerbach Family Fund and Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Dubowsky teaches at NYU in the Design, Digital Arts and Film department of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He writes about film, music and popular culture for Film International and other publications.

Mike Epple
Mike Epple is a San Francisco–based director of photography and camera operator. He shoots both film and video for television and for corporate and narrative films throughout the U.S. He has shot for the Discovery Channel, PBS and HD Net, as well as clients Visa, Yahoo and Cisco. He is experienced with state-of-the art camera systems and is well versed on the latest digital formats and techniques.

Karen Everett
Karen Everett, owner of New Doc Editing, is an award-winning editor and story editor who helps documentary directors convey their vision in a way that keeps viewers glued to the screen. During the past fifteen years, Everett has been teaching at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, one of the top American documentary programs. She is the author of the newly released book Documentary Editing. Everett has directed and produced five documentaries, including the critically-acclaimed PBS biography I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs. Her films on lesbian relationships have screened at more than 150 film festivals worldwide and the latest, Women in Love, is available through Netflix.

Jörg Fockele
Jörg Fockele is an award-winning filmmaker and tv producer who has directed television shows such as Bravo's Queer Eye and ABC's Wife Swap. Most recent television credits include MTV's Savage U and the upcoming AMC show JJK Security (working title). Jörg is co-founder of the non-profit media organization "The HIV Story Project" and Co-Executive Producer of the award winning short film compilation Still Around.
http://www.elevationtalent.com/JorgFockele_TV.html

Peter Franck
Peter Franck’s distinguished career spans more than 40 years across the areas of constitutional law, intellectual property and entertainment law. His commitment to legal activism has led to affiliations with the ACLU, the Council for Justice and the National Lawyers Guild. Franck has come to specialize in intellectual property and entertainment law through his representation of pioneering San Francisco Bay Area musical groups and cutting-edge artists.

Aurora Guerrero
Aurora Guerrero is a queer Xicana raised in the Bay Area. She has over 10 years of filmmaking experience as a writer/director. Her debut feature Mosquita y Mari premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and went on to screen in competition at the San Francisco International Film Festival. During its making Mosquita y Mari was awarded a 2011 SFFS/KRF Post-Production Grant, 2011 LG Cinema 3D Fellowship, 2005 Sundance Ford Fellowship, and 2005 Paul Robeson Development Grant, and was selected to participate at the Sundance Indigenous Filmmaker Lab, Tribeca All Access Program and Film Independent Producer’s Lab. Guerrero has also directed short narrative films including Pura Lengua (2005 Sundance Film Festival) and Viernes Girl (winner of the 2005 HBO/NYLIFF short film competition). Guerrero is a 2012 Sundance Institute/Time Warner Storytelling Fellow.

Klara Grunning-Harris
Emmy Award winning Klara Grunning-Harris is the Vice President of KUDOS Family, an international media/film co-production and distribution company based in Norway. Grunning-Harris worked nearly a decade for the Independent Television Service bringing domestic and international film to US broadcast and digital platforms. She has produced and shot independent work for the last 15 years and has served as panelist, jury and advisor in industry settings in the US and on the international market. Gumby Dharma, an episode on stop-motion animator Art Clokey she produced for the KQED program Truly CA, received the 2008 Documentary Emmy.

Hilary Hart
Director of Publicity at the San Francisco Film Society since 1998, and a veteran of the SFFS publicity staff since 1993, Hart previously worked as publicity coordinator at San Francisco International LGBT Festival and director of publicity at Cinequest, San Jose Film Festival. She has attended Sundance and Telluride for over 15 years. Hart learned the basics of grassroots publicity while working at a Bay Area repertory movie theater and later Landmark Theatres for 19 years, before segueing to the film festival world.

Christie Herring
Christie Herring is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker with a strong interest in social justice topics and the human stories behind them. Her current film, THE CAMPAIGN, tells the inside story of the fight against Proposition 8, the CA Amendment banning gay marriage.
 
No stranger to politics, Christie grew up working on campaigns for public office in Mississippi. Her first film Waking in Mississippi focuses on a wildly controversial political race in her home town the 1994 election of the towns first black mayor a match that ended in the threat of a race riot. Her popular short films have shown at festivals around the world and have been featured by PBS regionally and online. Bodies and Souls explores the community work of Sister Manette, a Catholic nun who provides the only healthcare in an isolated town in the Mississippi Delta. Chickens in the City is a humorous chicken-eye view at the differences between pets and food. Howdy Partner is a meditation on the meaning of the word partner inside and outside of romantic relationships.
 
In addition to her work as a director, Christie has produced, edited, and researched films with PBS, National Geographic, A&E, MBC1, and the History Channel. She produces and edits films for nonprofit and corporate clients including SFMOMA, LEVIS, UC Berkeley, Breakthrough Collaborative, the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the New Media Advocacy Project, Michigan Forward, and the Mississippi Center for Justice. Christies undergraduate degree is from Duke University, and she received her MA in Documentary Filmmaking from Stanford University.

