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Marissa Aroy is a Filipino-American director and producer. She directed the documentaries Sikhs in America, which received an Emmy award for "best historical program", and The Delano Manongs. Aroy is also co-founder of the production company, Media Factory. A Fulbright Scholar, Aroy was recently listed as one of the "Notable Asian Americans in Entertainment" by the Center for Asian American Media and cited by BuzzFeed as one of the "Legendary Filipino Americans in the US". [1]
Aroy got her undergraduate degree in Psychology at Boston College and went on to complete a Master's in Journalism at UC Berkeley. She spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic working in the public health sector and creating a film about HIV/AIDS in the Dominican Republic. As a Fulbright Scholar, Aroy filmed a narrative about the effects of emigration on one family called Recipe.
Aroy produced and directed the documentary Sikhs in America for which she received an Emmy. She also received an Emmy nomination for her PBS documentary The Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers. This documentary highlights the role of Filipinos in the Delano Grape Strike of 1965 in California and the formation the United Farm Workers. [2] "My goal," said Aroy in an interview for caamedia.org, "is to get Filipinos to learn about this history and be proud of it and have a better understanding of our contributions to the American fabric." [3]
Through Aroy's company Media Factory, she created interactive video elements about climate change with Bill Nye the Science Guy for the Chabot Space & Science Center, and has worked with various companies and non-profit organization to create videos and serialized content. Aroy worked with UNICEF as a video producer/communications specialist in the UNICEF New York headquarters before spending four months writing and filming stories in the Typhoon Haiyan-affected areas of the Philippines soon after the disaster.
In 2016, Aroy debuted her short film TGIF- Thank God I'm Filipino! - a response to the lack of Filipino American representation in pan Asian American media at the time. [4]
Lucy Alexis Liu is an American actress. Her accolades include winning a Critics' Choice Television Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Seoul International Drama Award, in addition to nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award.
Philip Villamin Vera Cruz was a Filipino American labor leader, farmworker, and leader in the Asian American movement. He helped found the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which later merged with the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). As the union's long-time second vice president, he worked to improve the working conditions of migrant workers.
The Delano grape strike was a labor strike organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a predominantly Filipino and AFL-CIO-sponsored labor organization, against table grape growers in Delano, California to fight against the exploitation of farm workers. The strike began on September 8, 1965, and one week later, the predominantly Mexican National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) joined the cause. In August 1966, the AWOC and the NFWA merged to create the United Farm Workers (UFW) Organizing Committee.
The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) – formerly known as VC FilmFest – is an annual film festival presented by Visual Communications (VC). It was established in 1983 by Linda Mabalot as a vehicle to promote Asian Pacific American and Asian international cinema. The festival fulfills a unique mission in illuminating the visions and voices of Asian Pacific peoples and heritage. The festival is held in Los Angeles in May, which is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
Cesar Chavez Day is a U.S. federal commemorative holiday, proclaimed by President Barack Obama in 2014. The holiday celebrates the birth and legacy of the civil rights and labor movement activist Cesar Chavez on March 31 every year.
Craig B. Fisher was an American network and cable television producer. He spent more than 25 years with ABC, CBS, and NBC News Division in New York and Washington, D.C. and more than two decades as a freelance writer and producer. Fisher was responsible for over one thousand hours of live, film and videotape, studio and location television and corporate productions.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company Story Syndicate.
Doan Hoang or Đoan Hoàng is a Vietnamese-American documentary film director, producer, editor, and writer. She directed and produced the 2007 documentary Oh, Saigon about her family, after leaving Vietnam on the last civilian helicopter as Saigon fell. The documentary won several awards at film festivals and was broadcast on PBS from 2008 to 2012. Hoang was selected to be a delegate to Spain for the American Documentary Showcase.
Kara Patria Constantino David-Cancio is a Filipino journalist, host, professor, and educational administrator. She is known because of investigative and multi-awarded documentaries in i-Witness. These documentaries are "Bitay, “Selda Inosente”, "Buto't Balat", and Ambulansiyang de Paa.
Joseph Israel Laban was a Filipino journalist, independent filmmaker, playwright, and a Fulbright Scholar.
Kavery Kaul, formerly known as Kavery Dutta, is an American filmmaker, born in India. Her directing and producing credits include Back Walking Forward, Long Way from Home, Cuban Canvas, One Hand Don’t Clap, and First Look.
Kathryn Walker is an American theater, television and film actress.
Hanna Polak is a Polish director, cinematographer and producer. For her short documentary film, The Children of Leningradsky, about a community of homeless children living in the Leningradsky railway station in Moscow, she was nominated for an Academy Award and an Emmy Award. In 2003, she was awarded Best Producer of Documentary Movies at the Kraków Film Festival for Railway Station Ballad.
Modesto "Larry" Dulay Itliong, also known as "Seven Fingers", was a Filipino American labor organizer. He organized West Coast agricultural workers starting in the 1930s, and rose to national prominence in 1965, when he, Philip Vera Cruz, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco, walked off the farms of area table-grape growers, demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage, that became known as the Delano grape strike. He has been described as "one of the fathers of the West Coast labor movement." He is regarded as a key figure of the Asian American movement.
Patricia Ann Aufderheide is a scholar and public intellectual on media and social change, and an expert on fair use in media creation and scholarship. She is a University Professor at American University in Washington, D.C., where she has worked since 1989 and directed the Center for Social Media, later the Center for Media & Social Impact, beginning in 2000. She has received multiple awards and honors for her journalism and scholarship, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1994, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1995, and a Distinguished Career Award in 2008 from the International Digital Media and Arts Association.
Niall McKay is an Irish writer, Emmy-winning director and film curator. He’s the writer/director of a New York based comedy series called On the Lig, a shorts programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival and curator of Irish Screen America, an Irish film festival held at USC in Los Angeles and NYU in New York. McKay is also co-founder of the production company Media Factory.
Dolores is a 2017 American documentary directed by Peter Bratt, on the life of Chicana labor union activist Dolores Huerta. It was produced by Brian Benson for PBS, with Benjamin Bratt and Alpita Patel serving as Consulting Producers and Carlos Santana as Executive Producer.
American Factory is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, about Chinese company Fuyao's factory in Moraine, a city near Dayton, Ohio, that occupies Moraine Assembly, a shuttered General Motors plant. The film had its festival premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It is distributed by Netflix and is the first film acquired by Barack and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground Productions. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The manong generation were the first generation of Filipino immigrants to arrive en masse to the United States. They formed some of the first Little Manila communities in the United States, and they played a pivotal role in the farmworker movement. The term manong comes from the Ilocano word for "elder brother," while manang means "elder sister."
Linda Mabalot was a Filipino American filmmaker and community activist who founded the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, also known as the Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival or VC FilmFest. She was the former executive director of Visual Communications, a nonprofit media production organization "dedicated to the honest and accurate portrayals of the Asian Pacific American peoples, communities, and heritage through the media arts" according to their mission.