Our Team

WORKSHOP INSTRUCTORS

Alison Fast (Program Director)

Alison Fast is a Peabody Award-winning television producer who has worked for such networks as NBC/Universal, BBC Worldwide and MTV Networks. She has documented international events including, World AIDS Orphans Day in Los Angeles, the World Water Forum in Mexico City, the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, and the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York City. She spent six months documenting the power of grassroots media in Brazil, and speaks Spanish and Portuguese fluently. As Program Director of Barefoot Workshops, she has produced and led educational programs in the United States, South Africa, Burundi, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine. Her goal is to use media to bridge diverse communities around the world and to work towards global strategies for peace and a sustainable future. She graduated in 1998 with a degree in Journalism from Boston University College of Communication.

Chandler Griffin (Founder & Director)

Chandler is a New York City-based, documentary filmmaker and educator, as well as the Founding Director of Barefoot Workshops. He has more than ten years of experience instructing over fifty film and video workshops, starting out at the prestigious International Film & Television Workshops in Maine. His projects have since taken him to Latin America, North America, the UK, Africa, India and the Middle East. He has developed and produced educational programs in northern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, South Africa, Honduras, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, Palestine, Bahrain and various locations in the USA. He is a founding member of Video Volunteers and served on Jackson Hole Film Festival’s Global Insight Advisory Committee. Chandler started The Arnold & Friends Fund (www.TAAFF.org) to fundraise for AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe. He has collaborated with Navsarjan Trust, PLANusa, 1 Giant Leap, PBS, The American Cancer Society, FXB International, The Ford Foundation, Academy for Educational Development, Creative Associates, RFK Center for Human Rights, Ocean Classroom, FilmAid International, UNESCO, UNAIDS/UNDP, the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative and the President's Digital Freedom Initiative. He holds a BFA in Photography and a BFA in Video/Film from the Savannah College of Art & Design.

Edward Symes (Instructor – Cape Town & Mississippi Delta)

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

Julie Winokur (Instructor – Mississippi Delta & the West Bank)

JULIE WINOKUR is a writer and documentary film producer who strongly believes in using the visual power of film to catalyze positive social change. Her work has appeared on PBS, National Geographic, and in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC.com, among others. Her passion for social advocacy has produced multi-year projects including the one-hour film Aging in America: The Years Ahead, and its companion book and traveling exhibition, as well as the on-going five-year project Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured. 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.org, MediaStorm.org, AARP.org, and Good Morning America, and has been solicited by various organizations for community outreach and education on care giving. In 2008, Winokur completed Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, a short-form multimedia video that uses the voices of Niger Deltans and dramatic photographs by Kashi to expose the enormous costs and devastating impact of oil exploration. The film won First Place Multimedia at the 2008 New York Photo Festival Awards and has been featured at The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, and The Open Society Institute with Kashi's photographic exhibition, as well as on various websites including CNN, NPR, Slate and the Atlantic Monthly.

Yoni Brook (Instructor – Mississippi Delta)

Yoni Brook is a documentary film director and photographer. His documentary film BRONX PRINCESS (with Musa Syeed) about a teenager becoming an African princess, broadcast nationally on the PBS P.O.V. series and premiered at the Berlinale and International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, among numerous festivals and awards, including Best Documentary Short at the Big Sky Documentary Festival and Chicago Children's Film Festival. His film, A SON'S SACRIFICE, about a halal slaughterhouse, has been recognized at film festivals around the world, including Best Documentary Short at the Tribeca Film Festival and Best Documentary Short at the International Documentary Association (IDA) Awards. The film was broadcast nationally in 2008 on PBS' Independent Lens series. He is currently co-directing another national ITVS/PBS broadcast series: THE CALLING, about clergy students of different faiths. Brook has worked as a photojournalist at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. He is regularly assigned to cover stories of national significance, such as Hurricane Katrina for Fortune and advertising campaigns for Target. His web site is www.yonibrook.com. Brook's photography has received the field's highest honors at the Pictures of the Year International and Best of Photojournalism competitions. He was named the national College Photographer of the Year by the Missouri School of Journalism and was the youngest ever to be selected for Photo District News' "30 Photographers to Watch". He speaks regularly about filmmaking and photography. He served as an adjunct instructor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and mentored high school students at Reelworks Teen Filmmaking in Brooklyn. He is an alumnus of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and was selected to attend the CPB/PBS Producers Academy and the Berlinale Talent Campus. He has served as a consulting producer advising young filmmakers on Cinereach's Reach Film Fellowship project.

