Visiting Filmmakers and Artists
Emily Harrold (Fall 2025 -Spring 2024)
Emily Harrold is a documentary filmmaker from Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her films have screened at festivals including the Tribeca Film Festival, DOC NYC and the Telluride Film Festival. Her film Meltdown in Dixie, a TOPIC original documentary that is part of WORLD Channel’s America ReFramed Series, has garnered many awards including a 2022 duPont Columbia Finalist designation and a 2022 Silver Telly Award. Harrold has produced numerous films for PBS’s American Experience series. Her feature documentary directing debut, While I Breathe, I Hope about politician Bakari Sellers won the documentary Audience Award at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival, premiered on WORLD Channel’s AfroPop series in 2019, and won a 2020 Southeast Region Emmy. Harrold is part of the team behind Discovery’s Tigerland (Sundance 2019) and National Geographic’s Ron Howard-directed Rebuilding Paradise (Sundance 2020). She is part of DOC NYC’s 2021 40 Under 40 Class. Harrold is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has an MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Joel Fendelman (Spring 2025)
Joel Fendelman is an award-winning filmmaker who strives to embrace socially conscious stories that deal with religion, social class, minorities and communicates the underlying connection between us all. He is the director of North Putnam, which depicts a year in the life of a rural Indiana school district and the community it serves. Fendelman received an IDA Documentary Award for his fourth feature film Man on Fire, a documentary about a white Texas preacher who self-immolated in his birth town of Grand Saline in order to bring attention to the unrepentant racism there. Man on Fire premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival and had its broadcast premiere on PBS Independent Lens.
Jolene Pinder (Spring 2025)
Jolene Pinder is a documentary producer and veteran arts administrator with 15 years of experience in the independent film space. Before joining Tulane University, Jolene served as the executive director of Kartemquin Films (KTQ), a prominent 56-year-old nonfiction film organization in Chicago, where she was an executive producer on several KTQ projects released in 2020. Prior to KTQ, Jolene helped launch and served as the inaugural executive director of #CreateLouisiana, a grantmaking and mentorship non-profit designed to champion Louisiana talent in film. From 2011-2017, Jolene helmed the New Orleans Film Society (NOFS)—the producer of the Oscar-qualifying New Orleans Film Festival (NOFF)—during a six-year period of unprecedented growth. For four years prior, Jolene worked at Arts Engine / Big Mouth Productions in NYC as a documentary film producer and Director of the Media That Matters Film Festival. In 2018, she produced the documentary short, “All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk” (dir. Angela Tucker) about the 2017 New Orleans mayoral election, which premiered at DOC NYC. Other documentary producing and associate producing credits include: (A)sexual (premiered at Frameline Film Festival), Arctic Son (broadcast on POV), Election Day(broadcast on POV), Pushing the Elephant (broadcast on Independent Lens), Terra Blight and Hollow Tree (a recent Sundance Institute, Fork Films and IDA grantee). Her short film “Little Fountains” (co-directed with Josh Solondz) screened at MoMA as part of Documentary Fortnight.
Jonathan Lacocque (Spring 2025)
Jonathan Lacocque and Clara Lehmann founded the creative studio, Coat of Arms in 2010 and serve as its directors and producers. Coat of Arms works with Fortune 100 and 500 brands and is a Webby, Telly, Emmy, Cannes Lion-awarded studio. The directing team completed their first documentary, Born in a Ballroom, in 2019. Their second documentary, O Pioneer, received a Cinequest Film Festival Audience Award, the Appalachian Studies Association 2024 Jack Spadaro Documentary Award, and the Rome International Jury Award. They wrote and directed the multi-award-winning animated series entitled Lullaby Theories. Their work has played at over 50 film festivals world-wide, including Cannes, Doc Edge, DOC NYC, SXSW, and Tribeca. They live in Helvetia, WV and balance their filmmaking with community service.
