Antonia Hylton
News Correspondent, NBC
Journalism (Nov. 13)
Hear from experts on two panels as we explore the intersection of journalism and documentary filmmaking. Then join us for a special NBC Original Voices live pitch event hosted by NBCU Academy, NBC News Studios, and IF/Then Shorts as six teams pitch their archival and journalistically-driven short documentary works-in-progress.
Journalism and Documentary Day is co presented by:
In the Festival Lounge, the day starts with Breakfast (9-10AM) and ends with a Happy Hour (4:30-5:30PM) co-presented by NBC News Studios.
10-11:15AM
Documentary Podcasts as Investigative Powerhouses
This dynamic discussion explores the potent world of documentary-style podcasts. Navigate audio’s immersive power as investigative reporters use it to reveal hidden truths and incite change. Guided by NBC News Studios’ Alexa Danner, join Nancy Solomon (Dead End), NBC News journalist and podcaster Antonia Hylton (Grapevine), and Josh Dean (Campside Media) to unravel the art of podcasting as a medium for probing complex issues. Embrace podcasting’s potential as an investigative tool.
Antonia Hylton
News Correspondent, NBC
Antonia Hylton is an NBC News correspondent and a Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist reporting at the intersection of politics, civil rights, and immigration across all NBC News platforms.In 2021, Hylton co-hosted the #1 hit podcast, Southlake, with co-host Mike Hixenbaugh. Southlake tells the story of how this idyllic city, and its local school board election, became the poster child for a new political strategy with national repercussions. The podcast hit #1 on the podcast charts and was named to numerous lists of the best new podcasts of 2021. Hylton is a Pulitzer Prize Award finalist, Peabody Award winner, Scripps Howard Award winner and a Deadline Club Award winner for the podcast, among other honors. In October 2023, Hylton and Hixenbaugh launch their second podcast together, Grapevine, on the anti-trans movement within Texas schools. From 2016 to 2020, Antonia worked for Vice Media and HBO’s nightly news and documentary show, Vice News Tonight, and launched a podcast with Spotify focused on the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus. Antonia has won several additional awards, including an Emmy for her development and reporting of an HBO special episode on the family separation crisis, a Gracie Award for her stories about women, a NAMIC Vision Award for reporting on violence and politics in Chicago, and two Front Page Awards for special reporting and breaking news. When she’s not in the field reporting, Antonia mentors other young reporters.
Josh Dean
Campside Media
Josh Dean
Campside Media
Josh Dean is a journalist, author, and co-founder of the acclaimed podcast production studio Campside Media, whose first original podcast, The Clearing, was called a “new true-crime classic” by The New Yorker and “astonishing…an immense achievement” by The Guardian, and spent nearly two months at #1 on the Apple podcast charts. He co-created Campside’s first show, Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen, which peaked at #2 on the charts and helped solve a crime, and then made Hooked, which was nominated for Podcast of the Year by the Podcast Academy. He is a correspondent for Outside and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, a regular contributor to GQ and Popular Science, and the author of two books, Show Dog and The Taking of K-129, with a third book, The Impossible Factory, about the legendary aerospace designer Kelly Johnson and his Lockheed Skunk Works, in the works for Dutton.
Alexa Danner
NBC News Studios
Alexa Danner
NBC News Studios
Alexa Danner oversees day-to-day business and operations strategy across the NBC News podcast portfolio and editorially supervises NBC News Studios original podcasts. She served as Executive Producer on both Grapevine and the award-winning Letters from Sing Sing podcasts. Before transitioning to audio, she was an EP/showrunner/director whose docuseries credits while at NBC include the acclaimed John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise (Peacock) and its sequel, The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise (Peacock), among numerous other titles. Alexa holds a BA in English & History and a Master’s in journalism, both from Columbia University.
Nancy Solomon
New Jersey Public Radio
Nancy Solomon
New Jersey Public Radio
Nancy Solomon is a senior reporter and the founding managing editor of New Jersey Public Radio, which won a 2014 Peabody Award for Chris Christie, White House Ambitions and the Abuse of Power. Her latest project is the podcast, Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery.
