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PAST YEARS' FILMMAKER BIOS

2009 ARCHIVES

Jesse Erica Epstein

Renuka Jeyapalan

Toronto, ON, CANADA

Renuka Jeyapalan attended the Canadian Film Centre's Directors' Lab and graduated from the University of Toronto with degrees in Biochemistry, English and Cinema Studies. She has made several award winning short films, including Sunday Afternoon and Sing for Your Supper.

Claudia Varejao

Lisbon, Portugal

In 2002, she initiated her studies in image at Restart School in Lisbon. She studied fictional cinema directing at the International Cinema Academy of Sao Paulo, Brazil and at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation + Deutsche Film - und Fernsehakademie Berlin. She directed the documentary Wanting, a special mention at the DocLisboa05 Festival and at It's All True Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She worked as a photography director in several documentaries. She regularly works as a filmmaker in dance and theatre projects. Weekend is her first short film.

Lisa Blackstone

Minneapolis, MN

Lisa Blackstone believes everyone has a story to tell. Her passion is discovering those stories and then sharing them with the world.

Blackstone is an Emmy-nominated director/producer/writer/editor/and documentary maker based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Her documentary Polka Time was selected for national broadcast on the acclaimed PBS/ITVS series Independent Lens. Polka Time is also the winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary from the Broad Humor Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Blackstone's other awards include the Unity Award in Media for her work on the lifestyle economics series Right on the Money!; the Science of Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the Silver Award for Children's Programming from the National Education Association for her work on the PBS Kids' science series Newton's Apple. Her work has been seen nationally on PBS and several cable networks including Animal Planet, HGTV and MSNBC.

Harriet Storm

Berkeley, CA

Harriet Storm's award-winning short narratives have screened in festivals throughout the world. Her first documentary, Kaden, follows a transgender female-to-male individual as he prepares for chest reconstructive surgery. She continued her work in social issue documentary with It's My Body, My Baby, My Birth, an exploration of natural childbirth that challenges the assumption that birth requires medical and surgical procedures. She is currently working on the sequel to Kaden as well as an abstract, experimental film that celebrates the medium of film through the exhibition of its raw form.

Harriet Storm is currently an MFA student in filmmaking at San Francisco State University.

Christina Alexandra Voros

Brooklyn, NY

Currently a Dean’s Fellow in cinematography at NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s Graduate Department of Film and Television, Ms. Voros’ careers prior to filmmaking have included that of a stage actor, restaurateur and nationally-ranked saber fencer. The only member of her family not to be born in Hungary, Christina was raised in Cambridge, MA, where she later attended Harvard University.

In 2006 she was awarded a Graduate Assistantship in cinematography, teaching under Tony Jannelli- whom she has continued to assist on projects with Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese. Her first documentary short, The Ladies, received a Gold Hugo at the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival and a Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance 2008.

Recent projects have included campaign videography for Sen. John Edwards and two feature length documentaries shooting in India – Children of Ambedkar, a film about the Dalit community in Mumbai and Jogni – Sex or Culture, a meditation on ritualized prostitution in rural Andhra Pradesh.

Ms. Voros is currently directing Garden in Transit: the movie, a documentary feature on the largest collaborative public arts project in NYC history.

Julia Pott

London, England

Julia Pott graduated from Kingston University in July 2007 with First Class Honors in Illustration and Animation. She is currently signed as a director to Picasso Pictures in Soho.

Her graduating film, My First Crush, has been screened at the South by SouthWest Film Festival, in Harvard Square Massachusetts courtesy of Lumen Eclipse, The Pangea Day Festival in L.A., at the Roundhouse Venue in Camden, and in the May edition of the Future Shorts showreel.

Her achievements include winning the People's Choice Award at the Standing Rock International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Amsterdam Film Experience Festival and being shortlisted for the the Short Film of the Year 2007 in the Youtube Awards, the British Animation Awards, Exposures Festival, TGNST 20 Greatest Stories Never Told, Anifest and the Maui Internation Film Festival.

She is currently working as a freelance animator from her studio in East London. Her other projects include an animated set for Trinity College in Dublin and is currently working on a music video for the band Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. She has also been commissioned for various illustration projects and has participated in exhibitions in London, the U.S. and Belgium.

Jessica Sison

San Francisco, CA

In film school, Jessica Sison decided to rebel against the stereotypes placed on Asian- American females by making a parody of Hong Kong action films as well as an homage to Jean-Luc Godard. That film, Newton’s Law, was chosen as the closing film of San Francisco State University’s Film Finals Festival and has gone on to screen at the Film Arts Festival, The Humboldt International Film Festival, and the Women Make Movies Festival.

After graduation, she spent 3 years of post-production work in film, television, and corporate projects before focusing her editing talent on documentaries. Her documentary work has screened in film festivals all over the world, and her broadcast work has shown on PBS, the Oxygen Channel, the WB, ImaginAsian, and The Filipino Channel.

Kuna Ni Nanang is her documentary directorial debut. Jessica is passionate about documentaries and continues to edit for other producers and directors. Her next documentary is about her family’s unusual participation in the Bataan Death March during WWII.

Nazanin Shirazi

Austin, TX

Nazanin Shirazi is an accomplished filmmaker who explores issues of identity and diaspora culture through both visual and performing arts. Her most recent film, Red Wednesday, has been nominated for a Student Academy Award and will screen in France, Italy, and South Africa.

She is an alumnus of the New York Film Academy program in Paris and is currently pursuing an MFA degree in Film Production at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.A. from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Political Science. She has worked in Texas and Central America with La Capacidad and MECA, both community-based, non-profit organizations that promote social and cultural development to at-risk youth through education in the arts.

Jennifer Halley

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Jennifer Halley is a Canadian actress who lives in Vancouver, BC. She has played Seelix, a recurring character on Battlestar Galactica, for the past four years. She was co-producer on Simon Schneider's pilot, Urban Jungles, which is now in post-production. Currently, she is writing and developing a comedy television series and is also writing her directorial follow-up, a feature horror film.

Jennifer Halley began writing Sarah in the Dark as a side projet and never imagined it would end up being her directorial debut.