the filmmakers
JON SHENK
DIRECTOR / DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Jon Shenk is an Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker and the winner of both Emmy® and Independent Spirit awards. He recently co-directed the Oscar®-nominated short film Lead Me Home, which premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival and is a Netflix Original. Previously, Shenk and Bonni Cohen co-directed Athlete A (Netflix), which won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and was nominated for five Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, winning for Best Sports Documentary.
Before that Shenk co-directed and lensed An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (Participant), which premiered on opening night of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The film was shortlisted for the 2018 Oscars and was a BAFTA nominee for Best Documentary. The year before that Shenk co-directed and photographed the Peabody Award winner Audrie & Daisy (Netflix), which premiered in competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
In 2011 Shenk directed The Island President (Goldwyn Films), winner of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award and the International Documentary Association’s Pare Lorentz Award. Previously, he served as the D.P. on the 2008 Academy Award winner Smile Pinki and won an Emmy for “Blame Somebody Else” (PBS) in 2007. In 2004 Shenk won an Independent Spirit Award for directing Lost Boys of Sudan (Shadow Distribution/PBS).
Bonni Cohen
DIRECTOR / PRODUCER
Bonni Cohen has produced and/or directed an array of award-winning films. Most recently, she produced the Oscar-nominated short Lead Me Home (Netflix) and co-directed the feature Athlete A, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and received four Critics’ Choice Documentary Award nominations. Previously, Cohen co-directed An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which was selected as opening night film at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, shortlisted for the 2018 Oscars and was BAFTA-nominated for Best Documentary.
In 2016 Cohen co-directed the Peabody Award winner Audrie & Daisy, which premiered in competition at Sundance and was picked up as a Netflix Original. In addition to her directing work, Cohen produced The Island President, winner of People’s Choice Award for Documentary at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. Her work as producer and director on The Rape of Europa earned her both PGA and WGA award nominations and the film was shortlisted for the Oscars.
Cohen also produced Jon Else’s Sundance film Wonders Are Many and the pair teamed up to co-direct Inside Guantanamo, a 2009 Emmy nominee for Best Documentary. Cohen also executive produced Art and Craft and 3.5 Minutes, 10 Bullets, both of which were selected for the Oscar shortlist in 2015.
Cohen and Lisa Chanoff are co-founders of the Catapult Film Fund.
JESSICA ANTHONY
Producer
Jessica Anthony is a producer, writer, director and impact strategist with over two decades of experience in live action, animation and visual effects.
Most recently Anthony produced In the Bones, an unsettling portrait of American life that shines a light on the weight that women live under in this country. She is currently in production on Power & Light, a documentary about corporate corruption and climate change set in Florida.
In 2015 Anthony produced the critically acclaimed documentary The Mask You Live In (Sundance 2015), which explored the sociological effects of our culture’s expectations around masculinity.
In 2016 Anthony partnered with award-winning filmmaker Kelly Duane de la Vega to produce and direct Project Turnout, creating media partnerships with Mother Jones, The Nation and The New York Times. As part of this effort Anthony directed and produced the short film Supreme Court vs. the American Voter, which exposed strategic and deliberate acts to suppress the votes of people of color.
Anthony also produced director Guetty Felin’s narrative feature Ayiti Mon Amour, a magical neo-realistic fable set in Haiti that premiered at Toronto in 2016 and was shortlisted for an Oscar and is a producer Vivien’s Wild Ride, an ITVS supported documentary memoir that follows a visual artist as she loses her sight.
Anthony is a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and a member of the Producer’s Guild of America.
DON BERNIER
editor
Don Bernier is an Emmy-nominated documentary film editor who has worked on experimental, historical and verité features, TV series and shorts. Most recently, he cut the Epix series “Murf the Surf,” about convicted jewel thief and murderer turned prison evangelist Jack Roland Murphy. Bernier also edited Athlete A, which won a 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and earned him a Critics’ Choice Documentary Award nomination for Best Editing.
Bernier’s other editing credits also include Always in Season, which won a Special Jury Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival; the Emmy-nominated doc Charm City, which was shortlisted for a 2019 Academy Award; the Oscar-shortlisted and BAFTA-nominated doc An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which opened the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and premiered internationally at the Cannes Film Festival; the Peabody Award winner Audrie & Daisy, which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival; The Genius of Marian, which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival; and the Peabody Award-winning biopic Eames: The Architect & the Painter.
