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WORKSHOP INSTRUCTORS

Alison Fast (Program Director)

Alison Fast is a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker who has worked for networks such as NBC/Universal, BBC Worldwide and MTV Networks. As Program Director of Barefoot Workshops, she has designed and led media training workshops for the U.S. Department of State, Creative Associates International for more than fifty civil society organizations across Africa and the Middle East, most recently Libya during the country's first free elections. She has innovated video formats including "Video Policy Memos" for the President's Digital Freedom Initiative, and Most Significant Change (MSC) videos for health organizations in South Africa to monitor and evaluate program impacts. Her goal is to use media in the context of health, human rights and democracy building, and small town revitalization in the rural south. She has led workshops for UNESCO, UNAIDS, Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC), Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC), Mississippi Film Office, and Academic Distinction Fund, among others. She graduated in 1998 with a degree in Journalism from Boston University College of Communication.

Chandler Griffin (Founder & Director)

Chandler Griffin is a Los Angeles-based, documentary filmmaker, educator and the Founding Director of Barefoot Workshops with fifteen years of experience instructing over one hundred media workshops, starting out at the Maine Media Workshops. His projects have taken him to Latin America, North America, Europe, the UK, Ireland, Africa, India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He has produced and taught educational programs in northern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, South Africa, Honduras, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, Turkey, Palestine, Bahrain, Libya, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada and various locations in the continental USA. He is a founding member of Video Volunteers. Chandler has collaborated with Navsarjan Trust, PLANusa, 1Giant Leap, PBS, The American Cancer Society, Hospice Ministries, FXB International, The Ford Foundation, Academy for Educational Development, Global Nomads Group, RFK Center for Human Rights, Ocean Classroom, FilmAid International, UNESCO/UNAIDS/UNDP, the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative, Creative Associates International and the President's Digital Freedom Initiative. His camera work has helped films earn a CINE Golden Eagle Award and an Oscar Finalist shortlist for the Academy Awards. In 2006 Chandler founded A River Blue, an arts empowerment project for 100 displaced children in northern Uganda that currently offers agriculture, agroforestry, animal husbandry, tailoring, psychosocial counseling, English, business and secondary school to hundreds of students. He holds a BFA in Photography and a BFA in Video/Film from the Savannah College of Art & Design and lectures regularly in New York City at B&H and Tekserve.

Ron Haviv (Instructor – Mississippi Delta - Doc Photo)

Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv has produced images of conflict and humanitarian crises that have made headlines from around the world since the end of the Cold War. Haviv is a co-founder of the photo agency VII that is dedicated to documenting conflict, both violent and non-violent, to produce an unflinching record of the injustices created and experienced by people caught up in the events they describe. His images, which focus on raising awareness for human rights, have been published by Audubon, Business Week, Details, Fortune, Le Monde 2, Newsweek, NY Times Magazine, New Yorker, Paris Match, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Readers Digest, Stern, Time, US News & World Report among others worldwide. Numerous museums and galleries have featured his work, including the Louvre, United Nations and the Council on Foreign Relations. Haviv's work is in private and museum collections including Southeast Museum of Photography and George Eastman House. He has published critically acclaimed collections of his photography with the books Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, Afghanistan: On the Road to Kabul and Haiti: 12 January 2010. Haviv has helped create multi-platform projects for NGO's such as Doctors Without Borders' DR Congo: The Forgotten War and Starved for Attention, Unicef's Child Alert for Darfur and Sri Lanka and the International Committee of the Red Cross's World at War. Haviv has been the central character in three films including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk that explores the hazards inherent in combat photography. In addition, Haviv has spoken about his work on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and The Charlie Rose Show.

