Board of Directors

Kate Adams

Kate Adams is Vice-President of Total Wellness, which delivers nationwide onsite health and wellness services, including health fairs, screenings and vaccinations, with the help of licensed nurses and other healthcare professionals throughout the U.S. Her expertise is overseeing and coordinating large-scale projects that outreach to hundreds of high-level corporations.

Brooke Bassin

Brooke is a writer, media activist and academic focused on applied theatre and development issues. Brooke is one of Barefoot Workshops' earliest supporters, participating in three workshops and two field visits to Barefoot Workshops' A River Blue Vocational Training Center in Northern, Uganda, a program which she has personally sponsored by funding income-generating activities and community development programs. She served as Executive Director of Barefoot Workshops for a brief interim before going back to school to earn her degree in Filmmaking from SUNY. She recently returned to Africa where she documented the work of the Winter-Summer Institute, a Theatre for Development project dealing with the roles of power and denial in the spread of HIV/AIDS in Lesotho. Prior to her work in media and development, Brooke had a career in theatre as a playwright. She is the author of numerous works, including Charlie Rips, Yank's Glory Dreams and The Alibi Room. She has directed productions of her work in both New York and Los Angeles and has produced several short films through Barefoot-led workshops in South Africa and the Mississippi Delta. Her documentary, Crossin' All the Boundaries, co-directed by Rebecca Parrish, premiered at Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson, MS and was subsequently showcased in festivals around the country. She proudly serves on the Board of Barefoot Workshops.

Sarah Hindlian

Sarah began her career at Goldman Sachs as an Equity Trader after graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude from Wellesley College in 2001, with honors in Economics and Spanish Language. Ms. Hindlian worked in various trading capacities for over 7 years at Goldman before joining R Technologies, a private contextual cloud computing software company as Chief Operating Office and Executive Vice President. Her interest in technology innovation and stocks led Ms. Hindlian to join JP Morgan as a Technology Analyst in Equity Trading where she advises clients on what stocks to buy or sell for short term trades. Ms. Hindlian currently lives in Manhattan where she is actively involved in organizations like The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Financial Women's Network of New York.

Monica Winsor

Monica Winsor is a Founding Partner of Inspired Philanthropy Group,(IPG) providing innovative fundraising, cause-related marketing and strategic advice to nonprofits, foundations, philanthropists and companies working together to make a sustainable and positive impact on the planet. Prior to IPG, she helped launch the "6 Villages: 1 Global Fight Against AIDS" campaign for FXB International, raising awareness and funding for sustainable economic development programs in Uganda and Rwanda. Monica has spent the past twenty years helping social benificiary organizations with a focus on Africa, global health, human rights and women's rights. She is a trustee of The William H. Donner Foundation and Donner Canadian Foundations, Synergos, Barefoot Workshops, Culture Project and Dignitas International. Monica is a graduate of Brown University. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Advisory Board

Zana Briski

Zana Briski is an English artist (photographer, filmmaker) and activist. Her mother is an Iraqi Jew, who resides in Israel. Her paternal great-grandparents, also Jews, fled Poland during World War II. Briski, whose interest in photography began at age 10, says, "I feel at home everywhere and nowhere." Her documentary film, Born into Brothels, was the winner of the Best Documentary Feature at the 77th Academy Awards in 2005. After earning a master's degree at the University of Cambridge, Briski studied documentary photography at International Center of Photography in New York. In 1995, she made her first trip to India, producing a story on female infanticide. In 1997, Briski returned to India and began her project on the prostitutes of Calcutta's red-light district, which led to her work with the children of prostitutes. Briski has won numerous awards and fellowships including George Soros' Open Society Institute Fellowship, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Howard Chapnick Grant for the Advancement of Photojournalism. Briski and co-director Ross Kauffman were awarded grants from the Sundance Institute, the Jerome Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts for Born into Brothels. Briski is also the founder of non-profit organisation Kids With Cameras.

Cynthia Close

For nearly fifteen years, Cynthia Close has been the Executive Director of Documentary Educational Resources, (DER), a non-profit founded in 1968, that distributes more than 500 award-winning titles to the international television and educational markets. DER also supports 27 independent documentary projects in various stages of production through DER's fiscal sponsorship program. Cynthia serves on the advisory board of Massachusetts Communications College, the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. She has taught courses in fundraising for documentaries at Maine International Film and Television Workshops, the University of New Mexico, Emerson College and Boston University. Prior to DER, Cynthia was an art instructor at the Art Institute of Boston, Harvard/Radcliffe, Arlington High School and Boston University. She served as Dean of Admissions at the Art Institute of Boston, Co-Director of Boston Visual Arts Union, and a Board Member of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Currently, one of her primary activities is to preserve the ethnographic film archives at DER, which includes the historic work of John Marshall and his family who documented 55 years of the !Kung San (Bushmen) of Namibia, and films by anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch about the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela. These bodies of work under Cynthia's guidance, led to the establishment of the Human Studies Film Archive at the Smithsonian Institution, and are now recognized to be among the most significant ethnographic collections within the HSFA. Visit Cynthia's blog at: www.gather.com.