Bernier also works regularly as an editorial consultant, contributing to recent films such as Pray Away and In the Same Breath. He is a two-time Sundance Institute Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow.
The editor has served as a mentor for the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship, BAVC’s MediaMaker Fellowship program and Chicken & Egg, among other notable programs.
In 2017 Bernier was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Documentary Branch. He has been an active member of American Cinema Editors (ACE) since 2022.
Justine Nagan
executive producer
Justine Nagan is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary producer and creative media executive. She is currently the Head of Production at Actual Films. Prior to this role Justine was the Executive Director of American Documentary, Inc., and an Executive Producer on its two signature series, POV (PBS) and America Reframed (World Channel.) During her tenure at the organization, AmDoc launched POV Shorts, created several Artist Emergency Funds, and showed continued excellence in its programming including several Oscar nominations, and Emmy, Peabody and DuPont wins.
Films showcased during her time at AmDoc include Through The Night, The Mole Agent, Softie, Last Men In Aleppo, Dark Money, Hooligan Sparrow and 93 Queen. Justine also executive produced POV’s first foray into episodic programming, And She Could Be Next. Additional credits include Minding The Gap, Life Itself, The Interrupters, and The Trials Of Muhammad Ali. Justine has a certificate in Non-Profit Management from Harvard Business School, and a Masters from the University of Chicago in the Humanities/Cinema and Media Studies. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the PGA and the Television Academy.
Chris Artherholt
associate editor
Chris is an editor and producer based in Oakland, California. Originally from the Bay Area, Chris spent the first decade of her career in New York City, working on nonfiction programming for the likes of Showtime, HBO, CNN, PBS, NBC, MTV, HGTV, and Travel Channel. As assistant editor and production coordinator, Chris worked on the Oscar-winning documentary short, Strangers No More, as well as HBO’s Emmy-nominated Masterclass series. She also worked on Bedlam, which won official selection at Sundance and a duPont-Columbia Award. Chris is proud to have edited the documentary short, Out in Alabama, an optimistic look at the LGBTQ+ community in Birmingham, Alabama. Most recently, she edited What We Carry With Us, a series of micro docs about LGBTQ refugees presented at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco. Chris holds a BFA in Film & Television from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Joey Horan
associate producer, assistant editor
Joey Horan is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. His first film, Carl Runs the Paper, is currently screening at festivals. His print and radio reporting have appeared in the Detroit Free Press, Michigan Radio, Outlier Media, Bridge Magazine, and Belt Magazine. He holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.
STEVE SMALL
Animation Director
Steve Small is a BAFTA and Emmy-nominated director as well as a master craftsman and artist. Most recently, Small developed a series of BAFTA-nominated animated sequences for the BBC Netflix drama “Black Earth Rising” and the Emmy-nominated title sequence for Ridley Scott’s sci-fi series “Raised by Wolves.” He also did a title sequence and inserts for Jake Scott’s documentary Kipchoge: The Last Milestone.
Small’s work has varied from working on Disney features to designing and directing shorts, TV series and commercials. He has directed and animated a formidable slate of commercials at Studio AKA, including spots for Tele2, Nicktoons, Orange, TSB Bank, Admiral and the charity Sing Up.
Small has also embarked on a career of illustrating and writing children’s books. The first that Small illustrated, I’m Sticking With You, was nominated for a British Book Award and the Klaus Flugge Prize, winning a silver prize at the junior design awards and an honorary mention at the Ezra Jack Keats Awards. Small followed this up with The Duck Who Didn’t Like Water, which he both wrote and drew.
Small currently resides in London. When he’s not painting and drawing, you’ll likely find him feeding the crows on Blackheath Common.
GERGELY WOOTSCH
Animation Director
Gergely Wootsch is an award-winning animation director who has made a name for himself with projects across commercials, television and feature animation. His most notable credits include the feature A Trip to Infinity and the Apple TV+ series “Lincoln’s Dilemma.”
Aside from his assured directing and art directing, Wootsch is one of those rare people who can pivot around different axes, jumping between the technical aspects of production and creative direction and production design. An underlying theme that permeates his work is a fascination with dark, moody and textural worlds, overcoming the challenges involved in bringing them to life by whatever creative means best suit the situation.