Andrew Harrison Brown (Fall 2024)
After his time as an enlisted forward observer in the U.S. Army, Andrew Harrison Brown has spent the last decade working as a humanitarian and filmmaker in sub-Saharan Africa. Most recently, he served as co-director of Between the Rains. Filmed over the course of four consecutive years during record low annual precipitation in northern Kenya, the film is a feature collaboration with the Turkana-Ngaremara community that seeks to understand the experiences of a childhood caught within a traditional culture that is a casualty of climate change. Harrison-Brown also served as producer, cinematographer and editor of Kifaru (Mountainfilm 2019; Audience Award at Full Frame, Grand Jury Winner at Slamdance). Prior to that, Harrison Brown spent three years building relationships within northern Kenya’s poaching network, unveiling the intricacies of the illegal ivory trade as the producer of When Lambs Become Lions (Mountainfilm 2018; Best Editing, Tribeca Film Festival). He also teaches directing at UNC School of the Arts in the film program and has been a programmer for feature documentaries for Slamdance Film Festival since 2021.
Candice Dalsing (Fall 2024)
Candice Dalsing is an award winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. As a director and producer, she goes above and beyond to craft powerful narratives that captivate audiences while shedding light on pressing social and environmental issues. Her works include, Walking in Footstep– Director, Loose Screw– Producer, Marks of Majesty– Producer/Impact Producer and Bring Them Home executive produced by Academy Award nominated Lily Gladstone- National Impact Producer. With an unwavering drive to push boundaries, she is not just a filmmaker, she’s a catalyst for change.
Petter Ringbom (Fall 2024)
Petter Ringbom is the co-director of This World is Not My Own a film that reimagines the world of self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe and her life spanning the 20th century. With Uzo Aduba as the animated version of Nellie Mae Rowe. The film premiered at SXSW and has screened at multiple film festivals including industry leaders Hot Docs and Big Sky. Ringbom’s feature documentary, The Russian Winter, followed musician John Forté’s Russian odyssey after release from prison. His film, Shield and Spear, examined freedom of expression in South Africa. Ringbom’s films have screened at Tribeca, IDFA, Hot Docs, Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Hammer Museum, Miami Art Basel and Moscow International Film Festival. He has been a Film Independent Fast Track Fellow, a Gotland Film Lab resident at the Ingmar Bergman Estate and a Berlinale Talent.
Rodrigo Dorfman (Fall 2024)
Rodrigo Dorfman is North Carolina-based award-winning writer, filmmaker and multimedia producer who has worked with POV, HBO, Salma Hayek’s Ventanazul and the BBC among others. His films have been screened at some of the top international film festivals in the world (Toronto, Full Frame, Edinburgh, Telluride, Human Rights Watch). With his father, he won best screenplay award from the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain for Prisoners in Time (1997), starring Joh Hurt. His short One Night in Kernersville won the Jury Award for best short at Full Frame (2011). His work has been exhibited at the Levine Museum of the New South, at the Atlanta History Center, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the MAK in Los Angeles and SECCA in Winston Salem. He is a cinematographer of the Sundance award-winning documentary Always in Season, about the impact of lynching on four different communities; his documentary This Taco Truck Kills Fascists won the Best Louisiana Feature Award at the New Orleans Film Festival, and his feature FIESTA! Quinceañera on the intersection of quinceañeras and immigrant traditions in the South broadcast on PBS stations nationwide in 2018. His feature documentary Quaranteened aired on REEL SOUTH in 2022, and his feature, Bulls and Saints was broadcast on PBS ‘s POV in 2023.
