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Nancy D. Kates
(Producer/Director) is a filmmaker and writer based in Berkeley, California. She co-produced and directed Brother Outsider: the Life of Bayard Rustin with New York filmmaker Bennett Singer. Brother Outsider premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, with a national broadcast on the PBS program P.O.V. The film received numerous awards, including the 2004 GLAAD Media Award, and audience awards at the major American gay and lesbian film festivals. It also received the award for best feature film at New York’s New Festival and a number of jury prizes. Kates is a former producer of Computer Chronicles, the PBS series, and has worked as a producer, writer, and story consultant on various documentary projects. She also speaks frequently at schools, colleges and universities. Kates is a graduate of Stanford’s documentary film and television program; her M.A. thesis project, Their Own Vietnam, received the 1995 Student Academy Award in Documentary. She worked as a journalist in New York and Boston before turning to film.

Sophie Constantinou
(Cinematographer) has earned international acclaim for tackling difficult subjects with artistry. Her directing credits include Divided Loyalties, a personal exploration of the conflict in Cyprus and Between the Lines, a lyrical documentary about women who cut themselves. Her shooting credits include PBS’s award-winning Maquilapolis; HBO’s Unchained Memories, which tells the stories of former slaves; and the PBS film Presumed Guilty, a portrait of a public defender’s office. She is working on Open Minds, Open Mouths, a film about the movement for sustainable, organic lunches in public schools.

Sari Gilman
(Editor) has been a documentary film editor for 10 years. She received a Primetime Emmy nomination for her work on Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, which aired on HBO. She has worked on such award-winning films as Regret to Inform, which won Best Director at Sundance in 1999 and aired nationally on PBS, and Paragraph 175 which won Best Director at Sundance in 2000, and aired on HBO. Other programs she has edited have appeared on HBO, AMC, A&E and PBS, including a history of Las Vegas and a history of New Orleans, both for PBS’ American Experience. Currently she is directing a film about the Kings Point retirement community in Delray Beach, FL titled, Kings Point.

Veronica Selver
(Consulting Editor) has been an award-winning editor and producer for the last 30 years. She co-produced and directed KPFA On the Air. Her co-directing credits include You Got to Move and Columbia Dupont award-winner Word is Out, the first feature documentary on growing up gay. Selver is currently producing and directing the 30th anniversary DVD release of Word is Out. She edited the award-winning films On Company Business; Academy Award-nominated Berkeley in the Sixties, Harry Bridges: A Man and His Union; Absolutely Positive; Coming Out Under Fire; Blacks and Jews, and Brother Outsider: the Life of Bayard Rustin.

Rachel Antell
(Co-Producer) is a documentary filmmaker and editor based in the Bay Area. Among the films she’s produced are Fremont, USA which looks at one city’s response to its growing religious pluralism; Acting on Faith which profiles American women activists from the Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist faiths; and Death on a Friendly Border about the rising numbers of migrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border since its militarization. Rachel has also edited several documentaries, including Why We Sing, about GLBT choruses, which aired nationally on PBS; and Occupied Minds which followed a US-Israeli and US-Palestinian’s joint journey to their homeland and was broadcast on Link-TV. Antell received her M.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University.

Susannah Patrice Morse
(Associate Producer) is an independent filmmaker and writer. She received a Harvard Film Study Center Fellowship and a media grant from the Jerome Foundation for her work-in-progress Haunted by the Light an experimental 16mm film studying children’s fantasy writer Susan Cooper. She is also co-directing Elwood Snock & the Land of Lo-Fi, an experimental documentary feature exploring the magical peripheries of life with outsider folk musician Michael Hurley. Susannah has taught video production courses with Robb Moss, Alfred Guzzetti and Gina Kim in Harvard University’s department of Visual and Environmental Studies where she completed her degree in 2004. Her previous work includes documentary and experimental pieces in film and digital video.

Bennett Singer
(Consulting Producer) is a New York-based filmmaker and writer/editor. Singer began his career at Blackside, Inc. in Boston, where he served as an associate producer on the Emmy- and Peabody-winning Eyes on the Prize II and as an editor of two books on civil rights history. He subsequently served as producer or associate producer for a number of acclaimed PBS series, including The Great Depression, With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, and The Question of Equality. With Nancy Kates, he produced, directed, and wrote Brother Outsider: the Life of Bayard Rustin, a portrait of the late civil rights activist that has garnered more than 20 awards and honors in the U.S. and abroad. From 1996 to 2004, he was executive editor of TIME Magazine’s education program. Additional publishing credits include co-authoring The Student Body, a novel of suspense published by Random House, and editing 42 Up, the companion book to Michael Apted’s famed documentary series.

Susi Walsh
(Fiscal Sponsor and Strategic Advisor) is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Center for Independent Documentary, an award-winning nonprofit organization. The Center was founded in 1981 to collaborate with independent producers to create films and videos on issues of contemporary social and cultural concern. These films have been broadcast nationally on public and cable television, won numerous awards, and continue to be distributed nationwide. Walsh works to support filmmaker education and networking by organizing professional workshops, meetings and an annual retreat for documentary makers. She is a leader in inter-organization organizing in the film community in greater Boston, and helped craft recent legislation creating new tax incentives for filmmakers shooting in Massachusetts, which resulted in significant growth in the number of films being shot there. Walsh has also produced several documentaries with her husband, Fred Simon.

Advisor Bios.

Adam Green, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, co-edited, with Charles M. Payne, Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950, published in 2003, and wrote Selling the Race: Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940-1955, published in 2007.

Neil Jumonville, William Warren Rogers Professor of History and chair of the History Department at Florida State University, is the author of Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present, 1999, and Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, 1991. He is also the editor of The New York Intellectuals Reader, and co-editor (with Kevin Mattson) of Liberalism for a New Century, which addresses the question of liberalism in the post-9/11 world.

Liam Kennedy is director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at the University of Dublin, and Professor of American Studies. He is the author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion, 1995 and Race and Urban Space in American Culture, 2000. He is co-editor of Urban Space and Representation, 1999 and City Sites: An Electronic Book, 2000, and editor of Remaking Birmingham: the Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration, 2004.

Wayne Koestenbaum is Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His numerous works include the poetry volumes Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems, 1990, and The Milk of Inquiry, 1999; his critical works include The Queen’s Throat: Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, 1993, Andy Warhol, 2001, and Hotel Theory, 2007.

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of numerous books, including Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death, But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives, and other works.

Leland Poague, Professor of English, Iowa State University, is the author, with Kathy Parsons, of Susan Sontag: an Annotated Bibliography, 1948-1991, and editor of Conversations with Susan Sontag.

B. Ruby Rich, Professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also serves as Graduate Director of its program in Social Documentation. She is an influential film critic and scholar, and author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement.

Craig Seligman is a book critic for Bloomberg News, a former editor at several publications, including The New Yorker and Salon, and the author of Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004.

Nikhil Singh is Associate Professor of History, University of Washington, and author of Black Is a Country: Race And the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, 2005. His current work examines terrorism, U.S. foreign policy, and the post-9/11 world.
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