PHILIP HUNT
Animation Director
Philip Hunt has a diverse and eclectic body of directing work spanning animation projects. These include double Emmy winner “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth,” a half-hour adaptation of the bestselling book by Oliver Jeffers for Apple TV+ that featured the voices of Meryl Streep, Chris O’Dowd, Jacob Tremblay and Ruth Negga.
Hunt’s previous collaboration with Jeffers was the BAFTA-winning short Lost and Found, a children’s film narrated by Jim Broadbent and featuring a score by Max Richter. His other work includes the award-winning short Ah Pook Is Here, an interpretation of recordings by William S. Burroughs, as well as commissioned projects for BMW, Herman Miller, One.org and (RED).org.
An alumnus of both Central St. Martins and the Royal College of Art, Hunt is an advisory board member of the FMX and ITFS festivals, a visiting tutor at the Filmakademie Animation Institute in Stuttgart, and the course reviewer for animation at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). As a longtime faculty member of the Pictoplasma Academy in Berlin, Hunt teaches story development and is a regular speaker at countless festivals and design conferences.
MARCUS ARMITAGE
Animation Director
Marcus Armitage is a BAFTA-nominated filmmaker whose hand-drawn work employs bold colors and expressive motion, creating captivating visuals to tell thought-provoking stories. The diversity of his approaches can be seen in commissioned work such as his animated sequences for the documentary Limbo, which premiered at Sundance, and in his award-winning, BAFTA-nominated short film My Dad, which explores inherited racism using a tactile approach of oil pastels and newspaper clippings. Armitage’s recent short That Yorkshire Sound draws upon his roots with a colorful and frenetic union of audio and image that documents a day of life in Yorkshire, England.
Armitage’s commissioned works include a collaboration with designer Izak Zenou for Estée Lauder, directing work on a campaign for Key and beautifully realized 2D sequences in “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth,” winner of Emmy and BAFTA awards.
BRYCE DESSNER
Composer
Bryce Dressner is a vital and rare force in new music. Dessner has won Grammy Awards® as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger and co-principal songwriter. He is also a high-profile presence in film score composition, with credits such as The Revenant (Grammy and Golden Globe Award® nominee for best original score), Fernando Meirelles’ The Two Popes (which won Discovery of the Year at the World Soundtrack awards), Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon, Zach Braff’s A Good Person, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths and Joe Wright’s Cyrano. Dessner also scored the music—involving a full orchestra and 200-member choir—for the Louis Vuitton show at Paris Fashion Week 2020.
Most recently, Dessner composed the score for Nicole Riegel’s forthcoming romance Dandelion, Greg Kwedar’s drama Sing Sing, Frédéric Tellier’s biopic Abbé Pierre: A Century of Devotion and Rebecca Miller’s romantic dramedy She Came to Me.
Dessner is regularly commissioned to write for the world’s leading ensembles, from Orchestre de Paris to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He collaborates with some of today’s most creative and respected artists, including Philip Glass, Sufjan Stevens, Thom Yorke, Nico Muhly and Steve Reich. His orchestrations can be heard on the latest albums of Paul Simon, Bon Iver and Taylor Swift.
Dessner has had works commissioned and premiered by today’s leading conductors, including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Semyon Bychkov and Santtu-Matias Rouvali. This season alone has seen performances of his works by London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony.
In addition to his role as one of eight collaborative partners at San Francisco Symphony, Dessner is currently artist-in-residence at London’s Southbank Centre and with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Major works include “Concerto for Two Pianos,” premiered by Katia and Marielle Labèque; “Violin Concerto,” premiered and performed internationally by Pekka Kuusisto; “Trombone Concerto,” for Jörgen van Rijen; “Voy a Dormir,” for mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor; “Skrik Trio,” commissioned by Steve Reich and Carnegie Hall; the ballet “No Tomorrow,” co-written with Ragnar Kjartansson; “Wires,” for Ensemble Intercontemporain; and “Triptych (Eyes for One on Another),” a major theater piece integrating the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that was premiered by Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Also active as a curator, Dessner is regularly requested to program festivals and residencies around the world at venues such as the Barbican, Philharmonie de Paris and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. He co-founded and curates the festivals MusicNOW and Sounds from a Safe Harbour.
An alumnus of Yale University, Dessner currently resides in France.