The Filmmakers
Julia R. Mintz, Writer / Director / Producer
Julia Mintz is a writer, producer and director whose work focuses on narratives of bravery and resistance against unimaginable odds. She has been on the producing team for films that have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards, have premiered at Cannes, Sundance and TriBeCa, and won Emmy, Peabody and festival awards. Her films can be seen on HBO, PBS, American Masters, NETFLIX and Amazon. Mintz has worked on many of the country’s most celebrated documentary films. Recent projects include Mr. SOUL!, which premiered at TriBeCa and was short-listed for an Academy Award®. She co-produced Joe Papp in Five Acts and post-produced Get Me Roger Stone, both premiered at TriBeCa. Mintz produced the Emmy-nominated California State of Mind, and post-produced Soundtrack for a Revolution, short-listed for an Academy Award® Best Documentary, premiered at Cannes, nominated for Writers Guild; Nanking, short-listed for Academy Award® which won Peabody®, Emmy®, and Editorial Award at Sundance; and Love Free or Die: Story of Bishop Gene Robinson, winner Sundance Jurors Choice. Additional projects include Muscle Shoals, premiered Sundance; Equity, premiered Sundance; Bing Crosby Rediscovered; Life and Times of Frida Kahlo, Emmy® nominee; and Cyndi Lauper: Still So Unusual. Julia has also produced programming for Discovery, NASA, National Geographic, NHK and SONY. Mintz's upcoming feature documentary film FOUR WINTERS is slated for theatrical release in Fall 2022.
Peter Heady, Editor
Peter has worked with many of the industries greatest documentary film directors including: Errol Morris Academy Award winning, Fog Of War, Sundance Film Festival Award winner Capturing The Friedmans by Andrew Jarecki. Academy Award® nominated Tupac Resurrection by Lauren Lazin, John Sales’ Casa De Los Babies, Spike Lee’s Jim Brown All American, Geodfrey Reggio’s Naqoyaqatsi, Pieces Of April by Peter Hedges, and Ken Burn’s documentary films including the multi-part series: The War, Baseball, The West, Lewis and Clark and National Parks. Peter is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology. A twenty-year professional with experience in all aspects of film and post-production, Peter has worked extensively as both a colorist and editor, lending a unique perspective to his finishing work. Peter is also a frequent speaker on topics of interest to the larger filmmaking community at film festivals, technical conferences and roundtable discussions around the country.
Tricia Reidy, Story Editor
Reidy has worked as a documentary editor for twenty years. She collaborated on twelve programs with Ken Burns including episodes of Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, and Frank Lloyd Wright. She has received an American Cinema Editors nomination for The Civil War, an Emmy® Award nomination for best editing for Frank Lloyd Wright, for which she also received a Peabody Award, and has been screened at The Sundance Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. She edited Judith Helfand’s A Healthy Baby Girl, broadcast as part of the PBS series POV. The film was an official Sundance Film Festival selection and winner of a Peabody Award.
Dan Sturman, Producer
Dan wrote and directed the Academy Award nominated Soundtrack For a Revolution, and Sundance Award-winning documentary film Nanking, and produced the Academy Award®-winning documentary Twin Towers. Between 2001 and 2003, Sturman produced three seasons of the NBC documentary series Crime and Punishment. He has reported and produced for ABC News, CBS News, and the BBC while based in Los Angeles; for Reuters and NBC News while based in London; and for ABC News 20/20 in New York. In 1992, Sturman was the associate producer of another Academy Award®-winning documentary, A Time For Justice. The film, produced by Charles Guggenheim, commemorates the lives of the men, women, and children who were killed during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Sturman is currently in production on a feature length documentary about child actors. Sturman graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University.
Timothy A. Kuper, Editor
A graduate of Ithaca College's Park School of Communications where he studied Film, Photography, and Visual Arts. Tim has edited numerous documentary and narrative short films that have received awards at film festivals like the NYC Chain Film Festival and Asbury Park Film Festival. He has worked as an assistant editor on feature length projects such as MSNBC's This Happened series. Tim joined New Moon films editing team as an Assistant Editor and as a field archival researcher in Eastern Europe. In addition to his editorial work, Tim has collaborated and worked in many facets of the Jewish Partisans film and the production company.
Kit Marshall, Photographer & Verite Cinematographer
Kit Marshall is a photographer trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, The Art Institute of Chicago and the International Center of Photography in NYC. She also studied anthropology and visual ethnography at RISD and The New School for Social Research. Kit began her career as a photojournalist and then worked her way into visual public relations in both print and person. Kit worked for Very Special Arts New England as a photographer, public relations coordinator and a visiting artist in programs and institutions scattered across the East Coast. Kit is currently an Art Specialist, who has been working in the industry and in education for over 30 years.
