2008 Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival - speakers
Speakers
Deb Abrahamson is a mother of three, grandmother of two, and a traditional dancer/singer/food gatherer. She is of Spokane, Dine and Coeur d’Alene tribal affiliation. Deb is a former uranium mine tailings pond worker and in 1994 joined the board of DawnWatch, a mainstream environmental organization focusing on the Dawn Mining Millsite. In 2000, she founded SHAWL Society to educate and empower her people on the impacts of uranium mining. Deb serves on several other tribal and environmental boards and committees.
Joe Ammirati completed his Ph.D. in Botany, at the University of Michigan in 1972. He held an academic position at the University of Toronto from 1974 to 1979. In 1979 he came to the University of Washington where he has continued to teach, dabble in administration, and study forest fungi, primarily the classification, identification, biogeography, and ecology of mushrooms, throughout his career.
Peter Boger is a Ph.D. student in the University of Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. A first-time student filmmaker, he is interested in exploring relationships between humans and animals (and ideas of animals!) as well as how the concepts of wildlife and nature are being redefined in modern society. He is also involved in planning the Nelson Institute’s second "Tales from Planet Earth" environmental film festival. A native of North Carolina and New Jersey, Peter received his B.A. in history at Princeton University and is just finishing an M.S. in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin.
Kris Boustedt is co-owner of Seattle-based First Sight Productions (www.firstsightproductions.com). He has worked in digital media since 1998 and has been teaching video editing since 2003. Apple Certified as both an end-user and instructor of Final Cut Pro, he has also received awards for screenwriting and production and has had his work broadcast worldwide. With an undying passion for all things cinematic, Mr. Boustedt strives to make the world a safer place for film. He also has an embarrassingly large rubber-duck collection.
Robin Burke has been producer, director, coordinator, stage manager, assistant director and script supervisor for events and independent films for a wide variety of clients and causes since 1985. She is currently directing From the Garden: The Incredible Edible Classroom, a documentary film featuring Alice Waters, and NuLu Green, an architectural portrait of the first LEEDS residential green building in Louisville, Kentucky and co-producing Haiti’s Les Petits Chanteur and the Louisville Legacy project.
Steven Cady, Co-producer/Director of THORN TO BE WILD, is a sophomore at Truman high school in Federal Way. His primary interest is in new technologies and his work on the project has been focused on exploring technical needs as well as developing special elements like the graphics that appear in the film. Steven is now working on an informational video for the Boys & Girls Club that’s located near his school.
David Chase is a junior in Chemical Engineering who joined the UW chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) in the fall of 2007 after transferring to the UW. He transferred to the UW after 2 years at a community college and a six-year enlistment in the US Navy. Dave grew up in southwestern Washington and has lived in the southeast for 2 years and the island of Oahu, Hawaii for 4 years. He will provide a brief introduction to EWB and an important project in Bolivia that EWB-UW has taken on.
Carey Christie, Creative Producer of THORN TO BE WILD and Teaching Artist at the Nature Consortium, has been working in independent film since 1998. Her film credits include work on Seattle-based productions for PBS, VonPiglet Productions, Congenital Engine, and work on several independent features including ZOO, THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE (in Post), and TRUE ADOLESCENTS (in Post). New York credits include Production Design on the short film TASTE, and the feature THE ADULTERER. In addition to her feature film work, Carey has produced and directed a number of short documentaries. She is also a volunteer mentor in the REEL GRRLS program, a Seattle-based organization that teaches media literacy and filmmaking to girls ages 13-19.
Sasha Cornellier is an attorney and a long-time environmental advocate. She earned both her J.D. and B.A. from the University of Washington. She has worked as a civil rights attorney and for several environmental groups. When she is not working to protect and restore freshwater resources in the Pacific Northwest, Sasha enjoys bicycling, hiking and vegan cooking.
Jim Davis is Executive Director of the North Cascades Conservation Council. For 16 years, he has developed and managed several not-for-profit organizations addressing conservation and public health issues, including several years as co-director of the Grizzly Bear Outreach Project. Jim has coordinated research on knowledge and attitudes of both recreational visitors and local residents regarding wildlife management, forest and road management, and grizzly bear recovery. Jim received MS and PhD degrees in entomology from the University of Missouri and University of California at Berkeley.