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

Evelyn Coleman (Development Consultant – Africa Programs)

Evelyn worked at Sesame Workshop for more than three years where she managed fundraising efforts for domestic programs, moving up the ranks from Research and Development Assistant to Manager of International Giving. She also managed international projects and co-productions in South Africa and the Middle East, namely Egypt, Jordan, South Africa and Tanzania, and supported the development and analysis of summative research in Bangladesh. Prior to Sesame, Evelyn orchestrated fundraising and special events for Seeds of Peace, and designed educational materials for Amnesty International’s human rights campaigns in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Evelyn served on the steering committee for the founding chapter of Generation Obama in New York. She is currently a member of the Seeds of Peace Young Leadership Committee and is the Young Alumni Chair for the Birmingham Southern College Northeastern Alumni Network. She has her undergraduate degree in Psychology and is now earning her Masters in Social Work from Columbia University in New York City.

Sanaz Alesafar (Development Consultant – The Middle East)

Sanaz earned her B.A. in Political Science from University of California Berkeley and M.A. in Public Affairs from L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. She has field experience teaching conflict resolution to Afghan and Iraqi refugee children in Tehran as recently as 2006. She has worked in varying capacities in research and development for Save the Children in UK, where she completed her Master’s Capstone Project on education-based assessment tools to prevent conflict at the local and national level, and Relief International, where she drafted proposals to secure funding from USAID and State Department for the Middle East for micro-credit schemes for women and women’s participation in political processes in Arab States. Most recently she has worked as a Research Assistant at Inspired Philanthropy and Sonja Sohn in Los Angeles. Her areas of focus are: International and Human Security, Risk Assessment and Management in Post-Conflict Recovery, International Negotiations and Scenario Planning. She speaks English, Farsi and French.

Veronica Medina (Educational Partnerships)

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Veronica Medina has always been interested in arts and communication. She attended high school focused on advertising, where she received a prize as best RTVC (radio, TV and cinema producer), leading her to an undergraduate degree in film and video. While most of her friends enjoyed the warmth and beautiful beaches of the city, she was engaged in making movies to show the social diversities within the universe around her. She then realized the power of working with film as a catalyst for change. Veronica then enrolled in a graduate level program in cultural journalism, which fomented her ideology as an artivist (artist and activist), and conceived documentary as the instrument to turn these ideals into materials. She moved to New York City where she earned a graduate certificate in documentary filmmaking and is now pursuing her Masters degree in Media Studies at the New School.

Melissa Brough (Research & Assessment Consultant – Africa Programs)

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.

Charlotte Lapsansky (Research & Assessment Consultant – Africa Programs)

Charlotte is a PhD candidate at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. Her research focuses on evaluation strategies for development communications and communication for social change programs. Previously, she worked in India on the design and evaluation of national media campaigns to address gender inequality, health and HIV. She has also worked on youth leadership development and teacher training in India. Prior to working in India, she served as Program Coordinator for Breakthrough where she implemented programs to promote racial justice and domestic violence advocacy through a number of strategies including national theater tours, education and curriculum development, film and media advocacy. Her current research is on evaluation strategies for community media projects as well as national media campaigns related to gender and health in India, including the BBC World Service Trusts recent national PSA and new media campaign to promote condom use among men in India. She holds a BA in Evolutionary Biology from Brown University.

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 developing user interface designs for various web-based applications.