Introducing Our Advisory Board
One of the pleasures of building DOC NYC has been reaching out to people I admire to enlist their input for the festival Advisory Board. For our first year, we wanted to assemble a group of people who reflect the artistic ideals of the festival and widen our connections to diverse fields of documentary storytelling.
Drawing upon our five year history programming Stranger Than Fiction, we’re pleased to welcome filmmakers Barbara Kopple, Dan Klores and Michael Moore. All three have previously presented films at STF – three times for Kopple with AMERICAN DREAM; MY GENERATION; and FALLEN CHAMP; twice for Klores with CRAZY LOVE and WINNING TIME; and once for Moore when he highlighted his Traverse City Film Festival with a screening of CZECH DREAMS.
For further representation in the film world, we’ve recruited top documentary funders Cara Mertes of the Sundance Documentary Fund; Philipp Engelhorn of Cinereach; and Ruby Lerner of Creative Capital. We hope to work with those organizations to showcase works-in-progress at DOC NYC. Rounding out the board’s film representation are Cameron Bailey, the co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival; Matt Dentler, former producer of the SXSW Film Festival, now working on new distribution platforms for Cinetic Digital Rights Management; and Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films, distributor of docs such as ART OF THE STEAL and JOAN RIVERS.
Looking beyond film, we’ve recruited folks who represent other forms of documentary storytelling: Dean Olsher, a veteran of radio production including the NPR show “The Next Big Thing”; Jenifer Hixson, a senior producer at the acclaimed storytelling series The Moth; and Joe Sacco, who pioneered a style of documentary war reportage in comic books including his latest work “Footnotes in Gaza,” the recent winner of the Ridenhour Book Prize.
At DOC NYC, we place a heavy emphasis on making connections between documentary and other worlds. That spirit is embodied by board members Nelson George, who bridges the worlds of writing (his latest book is “City Kid”) and producing (most recently GOOD HAIR with Chris Rock); Anya Schiffrin who has traveled all over the world as a journalist, currently preparing her book “Bad News, How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century” for publication in November; and Mary Warlick, the executive director of the One Club dedicated to excellence in advertising and executive producer of the doc ART & COPY.
Finally, DOC NYC is proud to have forged a strong partnership with New York University, where I’ve taught the class “Documentary Development” for 10 years at the School of Continuing Professional Studies. Joining our board from the ranks of NYU are Mary Domowicz, the Academic Director of the Department of Design, Digital Arts and Film at SCPS; Robert Boynton, the author of the book “The New, New Journalism” and director of the Literary Reportage concentration at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute; and Dan Streible, an associate professor at Tisch School of the Arts and founder of the Orphan Film Symposium.
We’re grateful to this talent pool as a source of ideas and inspiration for DOC NYC. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for announcements of new additions to the Advisory Board.