John de Graaf has worked with KCTS-TV, the Seattle PBS affiliate, for 25 years, as an independent producer of television documentaries, with a special focus on the environment. More than 15 of his programs have been broadcast in Prime Time nationally on PBS. He is also the recipient of more than 100 regional, national, and international awards for filmmaking. He produced the popular PBS specials Running Out of Time, an examination of overwork and time pressure in America, and Affluenza, a humorous critique of American consumerism. He directed and wrote Buyer Be Fair: The Promise of Product Certification. John was the first recipient of the de Graaf Environmental Filmmaking Award, now presented annually in his name at the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, California, and is a co-founder of the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival.
Polly Dyer has been leading conservation activism in the Pacific Northwest for half a century. She has been a prominent figure in virtually every major campaign to protect wilderness in the state of Washington. She is one of the grassroots activists whose tireless efforts resulted in the passage of the Wilderness Act which has led to the protection of over 100 million acres of wilderness over the past four decades. She played a major role in the designation of Glacier Peak Wilderness in the 1960’s, and in the creation of the North Cascades National Park in 1964. Polly currently presides over the Olympic Coast Alliance, which is dedicated to protecting the land and sea interface that is encompassed by the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. Polly is passionate about wildlife, particularly wolves, and is currently serving on the wolves working committee, coordinated through the North Cascades Conservation Council, a group she co-founded over fifty years ago.
With degrees in both biology and film production from the University of Southern California, Lauren Farrar’s primary interest is in environmental and scientific filmmaking. Last fall Lauren participated in a hydrothermal vent research cruise led by Craig Cary and David Caron from the University of Delaware and University of Southern California respectively. She is currently editing the footage from that cruise and intends to make a short documentary about deep-sea protists. Lauren currently resides in New York and does a variety of freelance work in addition to her own projects.
Katie Fleming is devoted to using video to enhance environmental education experiences for young people. Katie instructs an undergraduate course at Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment in the use of video as a means for environmental interpretation, teaches a high school summer course at WWU entitled “Climate Quest: Environmental Science and the Art of Filmmaking,” worked as the Hazel Wolf youth program coordinator for three years and is the education coordinator at RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, an environmental education organization in Bellingham, WA.
Corrie Francis is a freelance animator, artist and photographer based in South Lake Tahoe, California. She has traveled extensively, including to Cameroon in 2002, creating illustrations for literacy publications and teaching art to children in remote villages. She also traveled to Aotearoa, known to the rest of the world as New Zealand, as a Fulbright Fellow. While there she tramped through the rugged backcountry researching her thesis film, an animated documentary about the wilderness experience, before returning to Los Angeles to complete her studies. Now with an MFA in Animation and Digital Arts, she has recently shifted her focus to documentary and is exploring how drawn images can complement documented reality.
Diana Gale is Senior Lecturer Emeritus at UW’s Evans School of Public Affairs. She is the former Director of Seattle Public Utilities and was responsible for water, sewer, drainage, solid waste, engineering services and utilities customer services. Previously, Diana served as the superintendent of the Seattle Water Department delivering water services to 1.2 million people. Diana has extensive community involvement work in the arts and the environment. She is on the Board of the Seattle Opera, the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, Long Live The Kings (a salmon restoration organization) and the International Water Management Council.
Martha Groom is a conservation biologist specializing in plant-animal interactions and conservation of imperiled species. She teaches environmental science and conservation biology at the University of Washington, Bothell and Seattle. She is the lead editor/author of the textbook "Principles of Conservation Biology" published by Sinauer Associates, used in upper undergraduate and graduate courses. She recently has partnered with Elizabeth Gray, Director of Conservation Science at the Washington State office of The Nature Conservancy, and Patricia Townsend of the Department of Biology at UWS to examine potential impacts of biofuel production on biodiversity.