Kathy Eldon

Kathy Eldon is an internationally acclaimed lecturer, writer, activist, journalist, television and film producer who galvanizes audiences with her passionate belief that each and every individual can experience a rich and fulfilling life as "an active soul". Drawing on the extremes of her own life, Kathy awakens people to their potential, illustrating the resilience of the human spirit, and its power to transform tragedy into hope and renewal. The tragic death of her talented son Dan, a 22-year-old Reuter's correspondent, stoned to death in Somalia, transitioned her from a career in journalism to filmmaking, and led her to create the organization, Creative Visions Foundation, founded in 1989 in memory of her son, to support young people to make a difference through media and the arts. Kathy is the accomplished author of 17 books, including several bestsellers, published on three continents. She has launched many award winning television and film projects including Emmy-nominated documentary, Dying To Tell The Story, CNN's Soldiers of Peace (CNN) and Global Tribe (PBS). A popular speaker, she has been featured in Time, Newsweek and countless magazine articles, and has appeared on radio and television programs around the world, including three segments of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Martin Macwan

Martin Macwan is a human rights activist in Gujurat, India. Born into a poor Dalit family, he became a child laborer in his early years. After overcoming these difficulties and receiving a Bachelor's Degree in 1980, Martin began his career in rural development and community organizing. He became an advocate for Dalit rights, and narrowly escaped death in 1986 when four of his colleagues were murdered during a land rights campaign. He founded the Navsarjan Trust in 1989, with a special focus on training grassroots community leaders. Today more than 187 activists who were formerly day laborers have received training and now serve as leaders of the Dalit movement in India. Martin has also served as a convener of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. His has been recognised internationally, for addressing issues of land rights, minimum wages, and women's rights, and disenfranchisement, namely by the The RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights which honored him in 2000 with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

Rain Phoenix

Rain Phoenix is an actress, musician, and singer who starred in television and film roles in Maid to Order, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Stranger Inside and Harry and Max. Since 1989, she has performed as a musician and vocalist in the ban Aleka's Attic (performing together with her brother, River Phoenix), and more recently, the group Papercranes, releasing four albums along the way. She has worked background vocals for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and R.E.M. Rain continues to split her time between writing, recording and performing, and working on various television and film projects in New York City. She has two brothers, actors Joaquin and the late River Phoenix, and two sisters, Summer and Liberty.

Gabrielle Roth

Gabrielle Roth is an author, musician, world-renowned philosopher, dancer, and creator of 5 Rhythms, a genre of movement therapy that combines dance, breath and moving meditation. She is music director of a theatre company The Mirrors, and has produced more than fifteen albums as a recording artist through Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors. She is the Founder of the recording label, Raven Recordings; In the genre of dance, Gabrielle founded The Moving Center School in 1987 in Mill Valley, California, which has certified over 250 teachers internationally, and now has branches in New York and Europe. Gabrielle is the author of three books, and has been featured as an influential artist, author and thinker in publications, including Elle, Self, Mademoiselle, Bazaar and Utne Reader. She currently resides in New York City.

Brian Storm

Brian Storm is president of MediaStorm, a multimedia production studio based in New York City. Prior to launching MediaStorm in 2005, Storm spent two years as vice president of News, Multimedia & Assignment Services for Corbis, a digital media agency founded and owned by Bill Gates. Storm led Corbis' global strategy for the news, sports, entertainment and historical collections. He directed the development of Corbis' production tools and the representation of world-class photographers for assignment work with a focus on creating in-depth multimedia products. From 1995 to 2002 Storm was director of multimedia at MSNBC.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News, where he was responsible for the audio, photography and video elements of the site. Storm created The Week in Pictures and Picture Stories to showcase visual journalism in new media.

Storm serves on the Advisory Board for The Council on Foreign Relations, The Eddie Adams Workshop, The Alexia Foundation, and Brooks Institute's Journalism School. He has judged both the University of Missouri's Pictures of the Year and the National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism contests.

Storm received his master's degree in photojournalism in 1995 from the University of Missouri where he ran the School of Journalism's New Media Lab, taught Electronic Photojournalism and produced CD-ROMs for the Pictures of the Year competition and the Missouri Photo Workshop.