Albert Maysles  

Two of America’s foremost non-fiction filmmakers, Albert Maysles and his brother David (1932-1987) are recognized as pioneers of “direct cinema,” the distinctly American version of French “cinéma vérité.” They earned their distinguished reputations by being the first to make non-fiction feature films–films in which the drama of human life unfolds as is, without scripts, sets, or narration.

Albert received his B.A. at Syracuse and his M.A. at Boston University, where he taught Psychology for three years. He made the transition from Psychology to film in the summer of 1955 by taking a 16mm camera to Russia to film patients at several mental hospitals. The result, Psychiatry in Russia, was Albert’s first foray into filmmaking.

In 1960, Albert was co-filmmaker of Primary, a film about the Democratic primary election campaigns of Kennedy and Humphrey. The Maysles brothers made Meet Marlon Brando (1965) and With Love From Truman (1966). Albert was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1965. His next three films became cult classics: Salesman (1968); Gimme Shelter (1970), a dazzling portrait of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones; and Grey Gardens (1976), about the haunting relationship of the Beales, a mother and daughter living secluded in a decaying East Hampton mansion. These films were released theatrically to great acclaim. The landmark Salesman (1968), which won an award from the National Society of Film Critics, is regarded as the classic American documentary.

Albert’s subsequent forays into the world of music range from What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964) to films on Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Vladimir Horowitz, Mstislav Rostropovich and Wynton Marsalis, several of which have received Emmy Awards. In 1994, Albert filmed an up-to-date portrait, Conversations with the Rolling Stones (broadcast on VH-1).

Maysles Films Inc. has produced many films on art and artists, including a long-standing collaboration of celebrated artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose monumental environmental projects were documented in Academy Award-nominated Christo’s Valley Curtain (1974), Running Fence (1978), Islands (1986), Christo in Paris (1990), and Umbrellas (1995) – which won the Grand Prize and People’s Choice Award at the Montreal Festival of Films on Art.   The 2007 The Gates - for which Albert and David Maysles began filming in 1979 – follows, over a 25-year-period, the persistent, interrupted, and eventually successful efforts of Christo and Jeanne-Claude to place their large-scale project The Gates in Central Park in February 2005.

More recently, Albert has worked on a number of collaborations with filmmakers Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson, and Bob Eisenhardt. These titles include Letting Go: A Hospice Journey (1996 HBO); Concert of the Wills: Making the Getty Center (1997); and the HBO-commissioned Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton, a story of one family’s struggle to break free from the cycles of poverty and illiteracy in the Mississippi Delta. In 2001 Albert received the Sundance Film Festival 2001 Cinematography Award for Documentaries for Lalee’s Kin, which was also nominated for an Academy Award, and in 2004, he received the DuPont Columbia Gold Baton Award.

In 1994, the International Documentary Association presented Albert with their Career Achievement Award. He has received S.M.P.T.E.’s 1997 John Grierson Award for Documentary, the American Society of Cinematographers’ 1998 President’s Award (given for the first time to a documentarian), the Boston Film and Video Foundation’s 1998 Vision Award, Toronto’s Hot Docs 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1999 Flaherty Award, and the Thessaloniki 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1999 Eastman Kodak saluted Albert as one of the 100 world’s finest cinematographers.

Photo by Kendall Messick

Su Friedrich  

Su Friedrich began filmmaking in 1978 and has produced and directed eighteen 16mm films and videos, including From the Ground Up (2007), Seeing Red (2005), The Head of a Pin (2004), The Odds of Recovery (2002), Hide and Seek (1996), Rules of the Road (1993), First Comes Love (1991), Sink or Swim (1990), Damned If You Don’t (1987), The Ties That Bind (1984), and Gently Down the Stream (1981).

