Margaret Byrne, Director / Producer / Cinematographer, directed and produced Raising Bertie (POV 2017), a feature documentary following the lives of three African American boys growing up in rural North Carolina. She has worked as a cinematographer on over a dozen films including Surge (2020), Waging Change (2019), All the Queen’s Horses (2017), and American Promise (2014). She was previously a creative director at Universal Music and directed live concerts and music videos for artists such as Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige. In 2005, Byrne produced and edited the live series that launched MTV across Africa. Byrne is an adjunct professor at Columbia College and College of DuPage. She is the founder of Beti Films, an all-women film collective based in Chicago.
Filmmakers
Leslie Norville, Executive Producer, is an award-winning producer who champions diverse voices and underrepresented stories through work that pushes boundaries, challenges limited beliefs, demands creative excellence and inspires humanity. Leslie Norville’s projects include: Oscar-nominated and Emmy-Award- winning director Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave for National Geographic, Margaret Byrne’s Any Given Day, A Ballerina’s Tale, a documentary about Misty Copeland, the first African American female principal dancer at New York’s American Ballet Theatre (Best Documentary by the African American Film Critics Association and released by Sundance Selects), Walk Good for the CBC, Finding the Funk for VH1 (official at the 2013 SXSW Film Festival), Disdain the Mundane (ESPN 30 FOR 30 documentary short featuring legendary NY Knick, Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier), Brooklyn Boheme (starring Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Rosie Perez), and Minustah Vole Kabrit (premiered at IDFA). Leslie is a 2017 Sundance Creative Documentary Producing Fellow and 2018 Telefilm Talent to Watch recipient.
Jane Wells, Executive Producer, is an Emmy-award nominated filmmaker, best known for producing and directing TRICKED, a documentary about sex trafficking in the USA, and for producing the groundbreaking documentary feature The Devil Came on Horseback, about the genocide in Darfur. As the founder of 3 Generations, a 501(c)3 not for profit organization whose mission is to tell the stories of survivors of human rights abuses, she has written, produced and directed over 50 short films and videos. Her films have been selected by film festivals including Sundance, AFI/Silverdocs, Hotdocs, Tribeca, Montclair, Nashville, Thessaloniki, Aspen Shorts Fest, Red Nation and The American Indian Film Festival. In addition her documentary credits include the features Pot Luck: The Altered State of Colorado about leglization of cannabis, A Different American Dream about environmental genocide on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and Lost In Lebanon about the Syrian refugee crisis. Her award-winning shorts A System of Justice, Native Silence, Go Debbie and most recently Preserving The Holocaust have played widely on the festival circuit.
Latesha Dickerson, Associate Producer / Impact Producer, is an independent filmmaker currently working on her first documentary project Teaching While Black which explores the lives of Black teachers in Chicago’s public schools. She is a 2017 Kartemquin Films Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow and a 2019 recipient of Kartemquin Films’ Accelerator Fund grant. She served as an impact coordinator for the short documentary ‘63 Boycott (Kartemquin Films). Latesha is a former educator with over twenty years of experience working in and with Chicago’s public schools. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Chicago State University and a Masters of Education in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Liz Kaar, Editor, has worked closely with Kartemquin Films, Chicago’s documentary powerhouse, for over a decade. Her editing projects have been honored with a variety of award recognition, including short-listed for an Academy Award®, nominated for Emmy® and IDA awards, and winner of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Award. She recently edited SXSW-premiering documentary The Dilemma of Desire and festival-favorite ‘63 Boycott. She co-directed and edited Hard Earned, a six-part television series for Al Jazeera America about people living on low wages across the United States.
Eric Kuhn, Composer, is a multi-instrumentalist composer, performer and producer based in Detroit, MI. His work for film includes documentary features Raising Bertie, While I Breathe I Hope, and The Immortalists; as well as a piece for the Oscar nominee documentary Crip Camp. He also composes for television, advertising, dance and theater. He is a founding member of musical groups The Light Switches, Eric and Erica and Silian Rail; and records and performs with numerous artists including Sean Hayes, May Erlewine, Woman Believer and The Kickstand Band.
Rory McFadden, Associate Editor, is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s film program and has worked with Kartemquin Films and Meridian Hill Pictures. She served as outreach coordinator for Raising Bertie (2017) and Minding the Gap (2018), and co-edited the award winning documentary short, “Life in Strides” (2017). She previously worked as a nurse in critical care and community health, and later in research where she interviewed patients’ family members and healthcare providers about their experiences of stress and trauma in Intensive Care Units. Inspired by their powerful stories, she now works to impact social change through documentaries.
Shuling Yong, Sound, is a Singapore-born, Chicago-based documentary filmmaker, sound mixer and cinematographer with a passion for social change. She has worked on films like Becoming (2020, dir. Nadia Hallgren), Radical Grace (2015, dir. Rebecca Parrish), In The Game (2015, dir. Maria Finitzo), The Feeling of Being Watched (dir. Assia Boundaoui), America To Me (2018, dir. Steve James), and In Time To Come (2017, dir. Tan Pin Pin). Her first feature-length documentary, Unteachable, won the Audience Choice Award at Singapore International Film Festival.