OUR TEAM

 
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Michelle Lanier - Executive Producer

Michelle Lanier is a Documentary Doula, helping makers birth films. She has served on the faculty of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University since 2000. Michelle uses her background as an oral historian and folklorist to connect communities around personal narratives and cultural expression. She has traveled to Panama and Ghana to document African Diaspora funerary traditions, and her ethnographic work in a South Carolina Gullah community led to her role as a liaison to the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Growing up in a family that includes veterans of five American wars has inspired her current work in training students to collect veterans’ narratives through a Service-Learning course. In 2008, Michelle successfully advocated for legislation creating the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which she led as its founding executive director. As a seasoned public humanities and museum professional, in 2018, Michelle was named as the first African American director of all of North Carolina's 25 state-owned historic sites. Michelle is also a proud founding member, along with her daughter Eden, of a multi-media and multi-modal coalition called DOADA, the Documentarians of African Descent Alliance.



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Alexander Glustrom - Director/Editor

Alexander Glustrom has directed, shot, produced, and edited a wide variety of film projects ranging from commercial, music, and art videos that have reached hundreds of thousands online, to documentaries that have been featured in film festivals internationally. He has shot footage that has aired on major networks such as HBO, CNN, Fusion, NYtimes.com, Great Big Story and Democracy Now. He has also created a number of fundraising videos that have raised thousands of dollars for New Orleans youth programs. Alex's first film is the award winning documentary film, Big Charity, which he directed, shot, produced and edited. Big Charity won The Jury Award and Audience Award at The New Orleans Film Festival, was awarded 2015 Documentary of the Year by Louisiana Endowment For The Humanities, and was named the 5th Best Film Made in Louisiana in 2014 and the 4th “Best Katrina Film" by NOLA.com. Alex was awarded "Filmmaker of the Year" at the 2015 New Orleans Millennial Awards and named as one of New Orleans' "40 under 40 brightest and most innovative young people" by Gambit Magazine.

You can read his Director’s Statement here or visit his website here.



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Daniel Bennett - Producer

Daniel Bennett grew up in Mossville, Louisiana, the son of Delma and Christine Bennett, longtime Mossville residents and environmental activists. Daniel brings a crucial perspective to the project, helping to ensure that the story is being told accurately and in the spirit of the place and people who live there.  Daniel has years of experience as a photographer, videographer and storyteller with his company, Snapshots by D. Bennett Photography. He has a degree from McNeese State University.



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Katie Mathews - Producer

Katie Mathews is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and researcher whose work explores the intersection of identity and the places and spaces we call home. She is currently directing Roleplay, a feature documentary about campus rape culture. Most recently, Katie produced and story edited Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, a feature documentary about environmental racism currently touring festivals. She was a 2018 Fellow in the UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab, a 2018 Fellow in the inaugural Southern Producer’s Lab and an Artist in Residence at A Studio in the Woods for their Adaptations Residency.

Prior to her work in film, Katie worked as an anthropologist and ethnographer at global design firm IDEO, using individual stories to inspire new systems in education and the public sector. Katie holds a BA in Communications from Northwestern University and is currently an MFA student at Hunter College's Integrated Media Arts Program.

You can visit her website here.


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Catherine Rierson - Producer

Catherine Rierson is an award-winning filmmaker based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Working namely as a creative producer of documentary film, her work is journalistic and observational, examining the relationships between identity, sense of place, and public policy. She recently produced Mossville: When Great Trees Fall and is currently story producing Dir. Dara Kell’s 40 Days (2020), a feature-length Ford Foundation documentary about poverty and the people fighting to end it. In 2018, Catherine worked as the local producer of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown “Cajun Mardi Gras”, as well as producer of several narrative shorts – including Dir. Nick Singer’s Stella for Star and Dir. Andre Rangiah’s Quiet and Clear. Prior to this, she produced the feature-length documentaries, Sick to Death (Dir. Maggie Hadleigh-West, 2017), which was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Big Charity (Dir. Alex Glustrom, 2015), which won the New Orleans Film Festival’s Jury Award and Audience Award, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Documentary Film Award, and many other accolades.

With an educational background in reporting and writing, Catherine holds a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been a student of journalism at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), and has completed postgraduate coursework at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

You can visit her website here.


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Lyntoria Newton - Impact Producer

Lyntoria Newton is an independent documentary filmmaker and creative producer based in Oakland, California. Lyn has produced content for outlets such as The Boston Globe, PBA30, Google, The University of Michigan, and others. Her work has shown at festivals across the U.S and internationally. She holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University where she completed her thesis film, Hey Little Black Girl The short essay film explores black girlhood through the coming of age stories of four little black girls living in the SF Bay Area (Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, 2019). With support from the Ford Foundation, she served as producer of Basic Able, a satirical podcast devoted to disrupting ableist representations of disability. She is currently the Associate Producer on a forthcoming feature documentary, River City Drumbeat which focuses on a drum corp community in Lousiville, KY. Lyn is committed to using non-fiction media as a platform for social activism and awareness. She is specifically interested in sharing the narratives of historically marginalized people in her work. Lyntoria Newton is a proud Southern native and takes the south with her wherever goes.