Her films have won many awards, including the Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival and Outstanding Documentary at Outfest. Friedrich has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as numerous grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, NYSCA and ITVS, and in 1995 she received the Cal Arts/Alpert Award. Her work is widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, The Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema, the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the First Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, the Wellington Film Festival in New Zealand, The Bios Art Center in Athens, Greece, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Friedrich is the writer, cinematographer, director and editor of all her films, with the exception of Hide and Seek, which was co-written by Cathy Quinlan and shot by Jim Denault. Her work is screened and distributed widely throughout the US, Canada and Europe. She teaches film & video production at Princeton University. Her DVD collection is distributed by Outcast Films.

(© 2002) by Rebecca McBride

Debra Chasnoff  

Debra Chasnoff is an Academy Award®-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has fueled progressive social-change movements in many fields. She is a the executive director at GroundSpark and co-creator of The Respect For All Project, a program that produces media and training resources to help prevent prejudice among young people.

The Respect For All Project films by Chasnoff include: Let’s Get Real (2003; director/producer), a powerful documentary about young teens’ experiences with name-calling and bullying in which youth speak up about racial tensions, anti-gay taunting, sexual harassment and much more; That’s a Family! (2000; director/producer), which looks at family diversity from a kids’ perspective, and which was screened at the White House and has been embraced by scores of national children’s advocacy, education and civil-rights organizations; and It’s Elementary — Talking About Gay Issues in School (1996; director/producer), which was hailed as “a model of intelligent directing” by International Documentary magazine and has served as a catalyst for schools all over the world to become more proactive in addressing anti-gay prejudice in the classroom.

Chasnoff’s other film credits include One Wedding and a Revolution (2004; director/producer), an intimate look inside San Francisco city hall when the first same-sex marriage license was granted to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon; Oscar®-winning Deadly Deception — General Electric, Nuclear Weapons & Our Environment (1991; director/producer), a crucial component of a successful international grassroots campaign to pressure GE out of the nuclear-weapons industry; Homes & Hands — Community Land Trusts in Action (1998; co-director), which is used extensively to inspire local communities to explore new models of creating permanently affordable housing; Wired for What? (1999; director/producer), part of the PBS series Digital Divide about the push to computerize education; and Choosing Children (1984; director/producer), which explored the once seemingly impossible idea that lesbians and gay men could become parents.

Chasnoff is a member of New Day Films, a national progressive film-distribution co-operative. She serves on the national advisory board for Frameline, the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Jewish Voices for Peace. She has been honored by many organizations for her leadership, including the National Education Association, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, Ally Action, Community United Against Violence, and the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, lives in San Francisco, and is a mother of two.

Natalia Almada  

Natalia Almada was born in Mexico to a North American mother and a Mexican father. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and shares her time between Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York.

Natalia Almada’s directing credits include All Water Has a Perfect Memory, a poignant experimental documentary that explores the effects of loss and remembrance experienced in a family’s life, which received international recognition; Al Otro Lado, her award winning debut feature documentary about immigration, drug trafficking and corrido music; and her most recent film, El General, a family memoir and portrait of Mexico past and present.

Almada’s work has screened at The Sundance Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Biennial, INPUT, and at The Flaherty Seminar, as well as at several film festivals around the world, at universities and conferences, and as television broadcasts including PBS, ARTE, and VPRO. She has received support for her work from numerous foundations including The Creative Capital Foundation, The Tribeca Film Institute, The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, PBS and others. Almada is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.

Peter Galison  

Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997 Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; won a 1998 Pfizer Award (for Image and Logic) as the best book that year in the History of Science; and in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize. His books include How Experiments End (1987), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), and most recently Objectivity (with L. Daston, 2007). He has worked extensively with de-classified material in his studies of physics in the Cold War. His film on the moral-political debates over the H-bomb, Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma (44 minutes, with Pamela Hogan) has been shown frequently on the History Channel and is widely used in courses and seminars in the United States and abroad. Galison co-curated a major exhibition, “Iconoclash” at the German Media Museum (ZKM) in 2002. The show explored the battles between iconoclasm and iconophilia—the necessity and impossibility of images—in art, science, and religion.