Brook Holston
Brook Holston is a Line Producer with many years of experience on documentaries and film productions of all kinds.  She specializes in budgeting, scheduling and the details and logistics it takes to get film crews and tons of equipment to the right place at the right time on planes, trains, boats, helicopters, underwater and over.

Brook has most recently supervised documentaries for National Geographic Television, Discovery, BBC and PBS on series including The Shape of Life, Strange Days On Planet Earth,  Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Adventures and National Geographic Explorer.

She graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and worked in television & film production in the Atlanta area for many years before re-locating to the west coast in 1998.

She currently lives in Sausalito, California with her husband Phillip, who is a cameraman, and her two cats, Ginger and Miss Kitty.

Christopher Horton
Chris Horton joined Sundance Institute in early 2011 to launch #ArtistServices, a new initiative that further extends the organization’s mission of connecting artists with audiences. Through a series of innovative deals and partnerships, #ArtistServices provides Institute alumni with powerful tools and resources that enhance creative funding and self-distribution opportunities. These deals include partnerships with Kickstarter, the world’s largest platform for funding creative projects online, and distribution arrangements that allow any feature film supported by the Institute to get best-in-class digital deals that keep artists in control of their rights.
 
Horton was previously the head of acquisitions for FilmBuff, a pioneering New York-based digital distribution company and sister company to John Sloss’ Cinetic Media.  Under Horton’s leadership, FilmBuff acquired sales rights to hundreds of feature-length movies, including Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop, Chris Smith’s Collapse, and Edward Burns’ Nice Guy Johnny. He also brokered numerous output deals with distributors such as MTV Films, Kino-Lorber, Palm Pictures, Wolfe Video, and MPI Media.
 
Horton had been with Cinetic for five years before the formation of FilmBuff in 2007. At Cinetic, a powerhouse sales agency behind titles such as Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, Horton negotiated several distribution deals and led the company’s tracking and outreach strategies.
 
Horton previously worked for Miramax Films, following his graduation from the University of Colorado with degrees in film studies and psychology.
 
He lives in Los Angeles.

Sade Huron
Originating from Wales in the United Kingdom, I now live and work in the San Francisco Bay area. I am a filmmaker/digital artist and my practice encompasses film/video, performance, installation, and photography.

My work has been exhibited, screened and performed internationally, at among other sites: The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Castro Theatre SF, the Walter and McBean Gallery - San Francisco CA, the Oakland Art Gallery - Oakland CA, The National Theatre - London, England, The Directors Guild of America - Los Angeles, CA. Select publications of her work are included in the book, 'Acts of Passion, Gender and Performance' by Haworth Press and in 'Blue' an Australian photography magazine.

In May 2000 I graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Masters of Fine Art. I received the Elizabeth Tuckerman Award for two years consecutively. My professional teaching experience includes: visiting faculty at The San Francisco Art Institute, Adjunct Professor at the Experimental Performance Institute, Visiting Artist Instructor at Pixar Animation Studios and Bay Area Video Coalition.

Amir Jaffer
Amir Jaffer is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor whose narratives and documentaries have screened at film festivals internationally. Amir’s most recent works include an episode of In The Life - a show on PBS, featuring Oakland's famous Gospel Choir, The Messengers (formerly known as Ambassadors), the short film Blur for the compilation till Around”, the political documentary Allah's Frontier about Pakistan and Ari Gold's music video Sparkle featuring Sarah Dash of Labelle. For more info. and details about his work, visit: www.amirjaffer.com

Barry Jenkins
Barry Jenkins is a writer/director living in San Francisco and a member of the Bandry Films collective consisting of himself, Justin Barber, James Laxton and Alejandro Cruz. His recent or current projects include the feature film Medicine For Melancholy, as well as the recently completed short A Young Couple an a commissioned work for the Northwest Film Forum’s One Shot Film Series.” He is a contributor to Short End magazine, where he continues to work on the dialogue series Notes On A Cinematographer.

Aaron Kerner
Aaron Kerner is an Associate Professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. His curatorial and research work examines the problems of representations, exploring the difficulty of representing catastrophic events and the uneasy transfiguration of history and memory into narrative form.

Jacob Krueger
Jacob Krueger’s first film, The Matthew Shepard Story (2002), won the Writers Guild of America Paul Selvin Award and a Gemini Nomination for Best Screenplay. The NBC film, directed by Roger Spottiswoode (And the Band Played On) and produced by Goldie Hawn, was based on the life of Matthew Shepard, a gay hate-crime victim. The film won Stockard Channing a SAG Award and her first Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress and Sam Waterston a Gemini Award for Best Supporting Actor. Krueger attended Dartmouth College and was a Presidential Scholar in Creative Writing.

