Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, since 1985.
A quinceañera is a celebration of a girl's 15th birthday. It has cultural roots in Mexico and is widely celebrated by girls throughout Latin America. The girl celebrating her 15th birthday is a quinceañera. In Spanish, primarily in Latin America, the term quinceañera is reserved solely for the honoree; in English, primarily in the United States, the term is used to refer to the celebrations and honors surrounding the special occasion.
Claiborne Paul Ellis was an American segregationist turned civil rights activist and trade union organizer. Ellis was at one time Exalted Cyclops, local leader, of a Ku Klux Klan group in Durham, North Carolina, the city where he was born.
David W. Ross is an English musician and actor. After moving to London at the age of 17 and seeking work as a film extra, his photo was spotted by Ian Levine, a boy band producer, and Ross was signed to A&M Records U.K., as one of the four members of Bad Boys Inc. The group released one self-titled album, which spawned five hit singles, including the Top 10 smash "More to This World".
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is an annual international event dedicated to the theatrical exhibition of non-fiction cinema.
Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She has published four photographic monographs, directed four documentary features, produced four traveling exhibitions, and published in magazines throughout the world.
Paul Westmoreland, known professionally as Wash Westmoreland and previously known as Wash West, is a British director who has worked in television, documentaries, and independent films. He frequently collaborated with his husband, writer-director Richard Glatzer. Together, they wrote and directed the 2014 film Still Alice, based on Lisa Genova's NYT best-selling book and starred Julianne Moore, Kristen Stewart, and Alec Baldwin. The film won many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress for Julianne Moore and Humanitas Prize for feature film for the duo. Their 2006 coming-of-age feature film, Quinceañera, won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
Flawed is a 2010 short animated documentary film and website by Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman about body image, combining stop-motion animation and hand-painted images. Flawed was produced in Halifax by Annette Clarke for the National Film Board of Canada.
Oren Rudavsky is an American documentary filmmaker specializing in work about individuals and communities outside the mainstream. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1979. Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People. He is also working on a documentary for a program called Witness Theater, which will chronicle the relationships formed between high school students and Holocaust survivors, culminating with a dramatization of the lives of the survivors. His films Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016.
Linda Goode Bryant is an African-American documentary filmmaker and activist. She founded the gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), which will be the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2022, organized by curator Thomas Lax.
Adam Taub is a documentary film director from Greeley, Colorado whose films include La Quinceañera, Don Angelo, and El Duque de la Bachata. His film La Quinceañera won the 2007 award for Best Documentary at the Angelus Student Film Festival in Hollywood, California and Best Documentary at the San Diego Latino Film Festival. In 2009, he released a film project entitled El Duque de la Bachata with Joan Soriano, a bachata and merengue musician from the Dominican Republic.
Marshall Curry is an Oscar-winning American documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. His films include Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Point and Shoot, and A Night at the Garden. His first fiction film was the Academy Award-winning short film The Neighbors' Window (2019).
Joaquin Emiliano Dorfman is an American writer, performance artist, and boylesque performer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is of Argentinian, Chilean, and Jewish descent. He has written under the names Joaquin Dorfman and Joaquin Emiliano. He is the son of novelist, playwright, and human rights activist, Ariel Dorfman, and Angélica Malinarich. His older brother, Rodrigo, is a multimedia award-winning filmmaker and producer.
Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. He is currently working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities..
The New Orleans Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the nonprofit organization New Orleans Film Society, a film society founded in 1989. The festival has been held since the society's inception. The festival takes place in mid-October. The festival, nicknamed "Cannes on the Mississippi", features national and international feature films and short films. The festival had one off-year when New Orleans suffered the effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Well-Founded Fear is a 2000 documentary film from directors Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini. The film takes its title from the formal definition of a refugee under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as a person who deserves protection, "owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” The film analyzes the US asylum process by following several asylum applicants and asylum officers through actual INS interviews.
Joe Brewster is an American psychiatrist and filmmaker who directs and produces fiction films, documentaries and new media focused on the experiences of communities of color.
The Santiago International Film Festival is a film festival that launched in 2005. As its name suggests, the festival takes place in Santiago, Chile.
My Sister's Quinceañera is a 2013 documentary-drama by director Aaron Douglas Johnston. It is a rural coming-of-age drama about circumstances, American aspirations, and the effect of family ties. The film stars Elizabeth Agapito, Becky Garcia, and Josefina Garcia.
Evann Siebens is a Canadian media artist with a background in dancing based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her current practice cross-references dance performance and media. Siebens' film works have been shown both nationally and internationally and have won awards. She recently exhibited a geodesic dome and 360 projection at the Belkin Gallery in Vancouver and also screened a commissioned work on the exterior of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her moving billboard Orange Magpies Triptych was part of Capture’s Photography Festival. She has also performed live with her media at New Media Gallery and the Western Front, Vancouver.