Judith Helfand, co-director of Blue Vinyl with Daniel B. Gold, is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical worlds of chemical exposure and heedless corporate behavior and make them personal, resonant, highly charged, and entertaining. Her most recent film, EVERYTHING’S COOL (also co-directed with Daniel Gold) screens at this year’s festival.
In 1999, Helfand co-founded Working Films, a leader in creating campaigns that dynamically link high-profile non-fiction filmmaking to cutting edge social change organizing.
Judith teaches documentary making as a full-time faculty member at New York University’s Undergraduate School of Film & Television. On leave for 2007-08, she was Artist-in-Residence at University of Wisconsin, Madison where she taught environmental documentary making to students studying science, history, and the environment.
In 2007, Helfand was awarded a United States Artist Fellowship grant. She is currently developing her next feature documentary, Heat Wave: An Unnatural Disaster, about the 1995 Chicago heat wave that left 739 people dead in four days, the majority of them old, poor and people of color.
Mandolin Hooper, Co-producer/Director of THORN TO BE WILD, is a sophomore student attending the progressive Highline Big Picture High School. He directed and edited a music video for Seattle musician Rachel Harrington, along with a 16-minute behind-the-scenes accompanying documentary. Mandolin has written a feature-length screenplay titled FINANCE, with several other scripts in process.
Peter Illyn is the founder and executive director of Restoring Eden in Vancouver, WA and is featured in the first segment of the film Renewal. After nine years as an evangelical minister, Peter returned to school for an undergraduate degree in marketing. Upon graduation, as a sabbatical, Peter took two llamas on a four-month, 1,000 mile trek through the Cascades, which set the long-distance record for llama packing. According to Peter, “I went into the mountains an evangelical minister, but I came out an environmental activist." He started Restoring Eden in 2001 and his work has been featured on the Lehrer Newshour, CBS Evening News, CNN, Outside Magazine, and other national publications.
Carol Jensen is the pastor of St. John United Lutheran Church in Seattle, board chair of the Lutheran Public Policy Office of Washington State, and an active member of Earth Ministry. She has helped mobilize her congregation to plant an organic garden to raise fresh produce for their soup kitchen, to advocate for the environment, and to reduce energy consumption as individuals and as a church.
Bern Johnson has been the Executive Director of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) since 1993. ELAW helps communities in 70 countries protect the environment and public health through law. Bern was President of the Environmental Law Society at Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude. Before attending law school, Bern worked on environmental issues in the U.S. Congress. Bern travels widely and traveled to Dominica and St. Lucia with Diana last year to help citizens throughout the region learn from JET’s success protecting communities and the natural environment.
Jack Knellinger is Director of the Seattle office of Youth Venture, an organization that provides coaching, resources and seed funding of up to $1,000 for young people ages 12-20 to create, launch, and lead sustainable community-benefiting ventures. Jack recently completed a year of service with Youth Venture through the AmeriCorps*VISTA program and has supported Youth Venture teams throughout the Northwest, California, Florida and Canada.
Linda Helm Krapf, producer/director of Woven Ways, has been creating something from nothing for the past 25 years. She served for over a decade as the Founding Executive Director of the Myhelan Cultural Arts Center and has worked in overseas development for NGOs and U.N. agencies to bring renewable energy technologies to rural villages around the world. She graduated with high honors from Cook College, Rutgers University with a B.S. in International Environmental Studies.
John Marzluff is Professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington and holds the Denman Chair in Sustainable Resource Sciences. His graduate and initial post-doctoral research focused on the social behavior and ecology of jays and ravens. His recent book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens (with Tony Angell, 2005 Yale U. Press) blends biology, conservation, and anthropology to suggest that human and crow cultures have co-evolved. This book won the 2006 Washington State Book Award for general nonfiction.
Diana McCaulay is founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET). Diana has served on the board at the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and as chairwoman of the National Environmental Societies Trust. She co-produced “Cockpit Country: Voices From Jamaica’s Heart” and “Jamaica for Sale.” Diana holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Washington and a Bachelor’s in Management Studies from the University of the West Indies.