Eva Haller, Executive Producer
Eva is a devoted activist in service of social justice for all. At 13 years old, Eva joined her older brother Janos in the underground Hungarian resistance. Her first activism experience was helping to make and distribute anti-Hitler leaflets. When German forces occupied her city, 14-year-old Eva managed to convince a Nazi officer that she was too young and too beautiful to die and to let her escape. Her older brother had previously escaped and joined the armed Jewish resistance. Janos was killed in the fourth winter when his partisan brigade was ambushed by Nazi soldiers and collaborators. Eva's extensive professional service includes Board Chair of Free the Children, Trustee of UC Santa Barbara, Co-Founder and President of the Campaign Communications Institute of America, Visiting Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, Board Member of Counterpart International, Sing for Hope and Creative Visions.
Peter Fine, Producer
Peter Fine is a real estate entrepreneur who co-founded Atlantic Development Group in 1995. As the Chief Executive Officer of Atlantic and its successor company, Bolivar Development, LLC. He has built over 12,000 units of housing in over 105 different projects and in excess of 400,000 square feet of retail and education space in New York City. He is the Managing Member of companies that own over 7,000 units of housing in New York City with a value of over $2 billion. As a life long New Yorker who grew up in public housing and educated in public schools Mr. Fine has a passion for improving access to quality education, for low-income and working class New Yorkers. Mr. Fine’s companies are currently in the ground or designing 7 charter schools slated for delivery in 2023 and 2024. Mr. Fine pursued a PhD in Sociology from New York University. After graduate school he worked as a social worker on the Lower East Side working primarily with homeless populations before starting his own business in 1991. This educational and professional background has led to a variety of artistic and philanthropic pursuits including producing 5 Broadway Plays and 3 films. One of the plays In The Heights earned Mr. Fine a Tony Award for Best Producer in 2008. Mr. Fine is on the board of a variety of charitable organizations and is currently at work on creating a museum in the Ukraine dedicated to preserving the memory of over 200 years of Jewish life in Meziritch his family’s ancestral village.
Emily Mandelstam, Executive Producer
Emily is devoted to education, specifically increasing excellence and expanding opportunities. She has been a member of the national advisory board of Appalshop (a media and arts organization in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky); president of the advisory board at Bronx Lab School (an under-resourced public high school in New York City); and president of the board of trustees at Trinity School (a private K-12 school in NYC). A writer by trade and passion, Emily has plied her craft in varied settings: as a newspaper reporter (and photographer) in South Africa during apartheid; as a newspaper reporter in NYC; and as a writer, researcher, and editor at various civil-rights and pro-immigration organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (which won Brown v. Board of Education) and the New York Association for New Americans (a Jewish refugee-resettlement agency). Emily has also been an advisor to “No Job for a Woman” (a documentary about female journalists during World War II); a consultant to the Library of America (a non-profit publisher); and a member of the New York State Supreme Court Departmental Disciplinary Committee (the panel that rules on misconduct charges brought against attorneys). Emily holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University; an M.Sc. in Journalism from Columbia University; and an M.Phil. in Criminology from the University of Cambridge (England).
Marylyn Dintenfass, Executive Producer
Marylyn is an internationally known artist, whose work is found in major public collections in Denmark, England,France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Among the institutions that have acquired her work are; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Dintenfass has twice been a MacDowell Fellow and has received both an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and two Project Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Marylyn was awarded the Silver Medal at the First International, Mino, Japan, and The Ravenna Prize at the 45th Faenza International in Italy. Books on her work include the monograph Marylyn Dintenfass: Paintings written by Lilly Wei [Hudson Hills Press, 2007], Marylyn Dintenfass: Parallel Park written by Aliza Edelman [Hard Press Editions, 2011] and Marylyn Dintenfass: Drop Dead Gorgeous written by Scott Indrisek [Driscoll Babcock Galleries 2013].
Dr. David Milch, Executive Producer
David, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, Stanford, and Amherst College, moved to New York City after completing his research to pursue his business career. He was principal of Bermil Industries, a corporation controlled by the Milch Family, until 1989, when he began to dedicate his time to venture investments in technology and the life sciences. He is Founder and Vice Chairman of Allium Medical, a fully integrated publicly listed medical device company in Israel. Dr. Milch has a long history supporting the arts, investing in and producing live theatrical performances including Avenue Q, In The Heights, West Side Story, and Finian’s Rainbow, for which he received a Best Musical Revival Tony Award nomination as producer in 2009. He is presently involved with three documentaries, and recently completed principal cinematography for a feature film. He is also an active philanthropist, participating in and funding charitable organizations such as ADL, Middle East Forum, The American-Israel Friendship League, The New Group, Demos, The Metropolitan Foundation, Jazz Foundation of America, Sophie Gerson Healthy Youth and The Brotherhood-SisterSol via The Dr. David M. Milch Foundation and its Ars Veritas initiative, “Arts for Social Impact.”
Ellen Steiner, Co–Producer
Ellen founded and has managed Matterhorn Partners, a fund-of-funds, for the past twenty-three years, after a career in institutional corporate bond sales at Dillon Read and Kidder Peabody. Ellen began her career as a corporate lawyer at Sidley Austin. For the past ten years, Ellen has served on the Advisory Board of the Tufts University Entrepreneurship Center. In addition, Ellen was a member of the Young Leadership Board of AIPAC. She has been involved with fundraising arms of Northwestern and Duke Universities, her children’s alma maters. Ellen graduated from the New York University School of Law and Tufts University.