Karen Larsen
Karen Larsen heads her own public relations firm specializing in publicizing independent feature and documentary films, film festivals, and special events.  She is currently publicist for the Mill Valley Film Festival, Film Arts Festival, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Asian American Film Festival, and Indiefest. She has served as a consultant to the National Educational Media Network and to many independent filmmakers. In addition, she handles Bay Area publicity for Sony Pictures Classics, IFC, Zeitgeist Films, Regent Releasing, BEV Pictures, and others. She has taught classes at Media Alliance, National Educational Media Network, and the Film Arts Foundation.

David Walter Lech
David Walter Lech is a Bay Area based filmmaker and photographer. In 2008 he attended the Sundance Film Festival for his work on the feature film The Wind and The Water (Burwa Dii Ebo), which premiered in the World Dramatic Cinema Competition. He was also a Sundance panelist, hosted by festival director Geoffrey Gillmore. He travelled to Panama to shoot The Wind and the Water, made collectively with the indigenous Kuna people of the San Blas Islands. While working as Director of Photography, he also worked as Workshop Coordinator, teaching filmmaking to a group of Kuna youth. His experience working in a collaborative, community based model was a great asset to Kunjo, which he recently travelled to Punjab, India to shoot. He has lensed many other films in a wide variety of formats including the 35mm feature film Mitsein.

Richard J. Lee
Richard J. Lee has been an attorney in private practice for more than 30 years, helping to protect and empower families, businesses, nonprofit organizations and independent filmmakers. Lee helped establish the Film Arts Foundation in 1976 and welcomes the transition of its services to the San Francisco Film Society. As one of the first panel members of Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts (now California Lawyers for the Arts), he represents nonprofit corporations, including numerous filmmakers.

Richard Levien
Richard Levien has a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University. Now a freelance film editor, he enjoys the collaborative process of helping the director find an original vision. Recently he edited and did motion graphics for the short film On the Assassination of the President which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2008. He also edited the cult internet hit Store Wars, which was seen by 5.5 million people in the first 6 weeks of its release. Levien recently completed his first film as a director. Immersion premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2009. Levien was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He enjoys a good cup of tea and follows the (mostly ill) fate of the New Zealand cricket team. He is one of the few New Zealanders who played no part whatsoever in the making of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Sydney Levine
Sydney Levine has over twenty five years' experience in the entertainment industry. She established the profitable video rental division of Republic Pictures as Vice President of Acquisitions and Development. She spent three years of acquiring video rights to feature films for Lorimar. Levine's international contacts have resulted in acquisitions ranging from specialized foreign features, such as Letter to Brezhnev, Tampopo and My Beautiful Laundrette, as well as a wide variety of artistic and commercial genres. Levine has worked in international distribution for Twentieth Century Fox in Amsterdam, in Ross Perot's start up video company Inovision, in marketing for ABC Video Enterprises and has acquired features and documentaries for foreign and domestic distribution. In 1989 she founded FILM FINDERS as its President to service distributors looking to acquire features. In July 2006 FILM FINDERS merged with WITHOUT A BOX to develop new digital services
for filmmakers, festivals, and international sales and distribution. In January 2008 FILM FINDERS / WITHOUT A BOX were sold to IMDb / Amazon.com. Levine joined IMDb then and amicably left IMDb in April 2009 to pursue her activities as an independent and today her blog SydneysBuzz is on Indiewire covering the international independent film
business. Levine's educational background includes a BFA from the University of California, a License from the Sorbonne University of Paris and a Master's Degree from the University of Southern California. She is fluent in several languages and travels extensively on the international film market circuit.

A.D. Liano
Tony Liano has directed and produced several films, including Barberland, The Three-Cornered Hat and Seven Fallen Objects. Most recently, he produced Everything Strange and New directed by Frazer Bradshaw, and screened at Sundance 2009. Liano was Senior Vice President of Digital Programming at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and before that a marketing executive at Microsoft.

Damian Lucas
Damian Lucas was the cinematographer for Limbo Lounge, a dramatic feature which screened at San Francisco's own IndieFest. He is a cinematography professor at Academy of Art University, the owner of Little Giant Lighting & Grip Co, and an all-around film production man about town.

Erin Markey
Erin Markey’s solo musical, Puppy Love: A Stripper's Tail played and extended at PS 122. She is a company member of Half Straddle and her work in FAMILY was heralded as "the scariest performance of the year" in 2009 by Time Out NY. She is a past participant in the Lincoln Theater Director’s Lab.

Chris Martin
Chris Martin studied photography and film at Brooks Institute of Photography and began learning telecine and coloring at Varitel in San Francisco, where he worked on music videos and commercials. In 2005, Martin joined Spy Post as lead colorist, where he has worked on the commercials (Comcast, Budweiser, Microsoft, Scion, Adidas), music videos (Carrie Underwood, LeAnn Rymes, Zioni), narrative (Black August, Village Barbershop, Quality of Life and Everything Strange and New) and documentary films (The Weather Underground and multiple projects for the PBS series American Experience).

