People

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Christopher Allen PROGRAMMER Steve Holmgren OPERATIONS MANAGER Lexi Henigman UDC PROGRAM DIRECTORS Kara Oehler Jesse Shapins COLLABORATIVE PROGRAM INSTRUCTORS Cassim Sheppard Chi-hui Yang Tom Zummer COLLABORATIVE PARTICIPANTS Annie Berman Emma Brenner-Malin Stephanie Chang Michael Kugler Will Martin Laura Mayer Ashley Panzera Andrew Parsons Joshua Gen Solondz Laurie Sumiye Daniel Terna Rosa White Matthew Yoka CRITICAL WRITING FELLOW Colin Beckett WEB ADMIN Radia Lateif ASSOCIATE PROGRAMMER Chelsea Miller

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Logan Beirne Caitlin Boyle Brian Frye Noah Landow Andreea Stefanescu PROGRAMMING ADVISERS Jim Supanick Mark Street Lu Olkowski Rachel Rakes Nathan Kensinger Hilke Schellmann Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

PREVIOUS COLLABORATIVE PARTICIPANTS

Andre Almeida
Tina Antolini
Ben Brown
Rahul Chadha
Hyatt Michaels
Katia Maguire
Jolene Pinder
Shawn Wen
Robbie Wilkins
Lila Dobbs
Lily Henderson
Sarah Lawson
Christy Wiles
Hillevi Loven
Nate Fisher
Serdar Paktin
Matthew Amonson
Kerstin Brätsch
Whitney Duncan
Matt Earp
Stine Exler
Katrina Grigg-Saito
Christopher Huth
Paul Kiel
Vanessa Liberati
Justin Lin
Johanna Linsley
Pejk Malinovski
Lindsay Napolitano
Timothy Phillips
Emma Raynes
Hilke Schellmann
Wendy Sharbutt
Stephanie Skaff
Brian Wengrofsky

Bios

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

(Bios coming soon)

TEAM

Artistic Director: Christopher Allen
Christopher Allen has worked as a director, creative entrepreneur, and new media artist after graduating from Columbia University and studying at Trinity College Dublin. He directed the interactive documentary Capitol of Punk, part of a 2007 exhibition at the MoMA NYC, and is the founder/director of UnionDocs. Christopher was also a founding-partner of the start-up, Counts Media, and played a leading role in the invention and execution of many art & entertainment concepts there, such as Yellow Arrow, a place-based storytelling project exhibited online and in galleries and museums internationally.

Collaborative Program Co-Director: Jesse Shapins
Jesse Shapins is an urban media theorist/historian/artist/curator who lives between New York and Cambridge, MA. His scholarly and artistic work explores experiments in mapping the imagination and perception of place across different media. He is the co-creator of Yellow Arrow, Mapping Main Street, The Colors Berlin, amongst other works. Hiw work has been exhibited at MoMA (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (Berlin), architekturgalerie am weißenhof (Stuttgart) and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (Cambridge), among other venues. He has taught at Pratt Institute and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he co-created the studio/seminar “Critical Urban Media Arts: An Experimental Workshop in Urban Research, Mapping and Representation.” He is currently pursuing a PhD in the History and Theory of Urbanism, Film and Visual Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies

Collaborative Program Co-Director: Kara Oehler
is a radio producer, transmission artist and interactive documentarian, whose work focuses upon the overlooked stories of everyday America, from the Mexican border to the South Side of Chicago, from people’s memories of their first childhood songs to the experiences of refugees across the nation. Her work with longtime collaborator Ann Heppermann has won Peabody, Edward R. Murrow, Associated Press, Third Coast International Audio Festival and other awards. Kara’s projects have been featured on national and international public radio shows and networks such as Morning Edition, Radio Lab, Studio 360, Marketplace and the BBC, and exhibited at MoMA and the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, among other venues. She has taught at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and Sarah Lawrence College.

Programmer: Steve Holmgren
Originally from Minnesota, Steve has a background in film production, previously working at HDNet Films (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, and Brian De Palma’s Redacted). Steve also does international film sales with the documentary production company Cactus Three (LoudQuietLoud: A Film About the Pixies, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Devil’s Playground). In addition to this, Steve has worked extensively the past few years in the film festival world, working in various capacities from operations to programming for a variety of festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, Telluride, Sound Unseen, and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Steve has transitioned primarily to programming, setting up numerous screenings in New York City and beyond.