Christine Turner (Instructor – Mississippi Delta Doc)

Christine Turner is an award-winning filmmaker and freelance documentary television producer. After receiving her bachelors of fine arts in Film & Television at New York University, she began her career in nonfiction television working with Bill Moyers, Stanley Nelson, and others. Recently, Christine founded Peralta Pictures in order to produce her independent film work, including the feature documentary Homegoings, which premiered at the 2013 Documentary Fortnight at MoMA and opened the 26th Season of the acclaimed PBS series, POV. In its film review of Homegoings, The New York Times noted, "The morbid meets the deeply spiritual in Christine Turner's assured documentary. . . Ms. Turner captures the intimacy of solemn, heartfelt moments, and salutes a man who honors their value."

Lisa Biagiotti (Instructor – Mississippi Delta Doc)

Lisa is an independent journalist and filmmaker. Her work focuses on complex, under-reported social issues, integrating cross-platform storytelling, data and technology and grassroots community impact. She is currently a Sundance New Frontier Fellow at MIT Media Lab, exploring the relationship between story and data. Lisa's work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, PBS, NPR, among other media platforms. She has been invited to The White House, the Clinton Global Initiative, federal and state governmental agencies, and think tanks to discuss her work. Lisa also lectures internationally on independent, digital journalism, and teaches storytelling to first-time filmmakers. The stories she produced on the humanitarian crisis in eastern Congo won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2009. In 2001, she received a Fulbright grant to research Muslim immigration to Italy. Lisa holds a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Edward Symes (Instructor – Cape Town & Mississippi Delta Doc)

Edward Symes is a producer, director, and founder of Here and Now Films. Edward has shot and produced documentaries in several countries, including Rwanda, Ethiopia, Peru, Guatemala, and East Timor. More recently, he has focused his efforts on web distribution, producing online videos for Time Magazine, Yahoo! Assignment Earth, Current Television and immigration reform organization Center for Community Change. He completed a five-part "web series" on the USS BOXER Navy Ship in 2008 with global health organization Project Hope and a six-part web series for OXFAM America on the mining industry in Peru. He has a strong focus in global health work. In 2008 he premiered a thirty-minute documentary film, Los Medicos, at the Jackson Hole Film Festival and edited a promotional video for the XVII International AIDS Conference for UNAIDS. As a cinematographer he documented musicians Eugene Hutz, Baaba Maal, Boots Riley, and Michael Stipe for the film, 1 Giant Leap (19 Entertainment) and artist Alex Grey. In 2010 he plans to launch Frontrunner Magazine, a site to host multimedia from a team of artists on the forefront of the media shift online. A beta site can be found at www.frontrunnermagazine.com. Edward has taught documentary filmmaking with Barefoot Workshops and the Maine Media Workshops. He attended Kenyon College and NYU Tisch School of the Arts in London UK. Please visit his site: www.hereandnowfilms.com

Yoni Brook (Instructor – Mississippi Delta Doc)

Yoni Brook is a director and cinematographer. Last year he shot the feature film “Valley of Saints” under military curfew in Kashmir. The film won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Brook has directed three documentary films for national primetime broadcast on PBS. BRONX PRINCESS, about a teenage African princess. THE CALLING, a four hour series following a year in the life of young religious leaders, and A SON’S SACRIFICE, about a family slaughterhouse in Queens, which won Best Documentary Short at the Tribeca Film Festival. Prior to making films, Brook worked as a photojournalist at The New York Times and Washington Post. Brook is an alumnus of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Les Stone (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2012/2013 - Doc Photo)

During the last several decades, critically acclaimed photographer Les Stone has chronicled the human cost of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Kosovo, Liberia, Cambodia and Haiti, among other war zones. The winner of several World Press Photo Awards and Picture of the Year Awards, Stone vaulted to prominence in 1989 when he photographed the savage, bloody beating of the newly elected Vice President of Panama by thugs of Generalissimo Manuel Noriega. The image revealed the true nature of Noriega’s repressive regime. Since then, Stone has covered stories often ignored by the mainstream media, including the deadly legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the plight of Iraqi Kurds fleeing the first Gulf War, and the deployment of child-soldiers in Africa. Les Stone’s work straddles the worlds of photojournalism and fine art photography. His images are powerful not only because they bring to our attention important and often overlooked people and events but because they do so in a visually arresting way. Many of his photographs seem so improbable that they could be mistaken for either set-ups or manipulated images. The Iraq food drop photograph doesn’t seem as though it can possibly be real – “the scale of the military helicopter, the painterly mountains in the background, the expressions on the people’s faces. In Stone’s photograph of a Vodou ritual in Haiti two figures partially immersed in a mud pool and completely covered in the deep brown mud appear to be figures cast in bronze, a statue resembling the Pietà.