Liza Johnson  

Liza Johnson is an artist and filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker Art Center, and the Centre Pompidou, as well as the New York, Berlin, and Rotterdam Film Festivals, among many others. Her titles include Giftwrap (1998), Fernweh/The Opposite of Homesick (2000), South of Ten (2006), and In the Air (2009).

Johnson has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm and the Sundance Institute. She has also published critical writing on art and film, has curated a number of museum exhibitions and festival programs, and has published a number of articles and interviews about art and film. Johnson is Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.

Myna Joseph  

Myna Joseph completed her M.F.A. in film at Columbia University in 2007. Her thesis short MAN was an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, SXSW, and New Directors/ New Films at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. The film received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short at numerous festivals including Florida Film Festival, Boston Independent Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival and CineVegas.  She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2008 list of “25 New Faces in Independent Film.”  Myna has produced numerous award-winning shorts and co-produced Pressure Cooker, a documentary feature executive produced by Participant Productions.  She currently teaches Film Studies at The City College of New York.

Hen Lasker  

Hen Lasker was born 1980 in Israel, and graduated in 2005 from The Film and Television School at Sapir Collage. She has directed a number of films, both features and documentaries as part of her studies. Seeds of Summer is her debut film.

Susan Meiselas 

Susan Meiselas received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1976. A selection was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000. The original book was revised and reprinted by the Whitney Museum and Steidl Verlag in 2003.

Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has worked as a freelance photographer since then. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, which were published widely throughout the world. In 1981, Pantheon published her second monograph, Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979, which was reprinted by Aperture in the fall 2008.

Meiselas served as an editor and contributor to the book El Salvador: The  Work of Thirty Photographers (Writers & Readers, 1983) and edited Chile From Within (W.W. Norton, 1991), featuring work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. She has co-directed two films:  Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1997, she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year photographic history of Kurdistan, and integrating her own work into the book entitled Kurdistan: In The Shadow of History (Random House, 1997; reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 2008). Meiselas then created the website, www.akaKURDISTAN.com, an online archive of collective memory; as well as an exhibition that launched at the Menil Collection in Houston, and traveled for eight years to several venues in the United States and Europe.

Her 2001 monograph, Pandora’s Box (Magnum Editions/Trebruk), which explores a New York S & M club, has been exhibited both at home and abroad. In 2003, Encounters with the Dani was featured as an installation in the International Center of Photography’s Triennial “Strangers” and co-published by ICP/Steidl Verlag. The book explores a 60-year history of outsiders’ discovery and interactions with the Dani, an indigenous people of the highlands of Papua in Indonesia. In 2008, Susan Meiselas, In History, a major U.S. overview highlighting key moments in Meiselas’ documentary process, was exhibited at the International Center for Photography. The accompanying reader, Susan Meiselas, In History, co-published by ICP/Steidl, received the Kraszna Krauss “And/Or” book of the year award as well as the LUMA book award at Recontres de Arles in 2009.

Meiselas has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Her work is included in American and international collections. Honorary awards of recognition include: the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “outstanding courage and reporting” by the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua (1979); the Leica Award for Excellence (1982); the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art (1985); the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America (1994); the Hasselblad Foundation Photography prize (1994) and most recently, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award (2005). In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Amanda Micheli  

Amanda Micheli is an Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker with over a decade of experience as both a director / producer and a cinematographer. Micheli directed, shot and edited her first film, Just For The Ride, a documentary about cowgirls on the women’s Pro Rodeo circuit. Ride won an Academy Award® and International Documentary Association Award in student categories and premiered on the prestigious PBS series POV in 1996. Her second film, Double Dare, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the audience award for Best Documentary at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among many others.