Critical Writing Fellow: Colin Beckett

is an occasional writer and more occasional video editor in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Fordham University with a degree in Visual Arts.

Johanna Linsley, Advisor

creates projects in performance, text and sound which have been produced for venues and spaces around New York City, New England and Berlin. She’s interested in connecting a critical and political approach to an intuitive and sense-based artistic practice. She graduated from Smith College and is currently pursuing an MA in Performance at Queen Mary, University of London.

CURRENT COLLABORATIVE PARTICIPANTS

(Bios coming soon)

PREVIOUS COLLABORATIVE PARTICIPANTS

Andre Almeida

Andre Almeida is a PhD student researching Interactive Documentary, enrolled at the University of Porto (PT). He holds a Masters in Information Management (PT), PgDip in Health Informatics at the UCL (UK) and a degree in Information and Communication Technologies (PT). He has been Assistant Professor at the University of Porto since 2003 in the area of Video/Audio production and Multimedia, and is a member of the Research Centre CETAC.com. His research is focused on the merging between audiovisual and the Web. He has been involved in several video productions and just directed a feature documentary. He has also been involved in different multimedia projects at the University of Porto.More recently, he was the Scientific Coordinator of a video and audio training at the Portuguese News Agency, spending several months training journalists and editors at the newsroom.

Tina Antolini

Since she started making radio at the tender age of 15, Tina Antolini has produced stories on everything from the sex lives of lobsters to Iraqi religious minorities to a secret bunker in the woods of Massachusetts that houses an archive of East German films. She’s now a producer at the new National Public Radio show State of the Re:Union, having previously served as a reporter, producer and host at WFCR, the NPR-affiliate for Western New England. She’s also produced for the science and nature program Pulse of the Planet, and for a slew of national NPR and PRI programs. Her radio stories have won numerous awards, including a 2009 Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and Television for her series documenting the transgender community in western Massachusetts. Antolini received her B.A. in Ethnomusicology and American Studies from Hampshire College, and is also a graduate of the radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She can bake a mean apple pie, sing a killer cover of “Mustang Sally,” and will happily spend hours in a cafe with a stack of books and newspapers to occupy her.

Ben Thorp Brown

Ben Thorp Brown is a documentary filmmaker and artist. After graduating from Williams College, he brought his laptop loaded with Final Cut Pro and a camera to Bolivia, Paraguay, and Colombia to produce documentaries about the environment. Since returning stateside, he has been creating politically and socially charged documentary video and installation work. His video work has appeared on the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, Discovery Channel, WNET, and in several international film festivals. He was the Leonhardt Cassullo Video Fellow at Creative Time from 2008-2009 and a Watson/Chandler Fellow in 2006-2007.

Rahul Chadha

Rahul Chadha is an aspiring documentary filmmaker who graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in journalism. He has worked as the sole full-time reporter at a small, independently owned newspaper in Maryland. Rahul also served as a reporter and editor at the volunteer-run Indypendent newspaper, a publication produced by the New York City chapter of the Independent Media Center collective. He maintains a blog at >www.guerrillaface.com.

Katia Maguire

Katia Maguire grew up in Quito, Ecuador, San Diego, California, and the D.C. area and graduated from the University of Virginia with two bachelor of arts degrees in Latin American Studies and Foreign Affairs, with a focus on women’s issues. She loves her current job as associate producer for Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. Along with her filmmaking partner, April Hayes, Katia is co-directing and producing a documentary about human rights activist and domestic violence survivor Jessica Lenahan, titled “Jessica Gonzales vs. The United States of America,” which was recently awarded development funding from ITVS and participated in 2009′s National Association of Latino Independent Producers’ Latino Producers Academy and Independent Film Week’s Spotlight on Documentaries. Her past credits include associate producer on “Quest for Honor,” a 2009 Sundance Film Festival documentary about women and honor-based violence in the Kurdish region of Iraq, and the PBS American Masters documentary “Annie Leibovitz: Life through a Lens.”

Hyatt Michaels

Hyatt Michaels is a writer, director from the thumb section of Michigan. He moved to New York city in pursuit of inspiration for his writing and directing. Since moving to the city he’s worked as freelance stage manager, assistant director and A/V operator for several downtown NYC theater companies.

