Director/Producer: Vera Wagman has directed short films including Interlude (Hypnotic Films, Sundance Channel), High Noon (PBS’ “Are We On”) and Jeopardy, a documentary short about an at-risk youth program in Los Angeles where the students train as boxers and dancers. Vera started her career as a dancer with company credits including David Storey/NY and Pennsylvania Dance Theatre where she worked with such innovative choreographers as Ohad Naharin, Kathryn Posin and Nina Weiner. She has produced arts events for Santa Monica's Cultural Affairs Division and most recently, choreographed MARCH, an original play produced by the LGBT Center and Playwright's Arena in Los Angeles.
Executive Producer: Russell Rothberg is a Consulting Producer for the upcoming series, The Offer, on Paramount+ and was Co-Executive Producer on Foundation, an upcoming series for Apple TV. He directed and produced his first comedy short, Happy Happy Bang Bang, co-produced by Vera Wagman, which screened at the 2018 Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival. As Executive VP, Drama Development at Universal Television, Russell developed several series including Bates Motel, The Path, Chicago Fire, Shades of Blue and Emerald City. He also served as VP of Current Programming for Fox Broadcasting Company where he oversaw 24, House, Bones, American Dad and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Russell started his career as an actor-writer-director with an original play, Life After Death, at the Intar Theatre in NYC.
Executive Producer: Roberta Grossman is an award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice. She is the writer, producer, director of Who Will Write Our History, co-produced by Arte and NDR. In 2018, Roberta co-directed and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Seeing Allred which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. She directed Above and Beyond (2014), about the American–Jewish WWII pilots who volunteered to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. Roberta also produced the NEH supported Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning, which aired on PBS/American Masters. Her 2008 film, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, was shortlisted for an Academy Award, nominated for a Primetime Emmy and won the audience award at 13 Jewish film festivals.
Co-Director/Director of Photography: Scott Whitham is in post-production on Burden of Memory, a documentary about a 97 year-old B-17 pilot and the remarkable life he has lived. He has also directed an award-winning short documentary about Zion Harvey, a young boy who received the worlds first pediatric dual hand transplant. Plans are underway to expand the project into a feature length film. Scott has spent the last 25 years working with a wide range of clients in the commercial industry and has also created short form programming for National Geographic, A&E Network, AT&T and Comcast.
Editor: Esther Shubinski's sensitivity and approach to storytelling are shaped by her French and Native American background. Her most recent feature documentary, Sundays, premiered in competition at the 2020 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. She edited two episodes of the upcoming YouTube Originals series, Defying Gravity: The Untold Story of Women’s Gymnastics, directed by two time Oscar-nominee, Lucy Walker. Esther’s documentary, Out of Love, a festival favorite, premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival to critical acclaim. She edited The Art of Observing Life, a documentary by her mentor and veteran Russian filmmaker, Marina Goldovskaya, which premiered at IDFA. Esther received her BA from UC Berkeley and holds an MFA in Film Production & Directing at UCLA, where she has taught Documentary Production.
Joy Ngiaw is a Chinese-Malaysian film composer based in Los Angeles. Recent projects include Walt Disney Animation Studios Jing Hua, VR-animated A Kite's Tale, and Netflix' June and Kopi. Her score for Fish Head was awarded Best Original Score at the 2020 Asians On Film Festival. Her music can be heard in critically acclaimed tv shows including Legion (FX), Cobra Kai (Netflix), The Night Of (HBO) and feature films including Impractical Jokers: The Movie (WarnerMedia) and Voyeur (Netflix). Joy's concert music has been performed by the Boston Pops, Helix Collective and the Valencia Symphony Orchestra.
Story Consultant: Sophie Sartain is the Director and Producer of the Netflix Original Documentary, Seeing Allred, which premiered in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. She wrote, directed, produced the documentary, Mimi and Dona, which aired nationally on PBS/Independent Lens in 2015. Sophie's other credits include the 2014 documentary, Above and Beyond (writer), produced by Nancy Spielberg and winner of the audience award at more than twenty film festivals; the 2012 documentary Hava Nagila (The Movie)(writer/producer), and the Emmy-nominated 2008 film Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senseh (writer/co-producer).
French Historian/Project Advisor: Laure Guilbert holds a Ph.D from the European University Institute of Florence and is the author of Danser avec le IIIe Reich. Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme (Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern Dancers under Nazism Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2000, André Versaille Editeur, 2011). From 2002 to 2018, she was the Chief Editor for dance books of the Paris National Opera. In 2015 and 2016, Laure was a Marie Curie visiting fellow at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (Axel Springer Endowed Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Exile and Migration), and at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin (Franco-German Research Centre for Social Sciences). She is currently research her second book which is on the exile of the German-speaking choreographic world under Nazism – a project that has led her to many archives in Europe, Australia and as a Resident Fellow at New York University's Center for Ballet and the Arts. Laure was most recently a Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.