Joseph Mendoza
Joseph Mendoza has been a lighting specialist for the film industry in San Francisco Bay Area for over 12 years. An alumnus of San Francisco State University, Joseph started his own company six years ago and now owns the Little Giant Lighting and Grip Company in San Francisco. His work includes everything from large Bollywood films to French bubblegum commercials. Recently he began producing commercials, shorts and anything he can get involved with creatively.

Patricia K. Meyer
For over two decades Patricia Meyer has written screenplays for the major motion picture studios and television networks, including two for Martin Scorsese, as well as Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Films. She is currently packaging two of her feature screenplays and a one-hour drama series pilot. Aside from writing, Meyer has produced seven movies for network television with Von Zerneck/Sertner Films. She also executive produced the 1992 Twentieth Century Fox release, This Is My Life, which marked Nora Ephron's directorial debut. She launched her producing career with the Emmy-nominated ABC miniseries, The Women of Brewster Place, starring Oprah Winfrey, which won an Image Award for Outstanding Miniseries. Recently, Meyer made her directorial debut with The List, a seven-time short film festival selection. Turnaround, her first full-length play, will be read at the Pasadena Playhouse next month. Currently, Meyer is serving her seventh year as Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute (AFI) Conservatory. Prior to that, she was a tenure-track professor of screenwriting and producing at Chapman University. After receiving a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University, Meyer earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from Boston University.

Christopher Million
Chris Million has been an award-winning director of photography for numerous documentaries and TV series over the last 20 years. For eight years he shot the Emmy-winning PBS educational show Real Science! in locations ranging from Alaska to the Everglades. In 2004, Chris won an Emmy Award for his work as DP on the PBS documentary Return to the Valley. He recently wrapped shooting on two documentary features; A Permanent Mark, shot on location in VietNam and It Came From Kuchar, which premiered in March at South by Southwest. His other broadcast credits include programs for NBC, A&E/History Channel and MTV/VH1. Chris is currently directing Jack London: Twentieth-Century Man, a feature-length documentary about the author and his times.

Holly Million
Holly Million is a consultant, author and filmmaker with nearly two decades worth of experience in fundraising. In addition to securing funding for A Story of Healing, which won a 1997 Academy Award, Million has raised money for numerous documentary and dramatic films that have aired on PBS, HBO and other broadcast outlets. She is the author of Fear-Free Fundraising: How to Ask People for Money, available on Amazon.com. Visit Million’s fundraising blog at fearfreefilmfundraising.blogspot.com.
 
Jason Mitchell
From studying acting at Carnegie Mellon to serving as a broadcast journalist in the Navy with material airing on CBS, BBC and NHK, Jason Mitchell has been involved in many aspects of the business. This broad experience has cultivated an artful style which has paired well with his technically savvy productions. Recent roles have been as a director, cinematographer and photographer for his company Purebred Productions producing commercials, industrials and award winning films including They Turned Our Desert Into Fire. Purebred Productions features a 36x40 stage in South San Francisco with camera, lighting and editorial, they continue to develop art photography and narrative projects while serving the greater SF Bay Area film community.

Jim Morton
Jim Morton has been writing about films and film history since the early eighties. He was the guest editor for Re/Search Publications Incredibly Strange Films, the first book to critically examine low budget and exploitation films. He has contributed essays and reviews to several books, including Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins’ Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head, and Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson’s Lost Highways, An Illustrated History of Road Movies. He is the researcher and author of the East German Cinema Blog.

Deborah Nadoolman Landis
Deborah Nadoolman Landis is the Academy Award-nominated costume
designer of Coming to America (1988). Her other costume design
credits include Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark,Three Amigos, and Thriller. Her work is on display at the Smithsonian Institution, the Autry National Center, and the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame.

Hiro Narita
Hiro Narita, ASC has spent more than 30 years working in various capacities with all kinds of  directors, ranging from such European Masters as the late Michelangelo Antonioni, local notables, Carroll Ballard and John Korty, right through to an assortment of movie bandidos working out of  single trucks.

Bill Nichols
Bill Nichols is a film professor specializing in documentary and ethnographic films, film history and theory, and rhetoric and visual representation. Among his ten published books, three are on documentary and his Introduction to Documentary is the most widely used textbook on the concepts and principles of documentary film. He has curated film programs, lectured in Europe, Latin America and Asia and is a professor of cinema at San Francisco State University.