Will Martin

Will Martin grew up in Denver, CO before attending Middlebury College in Vermont where he studied International Development and French. After leaving Vermont he lived and worked in Argentina practicing architecture and teaching art. He currently works at a small architecture studio in Manhattan. Will is an aspiring visual and audio artist with a focused interested on spatial expression, memory and connectivity. His work, which he hopes pushes the limits of what is considered documentary art, aims to encourage both a heightened social and sensual awareness of the built environment in order to connect people more deeply, physically and metaphysically, with the places they inhabit.

Jolene Pinder

Jolene Pinder is a staff producer at Arts Engine, a non-profit that supports, produces, and distributes independent media of consequence. At Arts Engine, she is currently producing Asexuality: The Making of a Movement. She served as Associate Producer for Outreach and Distribution on Arts Engine’s latest releases, Arctic Son and Election Day (POV 2007 and 2008). Jolene co-directed (with Sarah Zaman) the film Bismillah. Bismillah was a finalist for the International Documentary Association’s David Wolper Award, won first place at the 2008 Student Emmys and was the recipient of a CINE Golden Eagle Award. Jolene has a background in marketing, sponsorship and graphic design in a variety of non-profit settings–consumer rights, education reform, gender equity and most recently, in public broadcasting at WGBH. She graduated with a degree in English Literature from the University of Chicago and holds a Masters in Journalism and Communications from the University of Florida’s Documentary Institute.

Joshua Solondz

Joshua Solonndz makes video installations, formalist home movies, and handmade super 8mm films. Although he majored in film and electronic arts at Bard College, Josh also pursues an interest in language, new media art, and music. He has shown work at venues including DCTV, Light Industry, NYStudio Gallery, Artists’ Television Access, and Millennium Film Workshop. Josh lives in Brooklyn.

Shawn Wen

Shawn Wen is a writer, radio documentarian, and multimedia artist. She produced the lyric essay and radio documentary, “Parts of a Body,” a text and sound-rich profile of the late mime Marcel Marceau. Her radio work has aired on PRI’s Studio 360 and WRNI, Rhode Island Public Radio. Her installations have exhibited at List Art in Providence, RI and the Via di Sant’Anna Gallery in Rome, Italy. Shawn is the recipient of the Royce Fellowship and the Third Coast Scholarship. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in Literary Arts and currently resides in New York.

Robbie Wilkins

Listen. Robbie Wilkins after-schooled himself into filmmaking in the 7th grade, thanks to the Public Access Television circuit in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. Since then, it’s been his patchwork aspiration to explore, educate and entertain through the visual medium he grew up on. Inspired by everything from hip-hop to the Cornhusker state he calls home, Wilkins’ open-to-influence, show-and-tell mode of storytelling is steeped in that which drives him. After completing his undergraduate degree in Journalism at Creighton University, Wilkins attended the San Francisco Art Institute for a minute, and then dropped out. He said “Hello Brooklyn” in the mild summer of 2009, where he became a member of the Uniondocs collaborative as a resident. Not only has Brooklyn become his home but an essential pivot point and playground to which he believes he’s been coming to from the get-go.

Matthew Amonson
attended San Francisco State University where he majored in Cinema Production. As a Filmmaker/Animator/Editor, his short films have screened at numerous festivals around the country, including the Tribeca Film Festival. Check out his website www.nosnoma.com.

Kerstin Braetsch
is a painter. She was born in Hamburg, and studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She traveled to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship and she recently received an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Lila Dobbs
graduated from Hampshire College where she received her BA in literary journalism and cultural studies. She also holds a degree in non-fiction writing from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. Her passion for stories and abandonment for personal safety has taken her inside Israeli ambulances, on dogsleds in Maine and through Floridian Indian reservations. While she enjoys working in a variety of mediums and spaces, Lila currently dedicates her time to learning the ropes of audio documentary. Previous projects have included documentary work for Western Massachusetts’ Local Foods Initiative, WFCR Public Radio in Amherst, Massachusetts and Soft Skull Press in Brooklyn. Her favorite Mimo’s icees flavor is coconut.

Whitney Duncan
is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at UC San Diego. She also has a degree in English from Columbia University. See some of her writing at tierrasagrada37.

Matt Earp
is a rising second year master’s student at Berkeley’s School of Information. He received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in Direction and Sound Design for Theater, with further concentrations in Electronic Music and Photography. He is interested in how communication technology is (and isn’t) changing the social practices that surround musicians and the spread of music and musical cultures, as well as law and policy that are effected by current changes. Matt is also a music journalist for XLR8R magazine, a blogger, a event promoter, and DJs as Kid Kameleon, and he pushes Jamaican-influenced music at the extreme ends of the dance and electronic spectrums.

