Meet the Residents
Read about past Filmhouse residents here.
 | Serge Bakalian is a San Francisco–based filmmaker and activist. He worked for the F.A.O. of the United Nations and Greenpeace International before moving to San Francisco in 2007 to produce film and theater dedicated to the Middle East. In 2011, Bakalian completed the award-winning Default: the Student Loan Documentary, which has seen been released on PBS and LinkTV. He has worked on a wide range of issues and campaigns, notably on defending the biodiversity of the world's food supply against genetic modification. Bakalian holds a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. |
 | Hervé Cohen is an award-winning French American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer based in San Francisco. His work has taken him all over the world from the Casamance in Senegal where he filmed the initiation ceremony of the young Diolas (Sikambano, the sons of the Sacred Woods) to the countryside of Sichuan, China, to follow the work of three traveling projectionists (Electric Shadows). His cinematography credits include Broken Stones by Guetty Felin-Cohen, a film about self-recovery after the Haiti quake; and Room to Breathe by Russell Long, about the experiment of mindfulness in two "rough" classrooms in San Francisco. |
 | Cheryl Dunye, a native of Liberia, received her MFA from Rutgers University and is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts. She has received numerous national and international honors for her work in the media arts. Dunye wrote, directed and starred in the first African American lesbian feature film, The Watermelon Woman. Her other works have been included in the Whitney Biennial and screened at festivals in New York, London, Tokyo, Cape Town, and Sydney. Dunye has served on the Directors Guild of America's Independent Council and on the advisory board for IFP's Gordon Parks Award. |
 | Carlton Evans is an independent film producer and screenwriter whose productions have screened at top festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Tribeca, and Rotterdam. He has taught film theory, art history and architecture at Stanford, San Francisco State University and SF Art Institute, and lectures frequently about film and new media. Carlton's SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant funded project, Ross, is about how a hardworking young man’s staid, well-established life is upended after he posts an offhand comment to his Facebook profile, drawing the attention of numerous secretive government agencies and setting off a bizarre chain of events. |
 | Born in Haiti, reared in America and coming of age cinematically in France, Guetty Felin-Cohen is an award winning filmmaker with a very eclectic and rich background in the film and television industry. She has worked on over 70 hours of documentary and narrative films in various roles: distributor, marketing/outreach director, screenplay reader, voice-over narrator, curator and teacher. Guetty is working on her narrative feature film, Ayiti Mon Amour, an ensemble tale of four stories on salvaging love after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. |
 | Anna Fitch is an Emmy Award-winning director whose work has aired on National Geographic, Channel 4, TLC and PBS. Her films BugWorld: War of Two Worlds and Bug Attack have won numerous awards, including an Emmy for Best Documentary Directing in 2003 for the former. In 2011 her short The Burning Wigs of Sedition screened at the National Gallery of Art, the Seattle International Film Festival, the Woodstock Film Festival, the San Francisco Film Society's Cinema By the Bay, the Perth Revelation Film Festival and Rooftop Films, and won a Best of Festival prize at the Black Maria Film Festival and an Audience Award at SF IndieFest. |
 | Ian Hendrie is a San Francisco based director, screenwriter, producer and the co-founder of Fantoma Films, a production company and independent DVD label which has been releasing premium edition DVDs of films by such famed auteurs as Francis Ford Coppola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, Kenneth Anger and Alex Cox, among others, since 1999. Ian's SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant funded project, Mercy Road, based on true events, traces the political and spiritual odyssey of a small town Christian housewife as she slowly turns from a peaceful pro-life activist to an underground militant. |
 | No stranger to politics, Christie Herring grew up working on campaigns for public office in Mississippi. Today she is an award-winning independent documentary director with a strong interest in social justice. Her first film Waking in Mississippi focused on the wildly controversial election of the first black mayor in Herring's childhood hometown—a contest that ended in the threat of a race riot. Her short films Chickens in the City, Howdy Partner, and Bodies and Souls have won multiple awards, screened at dozens of film festivals around the world, and have aired on PBS. |
 | Matthew Lessner is an award-winning writer/director whose credits include The Woods, which is credited as the first feature selected by Sundance to use Kickstarter for production funding; Darling Darling, which won the Tom Berman Most Promising Filmmaker Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival; and By Modern Measure, which was dubbed “the best short of 2007” by Indiewire. |
 | Jonah Markowitz has been professionally making films for the past 13 years. He wrote and directed the critically acclaimed independent feature film Shelter, which won the HBO Award for Outstanding First Feature and the Scion Director's Award, as well as audience awards in New York, Vancouver, Sao Paulo and Melbourne, among others. The film was named “The Number 1 Gay Film of All Time” by AfterElton.com in their bi-annual poll. Previously, Markowitz wrote and directed two short films, I Left Me and Hung Up, which screened at over 40 festivals worldwide and were both programmed at the American Cinematheque. |
 | Jennifer Phang is a San Francisco–based filmmaker with more than ten years of experience. She was commissioned by ITVS to create the short film Advantageous for their Futurestates series; it has screened at film festivals worldwide and she is currently developing the project into a feature film. Phang has an MFA in directing from AFI and a BA in media studies from Pomona College. Jennifer is in development on her film Advantageous, a thriller set in the future which transports us into a metropolis in economic decline. |
 | Banker White directed and produced the award-winning documentary Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars, which tells the story of a group of six Sierra Leonean musicians. The film was nominated by the International Documentary Association for best feature in 2006, won grand jury awards at AFI Fest, Full Frame Film Festival and Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and earned audience awards at SXSW and Miami International Film Festival. It was also broadcast on POV in North America, HBO Latin America and NHK in Japan. In 2009, he founded WeOwnTV, a collaborative filmmaking and storytelling project based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. |