Matt Notaro
Matt Notaro has edited and developed rich media for agencies including McCann-Erickson, Venables Bell & Partners and Ogilvy One. His clients include Sony, HP, Target, T-Mobile, Intel and Visa. He has edited projects with all of Kontent's Kollective directors including Mark Decena, David Munro, Sam Green, Eric Escobar and John Dilley. Notaro is the original hyphenate/slash at Kontent with a range of skills that span editing, graphic design, music composition and flash development.

Jennifer Nowicki Clark
Jennifer Nowicki Clark is the co-director of Creative Narrations, a consulting agency specializing in community-based multimedia training. Based in Oakland, she has more than ten years experience in language, civics and technology education and has trained many teachers and community practitioners nationally and internationally in digital storytelling as well as multimedia literacy and production.

Dan Olmsted
Dan Olmsted is a Berkeley-based sound mixer and designer with extensive and varied credits in the field. An alumnus of SFSU’s film production program, Olmsted honed much of his craft at Berkeley’s Saul Zaentz Film Center, where he served as a rerecording mixer for many years. He also performs music in a variety of local bands. Recent credits include Strange Culture (Lynn Hershman Leeson), White Light, Black Rain (Steven Okazaki) and Soldiers of Conscience (Gary Weimberg).

Stephen Parr
Stephen Parr, founder of Oddball Film+Video has a long history of presenting and archiving the unusual. Since the 1970s Parr has produced and documented live performances of John Cage, Christian Marclay and The Ramones, screened his signature pop culture montages from the Danceteria in New York to the Moscow Cinematheque and created found footage based films such as Historical/Hysterical? and Eurphoria! which have screened worldwide in venues such as The Anthology Film Archive, Jaaga in Bangalore, South India and the Leeds International Film Festival. His company, Oddball Film+Video, the largest film archive in Northern California has supplied eclectic footage for countless feature films, doc, music and media projects worldwide. He curates an eclectic weekly film series-Oddball Films at his archive and is a frequent presenter at film, media seminars and symposiums. He is an active member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.  "Since 1984 Oddball’s 50,000+ film archive has provided footage for worldwide features, television and doc projects like “Milk”, “Mythbusters”, “The Weather Underground” and more." -Oddball Film+Video mission statement

Joanne Parsont
Joanne Parsont is a year-round consultant with SFFS’s Youth Education program. A freelance film programmer, writer, editor and media educator, she has worked in the Bay Area film festival community for 15 years, specializing in outreach and education, youth media, and children’s and documentary programming. With a BA from Duke University and an MA in Mass Communication Studies from the University of Michigan, Joanne previously worked in Washington, D.C. for the Public Broadcasting Service and the Learning Channel before arriving in the Bay Area in 1994.

Miguel Pendás
Today the creative director of the San Francisco Film Society, Pendás graduated from the cinema program at San Francisco State University in 1987 and completed an AFI-Academy Director’s Internship after graduation. His film Refugees, a California Council for the Humanities-funded documentary about Central American refugees in the United States, has been shown on PBS. Pendás has appeared on local television taking viewers to his favorite San Francisco film locations and he recently lectured at the San Francisco Museum & Historical Society on the film noir era in San Francisco.

Marty Pistone
Marty Pistone has worked in professional film production and fight direction for over twenty years, and has worked as a producer and assistant director on numerous independent features, videos and commercials. His television work includes directing for Guiding Light and Another World, the Keenan Ivory Wayans Show, The Man Show, Connecting Dots, Heart of Stone, and A Bug in Her Ear. His choreographic experience has ranged from large-scale historical battle reenactments, (One Man's Hero), to close-up one-on-one sword battles, (The Mask of Zorro.) In New York, he choreographed Joe Papp's production of Richard III, with Denzel Washington. Marty is also Fight Director for the San Francisco Ballet where he choreographed Romeo and Juliet. Marty received an MFA from the American Conservatory Theatre where he also taught. His faculty credits include California Institute of the Arts, Julliard School of the Arts, and New York University.

Shaka Jamal Redmond
Shaka Jamal Redmond, a grassroots artist from Oakland, is a graduate of Tuskegee University in Alabama and is currently working on his MFA in Cinema at SFSU. Redmond’s goal to engage both his love for the arts and for community development led him to work with Digital Underground Storytelling for the Youth (DUSTY) in West Oakland, where he taught digital storytelling and created his first music video on his experience in South Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He is co-owner of Black Apes Project, a multimedia collaboration, and the owner of OLU 8: Film. Redmond is a talented producer, writer and performing artist for the hip hop funk band Hairdoo. His work has premiered at the Pan African Film Festival and the San Francisco Black Film Festival.

Dawn Rich
Dawn Rich has produced short films (The High and The Mighty; Waiter Duty), and instructional and fundraising videos. Her latest role has been as writer and producer for the indie feature Trattoria. She plays a key role in bringing financial resources to projects, besides being a muse and making it all happen. She brings skills developed in her positions at major pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Amgen, Roxane Laboratories, Eli Lilly, and currently Genentech, with a strong background in sales and marketing. She has several other scripts currently in development that she looks forward to bringing to life.