Stine Exler
is part of the New School University?’s graduate certificate in Documentary Media Studies program on a Dean?’s Scholarship.

Nate Fisher
is pursuing an MA in Media Studies with a specialization in documentary film at the New School University.

Lily Henderson
has been doing film and photography for the past eight years, working predominately as a Cinematographer. In still and moving image, she is constantly intrigued by the intricate stillnesses and vulnerabilities of people in their surroundings. It is because of this interest that Lily shapes her work. Her films include: Associate, an experimental short that looks into memory and personal associations with everyday objects (winner of Best Hampshire College Film in the 2004 Five College Film Festival); March for Women’s Lives, a 16 mm short that focuses on the crowd ambience in the 2004 March for Women’s Lives held in Washington, D.C; and most recently, Elderhood: Reports From an Unknown Country, a bittersweet feature-length documentary film that presents and explores the question: how do people of all ages view their own old self? Aside from working on her own films, Lily worked as a cinematographer for Director Joan Braderman on her newest film The Heretics. The Heretics is a feature length documentary about women who worked on The Heresies publication– a magazine published by feminists during the 1970′s – and how these women feminists live and think in today’s world. Lily has also worked for East Hampton’s Public Television and Plum TV producing topical news segments and was floor manager for Plum TV, then in its start-up phase, New York (also located in Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Vale, Colorado). Lily received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Documentary Film from Hampshire College.

Alan Hui-Bon-Hoa
is a graduate of the University of Washington, where he pursued an interdisciplinary background in cultural studies, critical theory, and mass media, earning a BA in Communication and a minor in Comparative History of Ideas. Alan is native of San Francisco, a characteristic often said to describe him. Prior to moving to New York, Alan lived abroad in Reykjavik, squatting in classrooms at the University of Iceland and reading sagas. While at UW, he served as Program Director for the University of Washington’s radio station. He does not like musicals.

Christopher Huth
is largely a product of the city of Kalamazoo and too much time handling celluloid. A graduate in film theory and cinematography from the University of Michigan, Christopher programmed for the university’s Lightworks Fest and was closely involved in the renowned Ann Arbor Film Festival. His interests in realist cinema and the Italian word for 18 led him to continue his studies through a fellowship at the Florentine Villa Guicciardini Corsi-Salviati. Following an amicable break-up with Italy, Christopher moved to the City to make it in pictures where in addition to a UnionDocs residency he currently works as an editor, cinematographer and world class flaneur.

Paul Kiel
is reporter/editor for the nationally-recognized and widely-cited political blog TPM Muckraker. He also writes essays and poetry and has worked for numerous print publications including Harper’s Magazine. He graduated from Columbia University.

Will Martin
grew up in Denver, CO before attending Middlebury College in Vermont where he studied International Development and French. After leaving Vermont he lived and worked in Argentina practicing architecture and teaching art. He currently works for as a designer at a small architecture studio in Manhattan. Will is an aspiring photographer and audio artist with a focused interested on spatial representation, memory, and connectivity. His work, which he hopes pushes the limits of what is considered documentary art, aims to encourage both a heightened social and sensual awareness of the built environment, connecting people more deeply, physically and metaphysically, with the places they inhabit.

Vanessa Liberati
is a photographer, curator and designer. She currently runs the Brooklyn gallery Gitana Rosa.

Justin Lin
is a photographer and curator of the Adolescent Sessions. He has been creating singular images for the better part of six years, focusing on the absurd and sublime moments in our lives’ daily fiction. His photographs are a penetrating sutdy of light and geometry, deftly exploring a wide range of subjects with a provocative eye. An East Coast native, Justin was raised in D.C. and studied at the Glasgow School of Art before launching his own Brooklyn-based studio. Check out his photography at www.justinwilliamlin.com.

Hillevi Loven
is pursuing an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.

Pejk Malinovski
went to a Marxist kindergarten in his hometown of Copenhagen. He is a poet, translator and radio producer. He has made radio drama, conceptual documentaries and sound art pieces for the National Danish radio, BBC’s Radio 4 and WNYC. For more info, visit Pejk’s Notes.