Amy Toensing (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2012 - Doc Photo)

Amy Toensing, an American photojournalist committed to telling stories with sensitivity and depth, is known for her intimate essays about the lives of ordinary people. Toensing received a BA in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic in Maine where she spent her senior year studying photography at the Salt Institute for Documentary Field Studies in Portland, Maine. In 1994, Toensing was hired as a staff photographer at her New Hampshire hometown paper, The Valley News, where she covered the community she grew up in. She then worked for The New York Times, Washington D.C. bureau covering the White House and Capitol Hill during the Clinton administration. In 1998, Toensing left D.C. to get her Master's Degree from the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. In 1999 she was awarded the National Geographic photographic internship. Since then she has been a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine and recently completed her thirteenth feature story. Her work has also appeared in publications such as Smithsonian, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time Magazine, and National Geographic Traveler. Toensing's work has been exhibited throughout the world and recognized with numerous awards. She has covered stories close to home, from Maine and the Jersey Shore to places on the other side of the globe, including the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea and the Australian outback. She has also covered news worthy issues such as the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and Muslim women living in western culture. Toensing lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her husband Matt Moyer who is also a freelance photojournalist.

David C. Turnley (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2011 - Doc Photo)

David C. Turnley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and filmmaker. He won his Pulitzer for his coverage of all the Revolutions in 1989, including the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square in China. He was a runner-up for the Pulitzer four other times. He has won the World press Picture of the Year twice, the prestigious Robert Capa Award for Courage, and four Overseas Press Club Awards. He has covered many of the major news stories of the past thirty years, producing eight books out of these experiences including his latest, MANDELA: Struggle and Triumph. His first film, The Dalai Lama: At Home in Exile, produced by CNN, was awarded the 2001 Cine Golden Eagle and nominated for an Emmy. He was awarded Best Documentary at the Miami International Film Festival for his film La Tropical, shot in Cuba. As a commercial director, he is represented by Furlined and recently directed a Nike Air Jordan commercial with Wieden + Kennedy. His Photographs are syndicated by Getty Images and Corbis. David has a Bachelor's degree in French Literature from the University of Michigan, an Honorary Doctorate from the New School in New York, and did a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard. He is fluent in French and Spanish. He lives in New York City.

Tyler Hubby (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2011 - Editing)

Tyler Hubby has edited over 30 documentaries of various shapes and sizes. Most notable among them are Welcome to Death Row, an exposé of Gangsta Rap and the underbelly of the music business; the Sundance award-winning The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a picaresque biography of mentally ill artist /musician Daniel Johnston; Double Take, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez's metaphysical essay on the cold war, the rise of television and the murder of Alfred Hitchcock by his own double, and the HBO documentary A Small Act which premiered at Sundance 2010. He served as an additional editor on the Oscar nominated The Garden and HBO's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. He also edited the gothic horror short Usher, by cult director Curtis Harrington about whom he also co-directed a short documentary. He is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied with filmmakers George Kuchar and Ernie Gehr. His subversive and irreverent short films, featured in the book Cinema Contra Cinema by British author Jack Sargeant, have screened internationally, much to the dismay of paying audiences. His photographs have been sold, published and/or used as evidence in federal court and can sometimes be seen in Artillery magazine, where he is a regular contributor.

