Lionel Friedberg is a documentary film director, producer and writer who has written or produced films for, among others, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, the History Channel and National Geographic. He has 18 credits as Director of Photography on feature motion pictures, and has worked all over the world on both dramatic and nonfiction productions.
Friedberg was born in South Africa. He began his career working in the television industry in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1961. He later directed numerous TV episodes and single dramas and documentaries in South Africa and was the Chairman of the South African Film and Television Association (SAFFTA) for many years. In 1966 he worked in Canada, where he was affiliated with the National Film Board of Canada, Montreal. In 1986 he moved to the United States. For the past 30 years he has specialized in fiction and non-fiction series, episodes and single shows, as well as writing non-fiction books. He is an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer, an author of three non-fiction books and a New York Times bestselling author. He is a vegan and active in the environmental and animal welfare movements.
• Full Service (Grove Press) (2012) New York Times bestseller. Co-written with Scotty Bowers
• Forever in my Veins: How Film Led Me to the Mysterious World of the African Shaman (O-Books. John Hunt) (2020)
• The Flying Springbok: A History of South African Airways Since Its Inception to the Post-Apartheid Era (Chronos Books. John Hunt) (2021)
Ann Druyan is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning American documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series.
Haskell Wexler, ASC was an American cinematographer, film producer, and director. Wexler was judged to be one of film history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild. He won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography twice, in 1966 and 1976, out of five nominations.
Doug Pray is an American documentary film director, cinematographer, and editor who often explores unique subcultures in his films. His work includes Surfwise (2008), a portrait of the nomadic, 11-member Doc Paskowitz family ; Big Rig (2008), a documentary about truck drivers; Infamy (2005), a documentary about graffiti culture; Red Diaper Baby (2004) a solo-performance film starring Josh Kornbluth; Scratch (2001), a documentary about turntablism and DJ culture; and his first feature, Hype! (1996), a documentary about the explosion and exploitation of the Seattle grunge scene of the early 1990s. His most recent films are Levitated Mass, (2013) a film about the creation of Michael Heizer's massive sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Emmy Award-winning Art & Copy, a film about advertising and creativity that premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and was distributed by PBS.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968.
David Hickman has been writing, producing and directing single documentaries and series for broadcast television in the United Kingdom and internationally for the last twenty years. He is also a cinematographer, having worked on 16- and 35-mm film, as well as a variety of video and HD formats – shooting drama and non-fiction.
Aaron Lubarsky is a documentary filmmaker known for his work on the HBO documentary Journeys with George, the PBS documentary Seoul Train and Sportsfan. After graduation from Stanford University's Documentary Film Program, he worked as a documentarian at Lucasfilm on The Making Of Star Wars: Episode One. In 2005, he founded Flicker Flacker Films, specializing in non-fiction production. He lives and works in New York.
Boyd Estus is a director of photography and producer/director in the motion picture industry whose credits include the Academy Award-winning The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, the Academy Award-nominated Eight Minutes to Midnight, and many Emmy-winning television programs. He has worked on location around the world shooting and directing feature films and documentaries.
Jim Coane is an American television executive producer, writer, director and development executive. He is an Emmy Award winner and the creator and executive producer of the PBS animated series Dragon Tales. He is credited as executive producer and director on many network, syndication and cable series, including Walking the Bible, Totally Hidden Video, America's Most Wanted and Futurequest.
Jack Craig Couffer A.S.C. was an American cinematographer, film and television director, and author. Couffer has specialized on documentary films, often involving nature and animal cinematography. Couffer was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on the film version of the novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1974).
Renee Tajima-Peña is an American filmmaker whose work focuses on immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing and producing credits include the documentaries Who Killed Vincent Chin?, No Más Bebés, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women and the 5-part docuseries Asian Americans.
Roger Ross Williams is an American director, producer and writer and the first African American director to win an Oscar, with his short film Music by Prudence.
A Sacred Duty: Applying Jewish Values to Help Heal the World is a 2007 American documentary film written, directed, and produced by Lionel Friedberg. It was distributed by Jewish Veg, then known as the Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA). The film centers on Jewish teachings about caring for the planet, treatment of animals, and the environment, with a focus on Jewish vegetarianism. Interviews with rabbis, activists, and scholars are interspersed with footage and stills illustrating the points being discussed.
Ric Esther Bienstock is a Canadian documentary filmmaker best known for her investigative documentaries. She was born in Montréal, Quebec and studied at Vanier College and McGill University. She has produced and directed an eclectic array of films from investigative social issue documentaries like Sex Slaves, an investigation into the trafficking of women from former Soviet Bloc Countries into the global sex trade and Ebola: Inside an Outbreak which took viewers to ground zero of the Ebola outbreak in Zaire - to lighter fare such as Penn & Teller’s Magic and Mystery Tour.
Philip Hoffman is a Canadian experimental filmmaker and a member of the faculty of York University.
Sophie Darlington is a noted freelance British wildlife camerawoman and producer-director who grew up in England, Ireland and Iran.
Suhel Nafar is currently the Vice President of Strategy & Market Development- WANA at Empire Distribution, the leading independent label, distributor, and publisher in the US and the first label to open a division in the US to help grow the local scene in West Asia & North Africa and its diaspora.
Richard Chisolm is an cinematographer and film-maker based in Baltimore, Maryland. Chisolm is most experienced in documentaries and actuality-style dramas. He has done additional camera work for feature films, television series, commercials and corporate and educational videos.
Naresh Bedi is an Indian filmmaker, the eldest of the Bedi Brothers and a member of the second generation of three generations of Wildlife photographers and filmmakers. He is the first Asian to receive a Wildscreen Panda Award and the first Indian to receive a nomination for the British Academy Film Awards. He was honoured by the Government of India in 2015 with Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
Emiko Omori is an American cinematographer and film director known for her documentary films. Her feature-length documentary Rabbit in the Moon won the Best Documentary Cinematography Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival and an Emmy Award after it was broadcast on PBS that same year. One of the first camerawomen to work in news documentaries, Omori began her career at KQED in San Francisco in 1968.
Sidney Allen Bruce Perou is a British cinematographer and film director notable for his work in caves. He has been called "renowned throughout the caving and broadcasting world," "possibly the greatest cave film maker of all time," and "the man who brought caving to the masses." His work has received international acclaim.