Jon-Sesrie Goff (Spring 2024)
Jon-Sesrie Goff is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator. His body of work includes extensive research, visual documentation, and oral history interviews in the coastal American South on the legacy of Black land ownership and Gullah Geechee heritage preservation. He has offered his lens to a variety of projects spanning many genres including the recently released and award-winning documentaries, including Out in the Night (POV, Logo 2015), Evolution of a Criminal (Independent Lens 2015), Spit on the Broom (2019), and his feature-length directorial debut After Sherman (POV, ITVS 2022), which has screened at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and received awards for best feature documentary film at the 2022 Atlanta Film Festival & 2022 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Goff is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team and makes grants globally in documentary film, new media, and visual storytelling for the foundation’s JustFilms program. He previously served as executive director of the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Museum Specialist for Film at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Michael McDermit (Spring 2024)
Michael McDermit makes and produces documentary films, books and other projects under a small independent creative imprint, Blurry Pictures. McDermit co-directed the feature documentary ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak), about Cherokee activists fighting to save their language; it premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and played at over 40 other festivals, universities, and museums including the Atlanta Film Festival, Provincetown International Film Festival, Yale University, the Smithsonian Institute, and the American Museum of Natural History, among other places. BP film STRAWBERRY FOREVER, about McDermit’s father’s struggle with the language disorder aphasia, won the 2021 Audience Choice Award at the disABILITY Film Festival. In addition to filmmaking, McDermit is an English Professor in South Los Angeles.
Kelly Creedon (Fall 2023-Fall 2021)
Kelly Creedon is a documentary editor and filmmaker based in the Southeast. Her film editing credits include the feature-length documentaries Brief Tender Light (POV 2024), Mama Bears (SXSW 2022), Jimmy in Saigon (BFI Flare 2022), Farmsteaders (POV 2019) and You Gave Me a Song: The Life and Music of Alice Gerrard (Full Frame 2019). She also edited the documentary short Santuario (Tribeca Film Institute IF/THEN 2018). She is the recipient of a 2018-2019 Artist Fellowship Award from the North Carolina Arts Council, and a member of the All Y’all Southern Documentary Collective. She has taught visual journalism and documentary storytelling at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the UNC Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism, where she received her MA in Visual Communication. She is also a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.
Chris Everett (Fall 2022-Spring 2023)
Chris Everett is the Program Manager of Southern Documentary Fund and a film director and producer, social media specialist, and graphic artist. He founded the creative studio Speller Street Films in 2015, while directing and producing his first feature-length documentary, WILMINGTON ON FIRE. Everett combines his love for history and visual storytelling in this award-winning film to chronicle the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. He was recently selected for Firelight Media’s Documentary Lab 2021-2022 fellowship for his upcoming martial arts documentary, GRANDMASTER, and is currently wrapping production on the sequel to WILMINGTON ON FIRE, WILMINGTON ON FIRE: CHAPTER II.
Rebekah Fergusson (Fall 2022-Spring 2023)
Rebekah Fergusson is a documentary producer with a passion for character-driven stories. Her experience includes cinematography, line producing, impact producing, and post production supervising. She has produced long form documentaries for Netflix, ITVS, HBO and Fox Sports that have premiered at major film festivals and been nominated for Academy Awards, Sports Emmys and Webbys. Her credits include: Academy Award nominated films Crip Camp (2020) and End Game (2018), Fox Sports documentary Q Ball (2019), and the Academy Award short-listed HBO documentary The Case Against 8 (2014). She is a 2021 Impact Partners Producing Fellow, an active member of the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA), and is based in Durham, NC
Safyah Usmani (Spring 2023)
Safyah Zafar Usmani (MFA ’15), a Pakistan based Director/Producer/Writer works on creating socially motivated content to foster discourse on the rights of marginalized individuals. She uses her work to explore the concept of identity – how it is shaped and its correlation to one’s status in the society. Her film, A Life Too Short, released by MTV documentary films, made DOC NYC’s 2020 Short List which showcases a selection of features and shorts the festival’s programming team considers to be among the year’s strongest contenders for Oscars and other awards. Usmani also received two Daytime Emmy nominations for Fundamental: Gender Justice, No Exceptions. Co-produced by Usmani and Shahrukh Waheed and directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the five-episode international documentary series was nominated in the categories of Outstanding Short-Form Daytime Non-Fiction Program and Outstanding Directing Team for a Single-Camera Daytime Non-Fiction Program. Having worked in half a dozen countries over the last few years, Usmani has immense exposure in the international market in addition to maintaining an impressive understanding of stories from Pakistan. She has produced and directed across many formats- including TV Soap Operas, TV Commercials, Digital Video Commercials, Music Videos, Public Service Messages and Documentaries – to tell stories related to honor killing, child marriages, abortion rights, LBTQI issues, racial injustice, rape survivors and right to quality education.
