Producers' Forum

Y. David Chung (co-director, producer, co-writer) is a filmmaker and visual artist known for his multi-media installations, paintings, drawings, prints, and public artworks who has exhibited widely throughout the country and internationally at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Project Rowhouse, the Gwangju Biennale and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Chung began his career collaborating as a graphic artist on documentary films. Selected credits include Surveillance, No Place to Hide (HBO), American Journey (PBS), and Gardens of Paradise (PBS) and Peace on Borrowed Time (ABC). He received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in 1995. Chung is Associate Professor with the School of Art and Design and the Director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan.

Pearl Bowser is an internationally-acclaimed film scholar, film curator and archivist. She programmed numerous festivals and touring programs of African American and African films including “From Harlem to Hollywood,” “Journey Across Three Continents” and “Celebration of Black Cinema.” She is also the author of several important texts including "Oscar Micheaux and His Circle" (Indiana University Press, 2001) and the producer of the documentary Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies (1994).

Abigail Child has created a wide variety of experimental, narrative, and documentary films since 1970. Her award-winning art has been extensively exhibited in both solo and group shows, including The American Century, 1950-2000 at the Whitney Museum, the Whitney Biennial (1989, 1997), the New York Film Festival & Video Side Bar (1989, 1993).. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou. She is also a poet and author; her most recent book is This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film. Child, who graduated with a M.F.A. from Yale University School of the Arts, has taught film/video production and history at various schools and is currently Chair of Film/Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Arthur Jafa is cinematographer, filmmaker, producer, visual artist, writer, scholar, educator, a cultural critic/worker, and visual artist.

Jean-Marie Teno, born in Cameroon, is an acclaimed filmmaker, whose works have been centerpieces at the international art exhibition, Documenta, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and at film festivals on five continents. He studied communications at the University of Valenciennes (France), and then began work as a film critic for the magazine "Bwana". In 1985, he was hired as an editor at FR3 (French National Television) where he worked until 1997. In 1983, Teno made his first film, the documentary short Schubbah. He has continued filmmaking, moving effortlessly between documentary and fiction. His feature documentary Afrique, je te plumerai (1992) is one of the most insightful examinations of the cultural damage created by Europe’s colonization of Africa. His other films include: Le mariage d’Alex (2002), Vacances au pays (2000) and Chef! (1999) and La tête dans les nuages (1994).

For more information about his work visit Les films du Raphia website.

Almudena Carracedo is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and scholar whose film, “Welcome. A Docu-Journey of impressions” won the Sterling Award for Short Subject at Silverdocs in 2003. Trained in film production in Madrid and Paris, Almudena worked as a television director in Spain before coming to the U.S. to work on her doctoral dissertation on U.S./Mexico border documentaries at UCLA. She is a recent fellow of NALIP's Latino Producers Academy.

Robert Bahar is the co-founder and coordinator of doculink.org, a grassroots networking organization for documentary filmmakers, and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Documentary Association. He is a graduate of Drexel University where he produced and directed the award-winning documentary Laid to Waste with George McCollough about toxic waste dumping in Chester, PA. He holds an M.F.A. from The Peter Stark Program at the USC School of Cinema-Television.

Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater have worked together since 1990, making award-winning documentaries for national and international broadcast. Their film Maggie Growls , was an ITVS-produced biography of Gray Panther founder Maggie Kuhn, was awarded the Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Digital Media from the Council on Foundations in 2004. Other broadcast documentaries by Attie and Goldwater include I Witness: Shot Down in Pensacola ; Landowska: Uncommon Visionary and Motherless .

Claire Andrade-Watkins, a historian and filmmaker, has published extensively on French and Portuguese language African cinema in leading academic journals and film publications including Framework, International Journal of African History, Journal of Visual Anthropology, and The Independent. She is coeditor of Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema. From 1995 to 1996 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Cape Verde, where she conducted research on indigenous cinema. She was an Associate Producer on Odyssey, a PBS anthropology and archaeology documentary series, and Assistant to the Producer on Haile Germia’s Sankofa. She is an Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts, at Emerson College in Boston. She founded Spia Media to document, preserve and disseminate cultural productions from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, with a particular emphasis on Cape Verdean-American and Cape Verdean history, culture and traditions.