Danae Ringelmann
Danae Ringelmann co-founded IndieGoGo to democratize filmmaking. She brings entertainment industry and film finance expertise, and serves as an Advisor to The Conversation. Prior to IndieGoGo, Danae was a Securities Analyst at Cowen & Co. where she covered entertainment companies including Pixar, Lions Gate, Disney, and Electronic Arts. Danae also focused on cable network, NFL, newspaper and hedge fund clientele while at JP Morgan's Investment Bank and Private Bank. In the wake of 9/11, Danae co-produced a concert reading of Incident at Vichy, an Arthur Miller play addressing the politically charged topic of racial profiling. Danae is a CFA charter holder and holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Danae graduated with a B.A. in Humanities from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar and varsity rower.

Judith Roscoe
Having already been an accomplished writer and fiction instructor at Yale when she wrote her first screenplay, The Road Movie, Judith Roscoe brings a wealth of experience to both creating original stories and crafting compelling adaptations, such as her adaptation of author Robert Stone’s novel, Dog Soldiers, which became Who Will Stop the Rain. Other credits include Eat a Bowl of Tea, Havana, Endless Love, and Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley Underground, soon to be released. Recently she consulted on Roger Spottiswood’s Shake Hands With the Devil, to be released this year, and for The Bang Bang Club, a feature about young conflict photographers in South Africa, which is presently in production.

Lisa Rosenberg
Lisa Rosenberg is a screenwriter whose writing credits include independent features, The Riddle and Savage Dawn; the dramatic short, Friends; the treatment for The Oddest Couple documentary for KCET; the PBS children’s series Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego home version; and many short educational dramas that air on PBS stations.  She was a writer/producer on the Los Angeles Emmy award-winning non-fiction public television series, Psychology: The Study of Human Behavior for KOCE. She also wrote for the Internet-based dramatic and documentary political series, Reinventing America I and II. Currently, she is marketing her dramatic feature based on Edie Meidav’s award-winning novel, Crawl Space, and writing a romantic comedy. Rosenberg has also been a story analyst for Tri-Star Pictures, ITC, and Zoetrope, and consults privately with writers, who have won or placed in the Nicholl, Slamdance, and Zoetrope Screenwriting Contests, won or been finalists for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Awards and the Golden Gate Awards, presented films at Sundance, Cannes, and the Berlinale, and sold or produced screenplays and films in the United States and Germany.

Jay Rosenblatt
Jay Rosenblatt is an internationally recognized artist who has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980 and has completed 25 films. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim, USA Artists and a Rockefeller Fellowship. His films have received over 100 awards and have screened throughout the world. A selection of his films had theatrical runs at the Film Forum in New York and at theaters around the country. Eight of his films have been at the Sundance Film Festival and several of his films have shown on HBO/Cinemax, the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel. Jay is originally from New York and has lived in San Francisco for many years. He has been a film and video production instructor since 1989 at various film schools in the Bay Area, including Stanford University, S.F. State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology and, in a former life, worked as a therapist.

George Rush
George Rush is an attorney, sales rep and producer of hundreds of films including Everything Strange and New, Audience of One, D tour and It Came from Kuchar.

Debra Russell
Debra Russell, Certified Business Coach, is passionate about the world of entertainment and facilitating growth in people's lives. As a coach and workshop leader for artists, Russell works with creative individuals to help shape their success in their chosen field. Russell specializes in the performing arts working with musicians and actors, and on the business and production side with producers, engineers, venue operators and executives. In addition to working with private clients, Russell, founder of Artist’s EDGE has presented several innovative programs for entertainment industry trade conferences including NAFA, TAXI Road Rally, and West Coast Songwriter’s Conference.

Tiffany Shlain
Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and an award-winning filmmaker. Her films include The Tribe and Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness, and have been selected at over 100 festivals—including Sundance and Tribeca—and received over 22 awards. Tiffany founded The Webby Awards in 1996 and was creative director and CEO for nearly a decade. She is currently in production directing a feature length documentary, Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence. Tiffany is a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. She lectures worldwide on the Internet and her filmmaking. She has just been invited to give one of the keynotes at the Berlin International Film Festival in Feb 2009. She is the director of The Moxie Institute, an organization that creates film, books and theater experiences around social issues using emerging technologies.

Britta Sjogren
Britta Sjogren is a screenwriter and independent film director of award-winning, internationally screened films. Two of her films premiered at Sundance; one was selected for the narrative competition, and the other won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short. Sjogren is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as other arts grants. She wrote the book Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (2006) and has worked as an independent script consultant, script reader for Amblin and Constantin Films and film programmer/curator. She is an associate professor and MFA coordinator in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University, where she teaches screenwriting, production and theory.