In addition to directing her own projects, Micheli was a producer and the director of photography on Lauren Greenfield’s award-winning film Thin (HBO) and shot the premiere episode of Morgan Spurlock’s series, 30 Days (FX). Other D.P. credits include: My Flesh And Blood, a Sundance and Emmy Award-winning documentary (HBO), The Flute Player, an Emmy-nominated film shot in Cambodia (PBS / ITVS) and Witches In Exile, which won the special jury prize at SXSW.

Amanda’s most recent film La Corona, which she co-directed with Isabel Vega, was nominated for an Oscar® and premiered in competition at Sundance. She was also a producer and D.P. on Cat Dancers, which premiered on HBO in 2008, and Brave New Voices, a new HBO series for release in 2009. While developing new projects, Amanda also produces various commercial shorts for clients including Adobe Software, Apple, and Nike.

Amanda is a graduate of Harvard University and was a member of the top U.S. women’s rugby team for over a decade.

Robb Moss  

Robb Moss’s last two films, The Same River Twice (2003) and Secrecy (2008) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The Same River Twice was nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit award, played theatrically in more than eighty cities across North America, and won Best Documentary Awards at Nashville, Chicago (Audience Award), New England and Sidewalk. Other films have shown at the Telluride Film Festival, screened at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and at numerous venues around the world, including in Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, Sydney, Ankara, and Rio de Janeiro. As a cinematographer he has shot films in Ethiopia, Hungary, Japan, Liberia, Mexico, Turkey on such subjects as famine, genocide and the large-scale structure of the universe; many of these pieces were shown on Public Television. He was on the 2004 documentary jury at the Sundance Film Festival and has thrice served as a creative advisor for the Sundance Institute documentary labs. He is currently serving on the Board of Directors for the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and has taught filmmaking at Harvard University for the past twenty years.

Laurel Nakadate  

Laurel Nakadate is a photographer, video artist and filmmaker. She was born in Austin, Texas in 1975 and raised in Ames, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University and currently lives in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1/MoMA, The Yerba Buena, The Getty Museum, and The Reina Sofia. In 2009, her first feature film, Stay The Same Never Change, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be featured in New Directors / New Films at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. She is currently finishing her second feature film, The Wolf Knife. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York City.

Alexander Olch  

Alexander Olch began directing Super8 films in the fourth grade. By the tenth grade, his short Soaked (1992) was a finalist at the New York National High School Film Festival. His short No Vladimir (2000), produced by Chantal Akerman and Ross McElwee at Harvard University, was named one of the top ten student films in the country by the Independent Film Project in 2000, was an IFC Finalist (2000), BBC World Film Festival finalist (2000), and played regularly on Bravo and the Independent Film Channel until 2004. His short, Artemin Goldberg: Custom Tailor of Brassieres (2000), supervising produced by Richard P. Rogers, premiered at the Hollywood Film Festival (2000). His feature screenplay based on the short was a semi-finalist at the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition 2000. The Windmill Movie is his first feature.

Olch is also well known as the founder and designer of Alexander Olch New York. He started the company in 2002, and his accessories collection is now sold at many of the world’s most prestigious stores – Bergdorf Goodman, Opening Ceremony New York and Los Angeles, and United Arrows in Tokyo. His collaboration with conceptual artist Nicolas Guagnini Money Is No Object (2008) is currently showing in New York at Fruit and Flower Deli and Andrew Roth Gallery, in Buenos Aires at Benzacar Gallery, in Berlin at Coma Gallery, as well at the Basel Art Exhibition in Switzerland. Olch has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Men’s Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue Italy, GQ, and GQ Germany.

GODLIS/The Film Society of Lincoln Center

Llewellyn Smith  

Peabody and Dupont award winner Llewellyn Smith is President and founder of Vital Pictures, inc. (www.vitalpix.com), a Boston-based documentary film production company dedicated to exploring social justice issues. With his business partner, Christine Herbes-Sommers, he is co-executive producer for the PBS series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (2008)—a look at the surprising impact social and economic conditions have in determining our health and longevity. Unnatural Causes won the Council On Foundations Henry Hampton Award, as well as the 2009 Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award, the top broadcast journalism prize in the United States.