Natalie Bullock-Brown (Spring 2022)
Natalie Bullock Brown is a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and a documentary filmmaker. She is currently working on her first feature length documentary film as a director, which explores the white beauty standard and its impact on Black women and girls. She is also a producer for award-winning filmmaker Byron Hurt’s upcoming PBS documentary, HAZING. Natalie is a contributor and guest for the monthly program #BackChannel, for which she provides pop culture on WUNC radio’s The State of Things. She also serves as strategist for the organization Working Film’s StoryShift initiative, which develops praxis and best practices for ethical, accountable documentary storytelling.
Hemal Trivedi (Fall 2021)
Award-winning director and editor Hemal Trivedi will return to the DFP on September 30th to screen her film Battleground and share her storytelling expertise and editing techniques with the DFP students.
Battleground offers is an intimate exploration of the state of our democracy as seen through the eyes of two opposing grassroots political leaders in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania – a pivotal county that voted for Obama twice and then flipped to Trump in 2016. Over the course of three years, the film shows their primary struggle was not against each other, but against the political machines that control their respective parties.
Trivedi’s work as a filmmaker and editor has been recognized with one Oscar and three Emmy wins and seven Emmy nominations. Her work has been showcased in major film festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, and IDFA and broadcast on Netflix, HBO, and PBS (Frontline and Independent Lens). Trivedi’s critically acclaimed film Among the Believers, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival, was ranked as one of the top documentaries of 2015.
Monica Berra (Fall 2020)
Monica Berra currently works as a producer with the award-winning Kunhardt Films. She recently served as producer of A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, which traces the stellar career of iconic portrait photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks. The film debuted at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in 2021 and is distributed by HBO films. She previously worked as an archival producer with Vox, and as a producer and outreach coordinator for Firelight Media, which is headed by acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson. Berra’s work has been featured on PBS, WORLD Channel, New York Times Op-Docs, Field of Vision, and The Atlantic. Berra is a DFP alum and her 2016 thesis film (co-directed with Gini Richards and SheRea DelSol), SOUL CITY, screened at 25+ film festivals worldwide, and earned numerous Best Short Documentary awards during its run.
Tina Thornton (Spring 2020 & 2018)
Tina Thornton – who joined ESPN directly out of college in 1993 – was named senior vice president, content operations in November 2020. Thornton added to her already vast portfolio ESPN’s remote operations team – responsible for more than 4,000 remote events annually, leadership of ESPN’s Directing team – including all directors, set design and lighting, and oversight of a newly formed centralized creative team. The ESPN Creative Studio brings together creative groups from across ESPN as storytellers through design, graphics, animation, music, editing and branded content. Thornton continues to oversee several additional business units at the company; ESPN Next – a dynamic career development program for employees across our content division, the content integration & synergy solutions group – producing strategic integrated opportunities between ESPN and TWDC, and production’s management operations team, made up of production management, production scheduling and business/personnel operations.