Marc Smolowitz
Marc Smolowitz is an Academy Award-nominated film, TV & new media producer (The Weather Underground 2003, Trembling Before G-d 2001), director (The Power Of Two 2011) and executive producer (Still Around, 2011) with 20+ years of experience across all aspects of the entertainment business. Most recently, he was the producer at TellyTopia, a Silicon Valley new media start up specializing in IP-TV and VOD products for cable companies. In 2011, he works as a consultant to a diverse slate of San Francisco-based media and technology companies while teaching as an adjunct faculty in the Digital Film Making & Video Production program at the Art Institute of California - San Francisco and as a lecturer in the Film & Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For more info, go to: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcsmolowitz

Karolina Sobecka
Poland native Karolina Sobecka works with animation, design, interactivity, physical computing, computer games and other media and formats. Her work often explores cultural repercussions of scientific and technological advances, and the subjectivity of perception. Sobecka received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Calarts in Experimental Animation/Integrated Media. She has also studied and taught in the University of Washington's Digital Arts and Experimental Media PhD program. Sobecka's work has been shown at festivals and galleries around the world, including the V&A, the Beall Center for Art + Technology, ISEA, Medialab Prado. She has received awards from the Creative Capital, New York State Art Council, Princess Grace Foundation, the Platform International Animation Festival, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards, Asia Digital Art Festival and the Japan Media Arts.

Maryam Soleiman
Maryam Soleiman is Director of Business Affairs for The Rights Workshop, a preeminent SF-based music supervision, licensing and clearance company located at the SF Film Centre in the Presidio. Soleiman oversees the day-to day affairs of the company’s many areas of concentration, as well as advising filmmaker-clients with respect to issues concerning rights and clearances, music licensing and copyright law. Prior to joining The Rights Workshop, Maryam worked for Live Nation where she administered Live Nation's intellectual property assets.

Matthew Tabak
Matthew Tabak is a writer/producer/director. His credits include Auggie Rose starring Jeff Goldblum and Anne Heche and HBO’s Point of Origin, starring Ray Liotta. He has been nominated for the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay Award and has written scripts for Sony, Universal, and Francis Coppola among many others, including a screen adaptation of of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He is also a former Studio Executive, having worked for Warner Bros, Paramount, Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer where he supervised the development and production of both hits and misses. He resides in San Francisco with his wife Samantha.

Cliff Traiman
Cliff Traiman works as a Director of Photography on commercial, industrial and narrative productions. He has shot several feature length films including Village Barbershop, Broken Arrows, Apartment 202, and Kung Phooey, as well as the 2004 season of the nationally syndicated TV show, Ultimate Living.  He has been part of the lighting and grip crew on films such as The Matrix II & III, The Game, What Dreams May Come, Sphere, The Rainmaker, Ed TV, The Wedding Planner, and True Crimes. He lives in Northern California and is a partner in the world famous Little Giant Lighting & Grip Company.

Michele Turnure-Salleo
Michele Turnure-Salleo heads the Film Society’s fiscal sponsorship, grants and residencies programs. Turnure-Salleo has produced and directed projects for film and television for more than 15 years in Sydney, Berlin, Vancouver, Banff and Marseille. She was associate producer of Regret to Inform, an Oscar-nominated documentary about the effect of the Vietnam War on war widows.

Sean Uyehara
Sean Uyehara is a programmer at the Film Society, where he inaugurated KinoTek, a programming thread dedicated to exhibiting cross-platform technologies and emergent media. Uyehara is also the establishing programmer of the San Francisco International Animation Festival and lead programmer of film and music, live events and multimedia performance at the San Francisco International Film Festival and SF360 Film+Club.

Federico Veiroj
Federico Veiroj received a degree in Social Communication from the Catholic University of Uruguay and began making short films in 1996. His first feature film, Acne, was awarded the Films in Progress TVE Award at the 2007 San Sebastián International Film Festival, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and went on to receive the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 AFI Festival in Los Angeles. His second feature film, A Useful Life (La vida útil, 2010), was Uruguay’s official submission to the 2010 Academy Awards, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and traveled to 80 other festivals around the world, including the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Emily Verellen
Emily Verellen is the Director of Programs and Communications at The Fledgling Fund. She joined the Fledgling Fund in 2008. Emily provides strategic communications and expanded outreach and audience engagement support for the Creative Media Initiative. Emily is the co-founder of The Binti Pamoja Center, a women's rights and reproductive health center in Nairobi, Kenya. In 2006, she received a grant from The Fledgling Fund to publish a book about The Binti Pamoja Center, LightBox, which features photographs, stories and autobiographies from the teenage members of the Center. All of the funds earned through the sales of LightBox support The Binti Pamoja Center Scholarship Fund. Emily graduated from American University with a BA in International Development, Anthropology and Communications and from the London School of Economics with an MA in International Development and Population Studies.