As a writer/producer, Llew Smith has contributed to such PBS series as Eyes On The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years and the critically acclaimed PBS history series American Experience, where as Series Editor he played a key role in origination, development and acquisition of more than 70 programs on American history. Mr. Smith was Project Director for the Peabody and Emmy award-winning series Africans In America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (1997), and directed the final film in the series, Judgment Day.

Mr. Smith’s film Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory (May, 2001) tells how former slaves from Fisk University preserved slave spirituals in concert performances and shared them with the world in years following the Civil War. The film was produced for American Experience.

For the 3-hour PBS series RACE: The Power Of An Illusion (2003), Smith produced the program The House We Live In. Smith was a producer /director for the 3-hour special Reconstruction: The Second Civil War (2004), winner of the Eric Barnouw award for best history documentary. He was also producer/director for the 2-hour NOVA biography of Dr. Percy Julian, the pioneering industrial chemist and civil rights activist, Forgotten Genius (broadcast on February 2007). Forgotten Genius was recently honored for broadcast excellence by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), won the National Science Writers Award, and was nominated for a Writers Guild award.

Most recently Llew Smith was director-producer for the Vital Pictures documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, which premieres in the 2009-10 season of the PBS series Independent Lens and will be featured at Wellesley’s New Directions in Documentary Film Festival and Symposium.

Llew Smith with his business partner, Christine Herbes-Sommers

Michael Sucsy  

Michael Sucsy made his directorial debut with Grey Gardens (2009). After earning a Masters of Fine Arts in film from the prestigious Art Center College of Design, Sucsy began directing commercials. Dubbed one of the industry’s crop of new directors to watch by Shoot! Magazine, he was subsequently nominated for the Young Director of the Year Award, given in conjunction with the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Sucsy’s extensive film production experience during and prior to grad school includes The One, The Siege, Deep Impact, Godzilla, Jungle 2 Jungle, The Shadow Conspiracy and Mars Attacks! He is also a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

courtesy of HBO

Isabel Vega  

Colombian-born filmmaker Isabel Vega moved to the United States at age seven and received her B.A. in film studies from Wesleyan University. She has been an editor, assistant director and associate producer on documentary projects for HBO, Lifetime, Bravo and FX, as well as numerous national commercials. In 2005, Vega’s directorial debut, First Kiss, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She co-produced the second-season premiere episode of Morgan Spurlock’s series, 30 Days, and was an associate producer on HBO’s Thin, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, as well as on the HBO documentary Too Hot Not To Handle, which focuses on global warming. Most recently Vega was the director of photography on the documentary Off The Grid: Life On The Mesa, which premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival. La Corona is her latest film, which she directed, produced and shot with Amanda Micheli. She is currently developing a documentary about gang girls who reside and work in East LA.

Jessica Yu  

Jessica Yu’s 1997 Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. The film, an intimate portrait of a writer who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung, also earned her an Emmy and a Cable Ace Award for Best Documentary Director.  Her documentary feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, debuted at Sundance in 2004 and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award when it was broadcast on PBS’s series P.O.V. She has also directed episodes of various television shows, including The West Wing, ER, and Grey’s Anatomy. Yu has been nominated three times for the Sundance Film Festival’s prestigious Grand Jury Prize for her feature documentaries In the Realms of the Unreal, Living Museum, and Protagonist, the film being featured at Wellesley’s New Directions in Documentary Film festival and symposium.  Her most recent documentary short, The Kinda Sutra, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January and will also be played at our festival. Yu has served on the Board of Directors of the International Documentary Association, where she was an organizing member of the first International Documentary Congress, and visited Boston as the artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  She resides and works in Los Angeles.