Catherine Gund – Producer/Director

Founder of Aubin Pictures, Gund is an Emmy-nominated producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health, and the environment. Gund’s most recent projects include: Dispatches from Cleveland, a five-chapter documentary that looks at the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice; and Chavela, a documentary about the life of the iconic Latin-American gender-bending diva, Chavela Vargas. her past films include America, Born to Fly, What’s On Your Plate?, A Touch of Greatness, Motherland Afghanistan, Making Grace, On Hostile Ground, and Hallelujah! Ron Athey, which have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums, and schools; on PBS the Discovery Channel, Sundance Channel, Netflix, and Amazon.

Hannah Shepard studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College and received master’s degrees from the National University of Ireland and Fordham, where she was a teaching fellow and a Loomie Prize winner. Engaging with history, the arts, and social justice, Hannah is drawn to projects that cross boundaries. She has worked as a researcher, educator, and script reader with institutions including the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Museum of the City of New York, The Public Theater and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. As an archival researcher and producer, Hannah has worked with filmmakers including Rebecca Miller, Nancy Buirski, and Catherine Gund. In 2019 she was nominated for the FOCAL Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year Award. Her fiction has been published by W.W. Norton, Fiction Southeast, and Spout Press.

Karen Song – Cinematographer

Karen B. Song is a filmmaker who has worked as a director, producer, writer, DP/cameraperson, editor and actor. Observing and conversing on the human condition through documentary and narrative storytelling, her subjects have taken her across the globe as well as deep into her own family history. Most recently she shared DP/Cameraperson duties on the documentary feature film Aggie, which premiered at Sundance 2020. She filmed Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year 2019 interviews, which included Megan Rapinoe, Ava Duvernay and Tori Burch. Currently she is writing a narrative feature film about a female assassin as an allegory for the feminine principles of transformation and creation, as well as Asian-American invisibility; and as director & producer, completing post on Sundays at Café Tabac, a documentary feature film about early ‘90s lesbian culture, told through the story of an era-defining NYC East Village nightlife destination, named in the title. She co-hosts the Sundays at Café Tabac podcast—an intergenerational first-person LGBTQ oral-history project of “coming out” stories; and is contributing co-host of Swell Season Surf Radio, a podcast about surf culture in New York and beyond, where she focuses on diversity and environmental issues.

More about Karen at www.singasongproductions.com

Liza Jessie Peterson – Poet/Playwright/Artivist

Liza is an artivist; an actress, playwright, poet, author and youth advocate who has been steadfast in her commitment to incarcerated populations both professionally and artistically for over two decades. Her critically acclaimed one woman show, The Peculiar Patriot, was featured at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and was recently recorded for Audible. Her play will also be featured at The Pulitzer Center’s fall 2020 program. A documentary is in production about her performance at  the notorious Angola Penitentiary where she performed the play in front of 700 inmates and was live streamed throughout the entire prison. The Peculiar Patriot premiered at the National Black Theater in Harlem, followed by Arts Emerson (Boston) and Woolly Mammoth (D.C.) and was nominated for a Drama Desk award in 2019.  The Peculiar Patriot received a generous grant from Agnes Gund’s prestigious Art for Justice Fund. During the early years of this play’s uncanny trajectory and true to her artivist nature, Liza performed The Peculiar Patriot in over 35 penitentiaries across the country in a self-funded prison tour spanning the course of four years.

Visit her website at www.lizajessiep.com