Jeremy Monroe’s background in aquatic ecology motivated him to pursue filmmaking to share the beauty and diversity of freshwater ecosystems with a larger public audience. Through the organization that he directs, Freshwaters Illustrated, he produces films and other media that are aimed at creating a public that is more aware of freshwater life, and more sympathetic to freshwater conservation efforts.
Melissa Peabody is an award-winning editor and producer, and owner of M Peabody Productions. She has edited wildlife television shows for Turner Broadcasting, Animal Planet, and international broadcast, and has edited dozens of educational programs for Stanford University. She has also co-produced and edited an award-winning 3-part video series on workplace health issues for national distribution. For almost three years, Melissa worked as primary story researcher and associate producer for the documentary unit for NBC’s San Francisco affiliate, KRON-TV.
Alex Steffen has been the executive editor of Worldchanging since he co-founded the organization in 2003. Worldchanging has become the most widely-read sustainability-related publication on the Internet and won the Utne Independent Press Award in 2004. Steffen was also the editor of Worldchanging’s wildly successful first book, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006), a 600-page compendium of writings from over sixty noted leaders around the world and a foreword by Al Gore. Steffen has spoken at influential innovation and environmental conferences around the world. He was the subject of a CNN documentary envisioning possibilities for the future and was featured as one of six leading innovators in the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s "Ecotecture" issue.
Colin Stryker, producer/director of River Ways, is a graduate of Tufts University with a degree in Drama and Computer Science. He earned Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from the University of Miami in 1997. His thesis film, Motospeaking, enjoyed a successful run in a number of art-film festivals including the Seattle Underground Film Festival. Colin moved to Los Angeles in 1999 with the goal of producing an independent film. He came across the very controversial issue of the Snake River dams in eastern Washington and instantly recognized the far-reaching human and cultural implications of the topic. In 2000, Colin began a series of self-funded trips to the Pacific Northwest: researching the issue, meeting with representatives of the interest groups, and developing a visual sense of the place and its people. A year later, he moved to Portland to create a documentary about the topic.
Seth Warren has spent the majority of his life chasing summer around the world kayaking. For nearly a decade, his exploits have been caught on film paddling some of the planet’s most obscure rivers. He has hosted expeditions on National Geographic and appeared in such films as Nurpu, Val Halla and One World. In 2004 he started the Biofuels Education Coalition to promote the use of alternative energy through action sports. Last year, Seth Warren paired up with Tyler Bradt for a mission dubbed "The Oil and Water Project." Equipped with two high definition cameras and a retro-fitted Japanese fire truck named "Baby", they successfully documented a 34,000 kilometer expedition from Alaska to Argentina. Driving the entire distance without a single drop of petroleum, using canola, soy, palm, fish, pig and chicken oils to fuel the vehicle.
Amrys O. Williams is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her scholarly work explores the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, technology, and medicine, particularly in the realm of agriculture. She comes to film as a means of understanding the relationship between people and the environment broadly conceived, and the way scientific, technological, and medical interventions shape and alter people’s interactions with the natural world and with one another.
Jane Winslow is an independent producer, director, editor, DP, scriptwriter, production consultant and still photographer. Her video production company, FireDancer Productions, specializes in documentaries, promo/training and arts programs. Jane has worked as a segment director and DP for Hallmark Channel, principle photographer/editor for a Pilgrimage for Peace involving Tibetan refugees and co-producer/editor on BeComing: Women’s Circles, Women’s Lives. Jane has won numerous awards for her video programs.
Jane teaches workshops for 911 Media Arts, and is a full-time college professor in filmmaking. She has worked as a trainer/product specialist for Snell & Wilcox’s HD and SD Switcher/Digital Effects (DVE) equipment at NAB, IBC Amsterdam, NBC Network News Burbank, the BBC and Entertainment Tonight/Paramount Studio to name a few.
As a still photographer, Jane shows both her photography and video installations in galleries and has been published in various publications such as Mandala Magazine and PATH Annual Report 2001. Jane has photographed extensively throughout Southeast Asia, Nepal, Europe, Greece, Turkey, Central and South America as well as the US.