Marcus Villegos
Marcus Villegos is an internet marketer that uses the power of the web to reach the masses. He has coached and empowered a variety of music artist, entrepreneurs, network marketing organizations of the unlimited reach that the internet contains. In a short period of time he has been able to establish massive followings and friends using Twitter and bring any message to any audience using cutting edge marketing principles.

Daniel Vitaglione
Daniel Vitaglione is a native of Marseille. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from St. Andrews University (UK) and teaches French cinema at the Alliance Française in San Francisco and at Santa Clara University. He is the author of several books on literature and travel and is currently doing research on the 1960s French New Wave filmmakers and French female directors.

Morrie Warshawski
Morrie Warshawski works with nonprofits and filmmakers to help them realize their full potential through strategic planning. He has worked in the field for over 30 years as an administrator, consultant, facilitator, teacher and writer. He was the Executive Director of two media arts centers (Bay Area Video Coalition and The Media Project) and has served on numerous grant panels. Warshawski has written many articles and two books on fundraising, Shaking the Money Tree: The Art of Getting Grants And Donations for Film And Video (3rd edition, Wiese Books) and The Fundraising Houseparty: How to Party with a Purpose and Raise Money for Your Cause.

Susan Weiner
Susan Weiner is the author of Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) and a former professor of contemporary French studies at Yale University, where she taught courses on cinema, literature, and popular culture.  She currently teaches in the Honors Program at the University of the Pacific.

Brooke Wentz
Brooke Wentz is a seasoned intellectual property rights executive who founded the Rights Workshop, a consulting and mediation business. Author of Hey, That’s My Music! Music Supervision, Licensing and Content Acquisition, Wentz has 25 years of experience in music licensing and publishing, record production and performing rights organization administration. Her credits as a music supervisor include The Devil and Daniel Johnston, American Hardcore, Ballets Russes and the Academy Award nominated documentary The Weather Underground.

Banker White
Banker White is the director/producer of the award-winning documentary Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars, which tells the remarkable story of a group of Sierra Leonean musicians. It was broadcast on POV in North America, HBO Latin America and NHK in Japan among others. His films have been supported by, the Sundance Documentary Fund, TFI, the California Council for Humanities, the Catapult Film Fund, LEF and the Pacific Pioneer Fund. Banker also founded WeOwnTV, a collaborative filmmaking and storytelling project in Sierra Leone which is supported by Creative Capital, Freedom to Create, TheBertha Foundation and BAVC.

David Winton
David Winton is a founding partner of Winton duPont Films, a film and television production company with offices in New York and San Francisco.  His company produces programs for leading broadcast and cable networks, including PBS, The History Channel, National Geographic, and Discovery, as well as Fortune 100 companies, advertising agencies, and not-for-profit organizations.

Recent broadcast credits include Executive Producer of Suburban Surveillance/Suburban Jihad and Interrogating Saddam for the National Geographic Channel (2011/10); Producer/Director of The Unabomber, National Geographic Television and Film (2008);  Executive Producer – The Scrap House, National Geographic (2007);  Producer/Director of Learning the Hard Way, Discovery (2006);  Producer/Director of The Crash, The History Channel (2004); Executive Producer of Big Thinkers: Portraits of American Scientists and Visionaries, TechTV/Spike (2000-2002); Producer/Director – Code Rush (2000), PBS.

David Winton is also on the board of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy Andover, as well as a member of the executive committee of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers. He is a graduate of Harvard College and lives in San Francisco with his wife, Charlotte Vaughan.

Jason Wolos
Jason Wolos recently wrote, directed, and produced the indie feature Trattoria and is gearing up for the festival circuit. His screenplay, Trattoria, was selected to one of the most prestigious incubators for emerging screenwriters in the country, the Squaw Valley Screenwriting Workshop. He has two other scripts in development (Sunday Dinner; San Francisco Story). When he's not writing, he runs Fine Dining Video Productions, which has produced various video projects, and has shot for numerous projects and indie films that have been on the Sundance Channel; 60 Minutes; ESPN2, LinkTV, and Cartoon Network, among others. His short films have played worldwide and in particular The High and The Mighty played on airlines as part of IFP’s Independents in Flight.

Tiffany Woolf
Tiffany Woolf has over 15 years of publicity and special event production experience in film, entertainment and public interest communications. She has directed major campaigns for films and events with leading entertainment properties. She currently heads up the PR/Marketing division of Citizen Film, a San Francisco–based documentary film company.

Ben Zweig
Ben Zweig is a freelance editor to numerous Bay Area filmmakers and non-profit organizations.  He previously worked for 5 years as a technician and online editor at VIDEO ARTS, a high definition post house, working on such esteemed local films as Connected, Woman Art Revolutions,  and We Were Here.   He has had a long withstanding partnership with the San Francisco Film Society, and most recently worked as the Digital Media Manager for SFIFF 55.