Lindsay Napolitano
Lindsay Napolitano is a Brooklyn based media artist whose video works have been featured at Galapagos Art Space, the Jersey City Museum, and in “The Women’s Caucus for Art International New Media Showcase” 2007 (Barnard College), among others. She has worked on the award winning documentary Crossing Arizona(Rainlake Productions); Follow My Voice: With the Music of Hedwig (Sundance); and Sex: The Revolution, a four part documentary series currently airing on VH1 & the Sundance channel. Lindsay is the Founder/President of the media services company, Right Brain Media, LLC. Most recently she has been working with acclaimed Producer/Director Dana Heinz Perry on the feature documentary, Boy Interrupted, a Perry Films, HBO co-production premiering at the Sundance Film Festival 2009. This summer Lindsay will be beginning her residency with Union Docs, and completing her first children’s book for adults.

Serdar Paktin
is a Fulbright scholar who will do his master’s degree on Liberal Studies in The New School for Social Research.

Timothy Phillips
studied architecture at Yale University. He is currently involved with creative and business projects in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Emma Raynes
Emma Raynes is a photographer who also likes to play with sound, video, and book arts. As an undergraduate she wandered through China and Nepal with a camera. Upon graduating with a degree in Art History from Bowdoin College she moved to South India. Eventually she returned the United States where she did a Certificate in Documentary Studies at Duke University and a one-year course of study at the International Center of Photography. Emma recently completed a Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative Fellowship from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. During this fellowship she made photographs about the families of sugarcane workers in Brazil. She is currently a graduate student of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her favorite toy is a point-and-shoot digital camera. See her photo blog here: http://emma-raynes.blogspot.com/

Hilke Schellmann
while working towards a master’s degree in Cultural Theory/ Aesthetics in her native Germany, received a Fulbright grant to study at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts & Science. In New York, Hilke took lead roles on several film projects, including commissioned films for Planned Parenthood documenting the March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C. and in New York City. Hilke also freelanced for WNYC’s nationally syndicated arts and culture magazine, Studio 360. Now back in Berlin, Hilke is pursuing her own documentary projects and has a position at the German-American documentary production company Story House Productions, producing 45-minute films for a national German cable channel.

Wendy Sharbutt
lived for 9 years in Japan, and returned to New York City, where she is a DJ.

Stephanie Skaff
develops performance projects that are often influenced by her interest in proletariat stories, her teenage years as a performer in musicals in Ohio, and her curiosity about the diverse possibilities for live art. Check out her website www.stephanieskaff.com.

Katrina Grigg-Saito
is currently pursuing a master’s degree in anthropology at Boston University. As a writer and actress she performed regionally and throughout New York, off- and off-off Broadway.

Brian Wengrofsky
studied film at SUNY Purchase is a documentary filmmaker and cameraman. He has worked in New York for over a decade and was recently cinematographer for the Emmy-award winning feature The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Christy Wiles
graduated from Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, with a degree in Spanish Literature. She wrote her Senior Thesis on Mexican photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Mexican author, Octavio Paz. During the summer of 2006, she received the Initiative Grant for Undergraduate Research, which allowed her to travel to Mexico City and examine primary source materials relating to her Thesis. Christy recently moved to New York and is beginning to find her way around the city.

PREVIOUS INTERNS & ASSOCIATES

Mallary Abel
filmmaker, curator, poet. Born February 21, 1986 in Indiana. Relocated to California in 1997. BA in Cinema from San Francisco State University, honors. Interest in cinematheque, experimental film, semiology and semantics began here. Upon graduation in 2008, she teamed with fellow SFSU alum Brenda Contreras and created Cut and Run, a traveling tour of experimental and avant garde film and videos, based out of San Francisco. Moved to New York in 2009 and joined UnionDocs as an associate programmer. She can be reached at mallaryabel@gmail.com.

Travis Johnston
is a visual artist pursuing a degree in Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College. His work, although varied in ideological and theoretical content, primarily explores concepts surrounding that of spectatorship.

Gabriela Duran
was born in Mexico and raised in Bolivia. After graduating form high school, she moved to the US to get a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Maryland. It hasn’t been too long since she moved to New York, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in Media and Film Studies at the New School. She will be graduating soon and plans to move back to South America to work on several of her documentary ideas.

Stephanie Morales
is an educator, media maker, and activist with an interest in documentary film and education. After graduating from Middlebury College with a degree in women’s studies and film she travelled for a year on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in Latin America compiling footage for a documentary about women in positions of leadership. She has taught classes to youth on community organizing, film and activism, feminism, and leadership.

Alex Marvar
is a writer and photographer. She graduated from Vassar College and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. You can see some of Alex’s work at www.alexmarvar.com

Ryan Quigley
studies graphic design at Parsons School of Design.