Solomon fell in love with radio reporting and production at KLCC in Eugene, Oregon, in 1995. She moved to New Jersey in 2001 and has been covering the state ever since. She has produced more than a hundred stories for NPR and was a 2008-09 Spencer Fellow in Education Reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. During that year, Solomon produced Mind the Gap: Why Good Schools are Failing Black Students for which she won a Peabody Award. Long before becoming a journalist, Solomon was the first woman ever hired to work on the county road crew in Portland, Oregon.
11:30-12:45PM
When Journalists Become Documentary Visionaries
Join journalists turned doc filmmakers Shayla Harris (Gospel), Alyse Shorland (Man On the Run), Julie Cohen (Every Body), and Becca Landsberry-Baker (Bad Press) to learn how journalists navigate the shift to visual storytelling and their challenges, insights, and transformative moments. Moderated by Kimberley Ferdinando, executive producer at NBC News Studios, this engaging panel promises an in-depth exploration of the evolving landscape where journalism converges with the world of documentary filmmaking. Gain valuable perspectives on the intersection of these two dynamic realms.
Julie Cohen
Filmmaker
Julie Cohen
Filmmaker
Julie Cohen is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy and Peabody winning documentary director. Her films include RBG (2018, Magnolia/Particpant/CNN Films), My Name is Pauli Murray (2021, Amazon Studios) and Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down (2022, Time Studios/CNN Films), each directed alongside Betsy West. Solo projects include The Sturgeon Queens (2014, PBS/7th Art) and American Veteran (2017, Freestyle Releasing.) Julie’s latest film, Every Body, was released theatrically in June by Focus Features following a Tribeca premiere and is now streaming on Peacock. Every Body, was produced by NBC News Studio’s stemming from Julie’s long relationship with NBC, where she served as a Dateline producer for nine years. She’s held earlier journalism jobs in cable tv (Court TV producer), print (Legal Times reporter) and public radio (WBAI reporter). She has a masters in journalism from Columbia and a masters in law from Yale.
Alyse Shorland
Producer/Director
Alyse Shorland
Producer/Director
Alyse Shorland is a two-time Emmy and Peabody-winning director and producer, who’s made great things with HBO, NBC Studios, One Story Up, VICE, CBS, FX, HULU, CNN, and the New York Times. Her work marries artful filmmaking with journalistic curiosity and rigor, and she has helped craft some of the most ambitious films, series, and television of the past decade. Alyse was a director for The Weekly from the New York Times, where her films featured original and investigative reporting, and interviews with Fortune 500 CEOs and legacy politicians. She was an inaugural director on the muti-Emmy winning Vice News Tonight on HBO, which reconceived the nightly newscast format into an innovative, immersive documentary program. She’s produced long-form stories for CBS Sunday Morning and CBS This Morning and was an original producer on the CNN documentary series Black in America with Soledad O’Brien. She’s also a professor at NYU.
Shayla Harris
Director/Producer/Journalist
Shayla Harris
Director/Producer/Journalist
Shayla Harris is an independent director. She recently produced and directed Making Black America and The Black Church with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for PBS. She directed Let Noor Run, a documentary short for ESPN’s W. Studios and was a producer on Who Killed Malcolm X?, an Emmy-nominated doc series for Netflix. Before her documentary career, she spent a decade as a videojournalist at The New York Times and won numerous awards, including a National Magazine Award, a Peabody and an Emmy for Life, Interrupted, a documentary series about a young woman with cancer that she shot, edited and produced. Before that, she worked on award-winning documentaries for Dateline NBC, including as the producer of The Education of Ms. Groves, which won both an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and a Peabody. She is currently show-running and co-directing Gospel, a four-part series for PBS.