Angus MacLachlan (Spring 2019)
Artist-in-Residence Angus MacLachlan has written numerous plays, an 18-minute short film, Tater Tomater, directed by Phil Morrison, and the award-winning feature Junebug, which was selected for the Dramatic Competition for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and won a Special Jury Citation for Amy Adams, as well as her first Academy Award nomination. MacLachlan was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for ‘Best First Screenplay’, and ‘Best Screenplay’ by the Washington Area Film Critics, and won ‘Best Screenplay, 2005’ from the International Cinephile Society. The film was listed on over 50 Top Ten lists. His other screenplays include Stone, starring Robert Deniro, and Förtroligheten, which won the Golden Goblet for Best Screenplay at the 2013 Shanghai International Film Festival. In 2013 he wrote and directed Goodbye to All That. The film debuted at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, was nominated for Best Narrative Feature and won Best Actor for Paul Schneider. It was released by IFC and was chosen one of the Ten Best Films of 2014 by Brandon Harris of Indiewire/Filmmaker magazine. Most recently, he wrote, directed, and produced Abundant Acreage Available, starring Amy Ryan. Martin Scorsese served as Executive Producer. The film was the winner of best screenplay at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film was the winner of the Best Screenplay at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
Ross Kauffman (Fall 2018)
Ross Kauffman is the Academy Award-winning director, producer, cinematographer and co-editor of Born Into Brothels, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary 2005 as well as the Emmy for Best Documentary 2005. The film’s accolades include National Board of Review Best Documentary 2004, LA Film Critics Best Documentary 2004 and the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. With Katy Chevigny, Ross co-directed E-Team, an award-winning Netflix feature documentary about Human Rights Watch emergency investigators. Ross executive produced the award-winning documentary In A Dream (directed by Jeremiah Zagar)and was a producer of Academy Award-nominated Postergirl. Ross is regarded as a top documentary cinematographer and has worked on projects such as PBS’s Half the Sky and Morgan Spurlock’s Comicon. Ross has shot, directed and edited short documentaries and branded content for DB Productions since 2009.
Diane Hodson (Fall 2018)
Hodson graduated from the DFP in 2015. Her thesis film unmappable co-directed with Jasmine Luoma, premiered at the New Orleans International Film Festival and received the Programmer’s Award for Artistic Vision. Described as “thought-provoking and disturbing” by Wired magazine, the film was an official selection at a number of film festivals including SXSW, Dokufest, Sidewalk and Indi Grits where it earned the Young Grit Award. More recently, Diane served as a producer and archival researcher on Missing Richard Simmons and Heaven’s Gate podcasts. In addition, Diane and Jasmine Luoma are teaming up again on The Million-Dollar Block. The documentary feature film shot inside the notorious Van Dyke housing project in Brownsville, Brooklyn, explores the intersection of mass incarceration and public housing.
Kimberly Reed (Fall 2018)
Kimberly Reed’s work has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, NPR, The Moth, and in Details Magazine. One of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” she directed/produced Prodigal Sons, a “whiplash doc that heralds an exciting talent.” Prodigal Sons (First Run Features, Sundance Channel) landed on many Best of the Year lists, screened at more than 100 film festivals, and garnered 14 Audience and Jury awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize. Ms. Reed was recognized as one of OUT Magazine’s “Out 100,” and as Towleroad’s “Best LGBT Character of the Film Year.” She also produced/edited/wrote Paul Goodman Changed My Life (Zeitgeist Films), and produced The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (Netflix).
Robert Lipsyte (Spring 2018 & 2017)
Robert Lipsyte was an award-winning sportswriter and columnist for the New York Times, an Emmy-winning host of the nightly public affairs show The Eleventh Hour and former Ombudsman for ESPN. He is the author of twelve acclaimed novels for young adults and is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award honoring his lifetime contribution in that genre.
Inbal Lessner (Fall 2017)
Emmy-nominated producer and editor Inbal Lessner has worked in non-scripted television, documentary series, documentary feature and narrative films. She produced and edited Brave Miss World, which premiered at AFI Docs and was launched as a Netflix exclusive in 2014. The film received an Emmy nomination for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Lessner spoke to the students about her career path and offered a workshop on archival editing.