Julie Winokur (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2010)

Julie Winokur, Founding Director of Talking Eyes Media, is a writer and documentary film producer whose work has appeared on PBS, National Geographic Magazine, MSNBC and Discovery online, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post. Her film, FIRESTORM, aired on KQED and the Documentary Channel and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her multi-year projects include the one-hour film Aging in America: The Years Ahead, and its companion book and traveling exhibition, as well as Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured, which won the Jury Prize at the Media That Matters Film Festival and was featured on MNSBC.com. Winokur's dynamic approach to documentary filmmaking drove her to turn the camera on herself in the short film The Sandwich Generation, in which Winokur and her husband, photojournalist Ed Kashi, chronicled their personal challenges caring for their two children and Winokur's aging father. The film has been featured on MSNBC.com, AARP.org, MediaStorm, Good Morning America, The New York Times website, in National Geographic Magazine, and has been solicited by various organizations for community outreach and education on caregiving. Winokur's other short films include: Fast Lane to the Future, documenting India's new national expressway and its impact on the population and Curse of the Black Gold, exposing the enormous costs and devastating impact of oil exploitation in the Niger Delta. Winokur's latest project, Bring It to the Table tackles divisive politics in America.

Julia Kumari Drapkin (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2009)

Julia Kumari Drapkin is a multimedia journalist working across the platforms of film, radio, and photojournalism. She specializes in environmental reporting, science, and international news. Currently, Julia Kumari Drapkin is a stringer for PRI's The World, an international news radio program co-produced by WGBH, Public Radio International, and the BBC's World Service. Julia joined the staff of The World as a 2007-2008 Metcalf Environmental Reporting Fellow. She then became The World's first multimedia radio producer covering the election last fall. Julia began her journalism career as photographer for the Associated Press covering the civil war in Sri Lanka. She covered the Asian Tsunami for the AP and photographed New Orleans in the months following Hurricane Katrina. Julia has worked as a photographer for the Associated Press in New York, the World Picture News Network, TIME, and the St. Petersburg Times. Most recently Julia has enjoyed teaching film and video workshops with Barefoot in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Louisiana Green Corp.in New Orleans, and the Atlantic Acting School in New York. Julia studied journalism at Columbia University. Prior to that, Julia did research in anthropology and archaeology for over 7 years in Latin America.

Jessica Reynolds (Instructor – Mississippi Delta 2009)

Jessica Reynolds is a Zimbabwean-born filmmaker and editor currently based in New York. She has produced and edited numerous shows for PBS, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the History Channel. Her independent work includes feature documentary Garbage Dreams, which has won numerous Best Documentary and Audience Awards at film festivals across the US as well as the Al Gore Current Award at the 2009 Nashville Film Festival; Promised Land, voted Best Socially Conscious Documentary at the IFP Festival in New York in 2006, and set to air of POV in summer 2010; Unmasking Mavis which screened at both the Amsterdam and Paris Gay & Lesbian Film Festivals and Changing Lands, which she also filmed, which won the Gold Award at the Dolphin Awards in South Africa. In 2007 Jess spent two months in Antarctica filming and editing educational content for use in science museums and schools across the US. She also produced the first South Africa Film Festival in New York City in 2004, in commemoration of the 10 year anniversary of the fall of apartheid.

STAFF & CONSULTANTS

Melissa Brough (Research & Assessment Consultant)

Melissa Brough received her B.A. in Development Studies and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University. She subsequently worked in documentary film production and for FilmAid International, a non-profit organization that uses film and video to promote health and strengthen communities. As Program Officer she supported video-based, psychosocial and educational programs as well as participatory video projects in refugee camps in East Africa, and youth media projects in the Gulf Coast of the U. S. She has volunteered with local and international community media projects including the Chiapas Media Project in Mexico, whose work she helped bring to the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Melissa is currently working on her PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include participatory media practices for social change; participatory design of mobile platforms; program evaluation; community media and social movements.

Tae Sayama (Graphic Design Consultant)

Tae is a Graphic Designer with a background in interactive design, print design, corporate identity design, and illustration. Her focus is in designing online marketing solutions for clients in the pharmaceutical, arts & entertainment, for-profit, and non-profit industries, as well as creating interaction designs for various web-based products and applications.