Becca Landsberry-Baker
Filmmaker
Becca Landsberry-Baker
Filmmaker
Rebecca Landsberry-Baker is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program grantee, Ford Foundation JustFilms grantee, and a 2022 NBC Original Voices Fellow. She is a 2022 Gotham Documentary Feature Lab Fellow and was selected to the Harvard Shorenstein News Leaders Fall 2022 cohort. She is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation and the executive director of the Indigenous Journalists Association. Landsberry-Baker made her directorial debut with the documentary feature, Bad Press, at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression. The film was also recognized with Best Documentary Feature from RiverRun International Film Festival, Dallas International Film Festival, Berkshire International Film Festival, and deadCenter Film Festival. It won Best Indigenous Feature Award at the 2023 Bend Film Festival. She and co-director Joe Peeler were awarded Best Directors at the 2023 Nevada City Film Festival.
Kimberley Ferdinando
Executive Producer, NBC News Studios
Kimberley Ferdinando
Executive Producer, NBC News Studios
Kimberley Ferdinando is a journalist and filmmaker with two decades of experience in nonfiction storytelling. As Executive Producer at NBC News Studios, she oversees documentary films and series as a hands-on creative producer throughout all stages of production. Kimberley’s most recent film, The Disappearance of Shere Hite (dir. Nicole Newnham) premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by IFC Films. She also produced the upcoming feature documentary, Between Life & Death (dir. Nick Capote), which will be released by MSNBC Films later this year. She is currently executive producing and showrunning a 4-part documentary series directed by Dawn Porter. Previously, Kimberley directed and produced documentaries, specials, nonfiction series, and live events with NBC’s Peacock Productions. She began her career in journalism as a radio news reporter at NPR-affiliate WFUV.
1:45-4:30PM
NBC Original Voices Live Pitch
Join us for a special NBC Original Voices live pitch event hosted by NBCU Academy, NBC News Studios, and IF/Then Shorts. Six teams selected from a national open call will pitch their archival and journalistically-driven short documentary works-in-progress for a chance to receive a $100,000 investment and co-production deal with NBC News Studios.
Industry Panelists: Sarah Amos (Conde Nast), Keesha Boyd (Comcast), Robert Chang (POV), Molly O’Brien (NBC News Studio), Paul Moakley (The New Yorker), Jihan Robinson (Disney), Alexandra Garcia (NYT), Amanda Spain (MSNBC)
The selected work-in-progress projects are below.
Cashing Out, Director: Matt Nadel, Producer: Luke Hodges. Cashing Out charts the rise and fall of the hundred-million-dollar industry that grew from the desperation of gay men who sold their life insurance policies for quick cash at the height of the AIDS crisis, and spotlights one of its earliest investors: the filmmaker’s father.
Free Joan Little, Director: Yoruba Richen, Producer: Christalyn Hampton. Free Joan Little examines the 1975 groundbreaking case of Joan Little who was the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.
Goodbye Baby, Director: Katya Berger, Producer: Maria Chiu. Thirty years after killing her two baby daughters, Paula Sims is on a quest to bring awareness to postpartum psychosis and change the law in the United States.
Love, Birds, Directors: Angel Morris and Elliott Kennerson. The story of how a breakthrough discovery of “lesbian seagulls” in the 1970s altered the course of American science, politics, and the LGBTQ+ movement.
Stingrays, Director: LeRon Lee, Producer: Yvonne Michelle Shirley. John L. Smith pulled the community together to revive the city’s dilapidated pool in an effort to create inclusion with a swim program that eventually became the first team of color to win a state championship in the US.
Women Walk Home, Director: Stephanie Andreou, Producer: Adrián Gutiérrez. Women Walk Home unearths a 50-year old, intentionally hidden, women-led movement in Cyprus as women’s movements are reigniting around the world.
To experience the DOC NYC PRO lineup, purchase an individual PRO Day Pass (via the Buy Ticket button) to hone in on a specific subject, or benefit from discounted pricing when you purchase Multi-Day Pass Packs to an assortment of topics.
DOC NYC PRO is co-presented by:
