Juan Carlos Castañeda is a writer, director and cinematographer who has worked around the world for the past 20 years. His work has been broadcast nationally and internationally and has screened widely at International film festivals. Juan Carlos holds a Bachelors in Multimedia Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Australia, and a Masters in Fine Arts in Film Production from Chapman University, Los Angeles, California. Juan is one of the co-founders of Human Pictures, a production company dedicated to media creation for social change. His involvement with Human Pictures has allowed Juan to create a voice against the injustices of humanity and promote Human Transformation in the work he does.
Marcel Cabrera is a seasoned cinematographer, director and editor whose work encompasses feature length to short form documentary and narrative films. As the cinematographer for Serenade for Haiti (Serenad pou Ayiti), Marcel directed the photography for the entire seven-year production in Haiti. He also served as a professor of cinematography at the Ciné Institute, in Jacmel, Haiti. A native of France, Marcel was the cinematographer of the award-winning OBP feature film production, Music Makes A City, as well as for the documentary features: Soul Searching: the Journey of Thomas Merton (2006); Guys 'N Divas: Battle of the High School Musicals (2009) and the narrative features: The Grey (2004); Death Tunnel (2005); Paper Cut (2004); and Assisted Living (2003). He directed the photography of the shorts: The White Box (2011); The Green Building (2009); At the End of the Day (2007); and Heavens Above (2003). His editing credits include: Living Lightly (2007) and From the Garden (2008).
When not teaching and filming in Haiti, Marcel has homes in France, Louisville, Kentucky, and Sausalito, California.
Gina has been a Producer, Director and Editor in San Francisco for almost twenty years. In 1998 she began working with the acclaimed filmmaker Les Blank on All In This Tea, which she co-produced, co-directed, and edited, and which had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, screened in over 40 festivals world wide, and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel. She most recently completed another collaboration with Les Blank called How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock in Normandy, which had its North American debut at the 2014 Telluride Film Festival.
Past documentary highlights include On Wayang: My Life With Shadows, which she co-produced, co-directed and edited and which premiered at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, and Homegrown Bounty, which she produced and directed for the KQED series SPARK. Gina also edited Frank Green’s Counting Sheep, about the endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, which aired on KQED’s Truly California series and won a Northern California Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2006; Karina Epperlein’s Phoenix Dance, about a dancer who returns to the stage after losing a leg to cancer, which won San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short in 2006; Of Wind and Waves: The Life of Woody Brown, about the pioneering big wave surfer Woody Brown, which was nominated for a Northern California Emmy for Best Documentary in 2006; and Kevin White’s A Land Between Rivers, a one-hour documentary about the history of California’s Central Valley for PBS, which won a CINE Golden Eagle Award for Excellence in Film and Television in 2007.
Jerome Hiler began his creative life as a painter and was a student of Natalia Pohrebinska at Pratt Institute. Within a few years, Mr. Hiler became enthralled with the visual and poetic possibilities of 16mm experimental film. This encounter completely changed the focus of his creative energies and led to decades of work in the world of personal, independent film. He has shown his films at London’s LUX film series, the San Francisco Film Festival, many seasons at the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival and was selected by the Whitney Museum of American Art to participate in the 2012 Biennial for a week of screenings. Throughout his career, Mr. Hiler has also worked on feature films and documentaries. In the documentary field, he has worked either as photographer, editor or director and, occasionally, all three. Mr. Hiler also works in the field of stained glass, which he considers a sister-art to film. He has also presented slide lectures on medieval glass, culled from his extensive collection of photographs on the subject, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Princeton University and The Art Gallery of Toronto. Mr. Hiler brought his love of classical music together with film in working as co-director on Music Makes A City.
Philip Wilder is a classical music industry specialist and independent producer whose distinguished career has encompassed 24 years of experience as an artistic programmer, educator, administrator, marketer, PR consultant, recording producer, and musician in the not-for-profit and corporate classical music industry. Philip pioneering career in the arts has celebrated the intersection of classical music across borders, genres and platforms, including launching the first ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas conducting an international orchestra comprised of musicians delivering their performances across YouTube’s digital platform.
For Owsley Brown Presents, Philip advised on the distribution of the Music Makes A City, guiding its reception to British and European audiences, where the film won the Gramophone Award best Documentary DVD/Documentary in 2012. He is also a producer for OBP of new media content for Music Makes A City NOW, the PBS documentary film and arts advocacy project. Philip recently served as the founding artistic and executive director of Sing With Haiti, a not-for-profit organization supporting the rebuilding of the Holy Trinity Music School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the subject of OBP's soon-to-be released Serenade for Haiti (Serenad pou Ayiti). Philip recently returned to San Francisco, where he began his professional career as a member of the internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble Chanticleer, where he served as artistic administrator, assistant music director and founding director of education. He is currently the Executive Director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
Philip is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy,the Eastman School of Music (Bachelor of Music in organ performance), and the DeVos Institute for Arts Management.
Nathaniel Dorsky, born in New York City in 1943, is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1963. He has resided in San Francisco since 1971.
"In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry." - Nathaniel Dorsky
In his book Devotional Cinema (2003), Dorsky writes of the long-standing link between art and health as well as the transformative potential of watching film. He also writes of the limitations of film when its vision is subservient to a theme or representative of language description, which can describe a world but does not actually see it.
Dorsky was a visiting instructor at Princeton University in 2008 and he has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship 1997 and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, and one from the LEF Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the California Arts Council. He has presented films at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Filmoteca Española, Madrid, the Prague Film Archive, the Vienna Film Museum, the Pacific Film Archive, the Harvard Film Archive, Princeton University, Yale University, and frequently exhibits new work at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde and the Wavelengths program of the Toronto International Film Festival. In spring 2012 Dorsky took actively part in the three month exposition of Whitney Biennial.
Dorsky’s films are available only as 16mm film prints and are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Light Cone in Paris. Prints of stills from his films are available at the Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco.
Guetty Felin, Filmmaker
Guetty Felin is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and producer of both documentaries and narrative films. A native of Haiti, she grew up in New York and came of age cinematically in Paris, France while pursuing graduate studies in cinema. She went to work in production and distribution of documentary films and directed her first documentary Hal Singer Keep the Music Going, portrait of the father of rhythm and blues Hal "Cornbread" Singer.
In the fall of of 2003 Guetty moved to Haiti where she was head programmer for Festival Film Jacmel and director of the first cinema workshops; which planted the seeds for the creation of Cine Institute, Haiti's only film school on the southeastern coast of the island. Guetty’s first narrative feature-length Ayiti Mon Amour had its international premiere at TIFF16, and was Haiti's very first submission for the Foreign Language Oscar. Guetty Felin cofounded BelleMoon Productions with Hervé Cohen. https://www.bellemoonproductions.com
Robin Burke has produced, directed and collaborated on film and theatre projects for more than 30 years. Robin produced Owsley Brown Presents' Music Makes A City (2010) and Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles (2002), and was an early contributor to Serenade for Haiti (Serenad pou Ayiti). Robin’s directorial debut, Living Lightly (2007), continues to inspire audiences at festivals, on PBS and as a featured selection of the Gaiam catalogue. Interested in youth advocacy and sustainable practices, Robin produced and directed the shorts: Jennifer Lawrence: Bellewood Cares (2012); The Green Building (2009-present); and From the Garden (2008). She also produced the 1991 acclaimed narrative short Dangerous Music (Directed by Draper Shreeve).
Robin served as co-chair for Youth Engaging Compassion: A Dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama (2013). She continues studying at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute Eastern Mennonite University and is a certified mediator and restorative justice facilitator. Currently, Robin is the Director of Special Projects for YouthBuild Louisville, overseeing the design and build of the green campus and Smoketown Streetscape while consulting on the 2016 documentary feature film Butterfly Trees (Directed by Kay Milam).
Robin graduated from New England College with degrees in Philosophy and Political Science. She keeps time between Louisville and her farm in Kentucky.
Mariah Parker is an accomplished artist with dual careers in graphic design and music. Mariah’s design company, MettaGraphics, combines her deep commitment to helping her clients realize their vision with over 25 years graphic design experience in branding, packaging, collateral material and website development. She has worked with national clients as well as design agencies including Landor and Primo Angeli.
While completing her degree in music at UC Santa Cruz, Mariah worked with ethnomusicologist Fred Lieberman and drummer Mickey Hart on the “Planet Drum” project and became fascinated with the possibilities of bridging musical concepts from different traditions. She has performed her original compositions in festivals in the US and Europe. A gifted composer and band leader, she released her first solo recording of her compositions, “Sangria,” in 2009. Her second release, “Into Latin Jazz Live in Concert” spent 16 weeks on the National Jazzweek Airplay chart, reaching #32. Both releases received extensive airplay and critical acclaim worldwide. She is currently developing music for a short documentary film.