Harriet Hirshorn: Director/ Co-Producer
Harriet Hirshorn is a documentary filmmaker whose award-winning documentaries focus on social justice issues. Her recently completed Mississippi I Am, co-directed with Katherine Linton, screened in festivals internationally and nationally and received awards at the Atlanta International Film Festival, Outfest and Frameline.
Hirshorn has been covering HIV in the US and Africa for the last ten years. Among several short films about HIV, Our Lives Are In Our Hands was exhibited in a video installation in the Pompidou Center’s Main Hall in Paris. Hirshorn has produced several videos about HIV/AIDS and women in Africa for The New York Times. She has also produced and directed two documentary films about the struggle for democracy and human rights in Haiti: The Disappearance of TiSoeur: Haiti after Duvalier and Pote Mak Sonje (Whoever Bears the Scar Remembers): The Raboteau Trial.
She has received grants from the Ford Foundation, MAC AIDS Fund, Open Society Institutes, The Centre National de Cinema (France), New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, as well as an artist’s fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts.
Mary Patierno: Co-Producer/Editor/Additional Camera
Mary Patierno is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, video editor and media consultant. Her documentaries include Heroin, USA, airing on Al Jazeera in 2015 and the award-winning, Vieques: Worth Every Bit of Struggle, which aired on Russian TV (2008.) Her documentary about her brother’s struggle to survive AIDS, The Most Unknowable Thing, was selected as part of The New Documentaries (2000) series at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. It was also nominated for a 2000 International Documentary Association (IDA) Achievement Award and was awarded Outstanding Documentary Feature at Outfest’99 in Los Angeles, the Reelings’99 Film and Video Festival in Chicago, and The Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. She has twice received Artist Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and is a longtime instructor in the MFA Photo, Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Hilary Brougher: Writer
Hilary Brougher is a writer and director living and working in N.Y.C. She wrote and directed her first feature, The Sticky Fingers of Time in 1996, produced by Isen Robbins, Susan Stover and Good Machine. The film was an official selection at the Venice, Rotterdam, and Toronto International Film Festivals, and was released theatrically in the U.S. in 1997. Hilary wrote and directed her second feature, Stephanie Daley in 2006. The film starred Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, Melissa Leo, Tim Hutton and Denis O’Hare. It premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival where Hilary won the Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting. The film was also awarded Best Director at the Milan International Film and was released theatrically in 2007.
Donna Binder: Associate Producer
Donna Binder is a photojournalist with significant fundraising experience who founded and co-directed Impact Visuals cooperative photo agency from 1986-1999. Her photographs of ACT UP feature in David France’s film, “How to Survive a Plague.” Her photographic work has appeared in magazines and newspapers throughout the world, including Time, Life, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Stern, Burda, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The LA times, US News, The Economist, People, MacLeans, The Christian Science Monitor, Fortune, and the Utne Reader.
Binder’s social documentary work has been used in advocacy campaigns by the United Mine Workers, UNITE, Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, ACT-UP, NARAL, and People For The American Way. Her photographs of prisoners in Alabama chained to hitching posts were used by the Southern Poverty Law Center to help end this barbaric practice.
Tamara Sloan: Associate Producer
Tamara Sloan has been in the field of program and organizational development for over twenty years, researching and acquiring funding, and designing, developing, and managing programs. As a social worker with a variety of non-profits, she spent the first six years of her career providing direct services such as counseling, outreach, case management, and crisis work for youth and families in the areas of mental health, education, health and employment. Later in her career, she moved into management, program development, and consulting, first on the state level and then nationally. In that capacity she developed programs, wrote grants, developed online, print, and video health education materials, developed strategies and implemented national communications and media programs and materials, worked with funders in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, and helped to pass national and state health legislation within the civilian, veterans, and military health care systems.
Nadia Hallgren: Director of Photography
Nadia Hallgren is an award-winning cinematographer and filmmaker from the Bronx, NY. Her camera credits include Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the Academy Award nominated Trouble The Water, HBO’s War Don Don and PBS’s The New Black. Nadia has shot commercially for networks such as Sundance Channel, IFC, MTV, BET, VH1 and OWN.
As a director, her first film Sanza Hanza, a short-documentary covering teenage train surfers in Soweto, South Africa premiered at Slamdance was acquired by PBS. Love Lockdown, her followup film, was developed as part of the Cinereach Fellowship, premiered at SXSW and won best short film at HBO’s Urbanworld Film Festival. Nadia holds a BA from the Hunter College CUNY, serves on the board of the Bronx Documentary Center and mentors inner city youth through the Tribeca Film Institute.
Cyrille Phipps: Additional Camera
Cyrille Phipps, has been a media educator and video documentary maker for almost twenty years. She was a Director of Production Services at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the largest public access facility in the country. Recently, she was the Senior Editor of Post Production at TV Land Online.
Working in film and video, she has collaborated on various documentaries that have aired on PBS, TNT and the BBC. She was the co-founder of Black Planet Productions, which produced the award winning grassroots series Not Channel Zero- the revolution, televised. As a member of this collective, she co-produced a number of critically acclaimed documentaries including, “Black Womyn, Sexual Politics and the Revolution.” Much of her work has been featured in national and international festivals from New York to Hong Kong. Currently, she is serving as the Producer/Director for “Seen, But Not Heard: AIDS and the Untold War Against Black Women”, a documentary addressing AIDS among women of color.