Mark Jonathan Harris is an American documentary filmmaker, writer, and educator known for his award-winning work in the documentary genre. Over the course of his career, Harris has earned three Academy Awards and numerous accolades for his contributions to filmmaking and education. He served as a Distinguished Professor and Head of Advanced Documentary Production at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he taught from 1983 until his retirement in 2023. Harris is also an accomplished author, having written five children's novels and a collection of short stories.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968 and Yale University in 1973.
John Saul Adrian Battsek is a British film producer of documentary films. In 2020, Battsek co-founded production company Ventureland with producers Kerstin Emhoff, Ali Brown, and director Paul Hunter.
Tia Lessin is an American documentary filmmaker. Lessin has produced and directed documentaries, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, three Emmy Awards, two primetime Emmy Nominations, the duPont Columbia Award, and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.
Andrew Rossi is an American filmmaker, Emmy nominated for directing, writing and producing The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022), Ivory Tower (2014) and Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011).
Bryn Mooser is a filmmaker and entrepreneur. In 2012, Mooser co-founded RYOT, a media company specializing in documentary film, virtual/augmented reality and branded content. Over his career, he has produced more than 200 linear and immersive films garnering an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, a Peabody and a Cannes Lion. Mooser sold RYOT to Verizon in 2016, becoming a senior vice president. While at Verizon, Mooser built the branded content studio for AOL/Yahoo, HuffPost and Tumblr.
Howard Barish is president and CEO of Kandoo Films, an Oscar nominated, Emmy award-winning entertainment company known for its producing partnership with Ava DuVernay. Barish and Kandoo's most recognized project to date, 13th, is a 2016 American documentary from Netflix directed by DuVernay. Centered on race in the United States criminal justice system, the critically lauded film is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery. It argues that slavery is being effectively perpetuated through mass incarceration.
Matthew Heineman is an American documentary filmmaker, director, and producer. His inspiration and fascination with American history led him to early success with the documentary film Cartel Land, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, and won three Primetime Emmy Awards.
Den Tolmor is a Moldova-born American film producer, director, and writer, whose work includes feature films, television series, and documentaries. Tolmor is best known for producing Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, a 2015 documentary film about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in the winter of 2013 and 2014, which earned him an Oscar Nomination for Best Documentary Feature and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination in the Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking category in 2016. Throughout his career, Tolmor has frequently collaborated with Oscar-nominated Israeli-American director Evgeny Afineevsky, also producing the 2017 documentary film Cries from Syria about the Syrian civil war. Narrated by Helen Mirren, the film was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered in 2017 and was acquired by HBO. Tolmor produced Francesco, a 2020 documentary film about Pope Francis that tells the story of hope inside the darkness of our times. Righetto, Tolmor's most recent feature film, entered pre-production in Italy in 2020.
Yance Ford is an African-American transgender producer and director.
Dan Cogan is an American film producer. He has produced multiple documentary films including The Queen of Versailles (2012), How to Survive a Plague (2012), The Hunting Ground (2015), Icarus (2017), Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018), On the Record (2020), and has produced documentary series including I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2020), and Allen v. Farrow (2021). Cogan is the co-founder of Impact Partners, Gamechanger Films, and Story Syndicate.
Laura Checkoway is a documentary filmmaker and writer, known for her documentary Edith+Eddie for which she received an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject nomination at the 90th Academy Awards. The film also received an Emmy nomination and won numerous awards including the IDA Documentary Awards Best Short. In The New Yorker, critic Richard Brody wrote: “One of the most impressive aspects of Checkoway’s film is that, with a simple and straightforward approach, she brings the overwhelming force of abstract institutions seemingly onto the screen.” Academy Award winning filmmaker Julia Reichert called Edith+Eddie "One of the most beautiful and quietly furious films I've ever seen." Checkoway's documentary The Cave of Adullam is executive produced by Laurence Fishburne and premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2022, winning top prizes Best Documentary Feature, Best Editing, and the Audience Award. In an interview with Deadline, Fishburne said: “She has a cinematic sensitivity and a doctor’s bedside manner... Laura doesn’t impose her personality or her energy onto anything. It boils down to her humanity and her ability to see the humanity in all…” The film was released by ESPN Films. She received NYWIFT’s Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking Award in 2022.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a 2018 American documentary film about the lives of black people in Hale County, Alabama. It is directed by RaMell Ross and produced by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes, Su Kim, and is Ross's first nonfiction feature. The documentary is the winner of 2018 Sundance Film Festival award for U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, 2018 Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Cinema Eye Honors Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. After its theatrical run, it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens and eventually won a 2020 Peabody Award.
RaMell Ross is an American filmmaker, photographer, academic, and writer best known for his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening and the 2024 film adaptation of the novel The Nickel Boys (2019), the latter of which he directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes, for which he won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director.
Geralyn White Dreyfous is an American film producer. She has produced multiple documentary and narrative films focusing on social justice issues including The Invisible War (2012), The Square (2013), The Hunting Ground (2015), Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018), The Great Hack (2019), and On the Record (2020). Dreyfous has been nominated for Primetime Emmy awards.
Louverture Films is an American independent film and television production company founded in 2005 by Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes. The company is known for producing Bamako (2006), Salt of this Sea (2008), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), The House I Live In (2012), Strong Island (2017), Capernaum (2018), Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), Prayers for the Stolen (2021), and Nickel Boys (2024).
Impact Partners is an American film production and television production company founded in 2007, by Dan Cogan and Geralyn Dreyfous. The company primarily produces documentary films focusing on social issues. They have produced such films as The Queen of Versailles (2012), How to Survive a Plague (2012), The Hunting Ground (2015), Icarus, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Of Fathers and Sons (2017), Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018), and On the Record (2020).
Bonni Cohen is an American documentary film producer and director. She is the co-founder of Actual Films and has produced and directed an array of award-winning films. Most recently, she produced the Oscar-nominated film Lead Me Home, which premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival and is a Netflix Original. She also recently co-directed Athlete A, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and received four nominations from the Critics’ Choice Awards. She is the co-founder of Actual Films, the production company of the documentaries An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, Audrie & Daisy, 3.5 Minutes, The Island President, Lost Boys of Sudan and The Rape of Europa. Cohen is the co-founder of the Catapult Film Fund.
Jon Shenk is an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary film director and director of photography, known for his films Lead Me HomeAthlete A, An Inconvenient Sequel, Audrie & Daisy,The Island President, Lost Boys of Sudan. He is the co-founder, with his wife Bonni Cohen, of Actual Films, a documentary film company based in San Francisco, CA. He co-directed and photographed Lead Me Home which premiered in 2021 at the Telluride Film Festival, was acquired by Netflix, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2022.
Nickel Boys is a 2024 American historical drama film based on the 2019 novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. It was directed by RaMell Ross, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes, and stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. The story follows two African American boys, Elwood and Turner, who are sent to an abusive reform school called the Nickel Academy in 1960s Florida. The film is inspired by the historic reform school in Florida called the Dozier School for Boys, which was notorious for abusive treatment of students.