Lee Feldscher, Co-Producer
Lee Feldscher, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania holds BA degrees in Astronomy, Physics and Natural Science. Lee worked as a physicist at Penn for years focusing his research in particle physics, and was on the teams of two groundbreaking experiments; discovering the Z particle, and neutrinos from a source outside of our solar system. Both experiments received Nobel prizes. Lee has built advanced telescopes on mountain tops in Maui and the Canary Islands, He also worked on filming teams that covered Space Shuttle launches at NASA’s Kennedy Center in Florida, with the Jewish Partisans director Julia Mintz. Lee has been involved with the Jewish Partisans film from its earliest conception. As one of the films producers Lee has contributed on technical and computer workflow, helped manage quarterly screenings and fundraising events and other outreach initiatives. He also traveled to the forests in Eastern Europe where the Jewish Partisans fought, filming the remains of their Semblance’s (hand dug underground bunkers), and sites of the Partisans missions. He has also spent time combing through the libraries and archives in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland in search of footage, photographs and maps for inclusion in the film. Lee previously ran the IT departments of two major post production film studios in NYC, The Tapehouse Editorial companies and Broadway Video. In those roles Lee worked supporting the editors and colorists on many films and TV shows, wrote custom code to support the editing studios, and played a central role in sub-titling the Miramax Classic films. After Years in NYC Lee opened his own company based in Massachusetts, Northampton IT, a computer consulting firm.
Carla Singer, Executive Producer
Ms. Singer has directed, written, and produced for BBC Television in London, England, CTV and CITY-TV in Canada, and Israel Television in Jerusalem. She has served on the boards of the American Jewish Committee and Americans for Peace Now. She is on the board of the Makhanga Academy in Kenya and is a member of the Women’s Forum of New York and the International Women’s Forum. Carla Singer is the President and Executive Producer of Carla Singer Productions, an independent production company that has produced over 30 television movies as well as documentaries and reality series. Ms. Singer is a former Vice President of Drama Programming for CBS Television. Under her tenure, the extremely successful “Murder She Wrote” was developed and produced as well as successful series such as “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” and “The Equalizer”. For TNT the company executive produced “The Portrait” starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall, and “Forgotten Prisoners: The Amnesty Files”. At TBS Ms. Singer produced a documentary “The Black West” which was nominated for a Cable Ace award. She also produced “A Refusenik’s Diary” for PBS for which she received an Emmy Award.
Noël Raley, Associate Producer
Noël is a social justice and human rights advocate who has committed her work to racial equity, family and child advocacy, education access, and reproductive health and justice. She received her JD from NYU School of Law after graduating magna cum laude from SUNY at Geneseo. She was a staff attorney fellow at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, and went on to direct an educational advocacy project for Family Court-involved youth in Brooklyn at Advocates for Children of NY. As an adjunct professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, she taught a course on the injustice of the school-to-prison pipeline and volunteered at Racial Equity and Learning, an anti-racist coalition in local schools. Noël also facilitated support groups for MotherWoman, an organization whose mission is supporting the resilience and empowerment of women suffering from post-partum depression. She took on the role of Communications Director at Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Raley served as President and board member of Friends of Children, a child and family advocacy organization. As a producer at New Moon Films, she has worked on Four Winters and A Survivor's Story.
Andrea Miller, Associate Producer
Andrea Miller, Folium Films LLC, is an independent producer in New York City and a former partner in the companies Anthos Media and Saltmill LLC. As a producer of documentaries, Andrea produced Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, which aired on American Masters in 2018; Take My Nose Please (a top 25 film of 2017) and Particle Fever (National Academy of Science, Du Pont Columbia, Grierson and Hawking Prizes, PGA nomination for Best Documentary 2014.) She also has producing credits on Thank You for Your Service, Letters from Baghdad, The New Public and Colliding Dreams. Taking Venice, the story of Robert Rauschenberg’s controversial win at the Venice Biennale, 1964, is in post-production. Andrea executive produced Savage Youth which premiered at Slamdance in January, 2018. She also produced Dark Matter,with Meryl Streep, Aiden Quinn and Chinese actor Liu Yeh (Sloan Prize, Sundance; best narrative feature, Asian Film Festival 2008.) She is currently developing a series for television that takes place against the backdrop of the 1909 garment workers strike with Tribeca Films and in pre-production on a film that takes place during the Kent State protests. She has an MPhil and MA in Fine Arts from Harvard and a BA in cultural history from Yale.
Diane Keefe, Associate Producer
Diane founded and managed the Pax World High Yield Fund after a career on bond trading floors at Oppenheimer, Dillon, Read, Swiss Bank, and UBS. She is a Trustee of New York Metro Area Quakers and a member of the National Finance and Investment Committees of American Friends Service Committee. Producer of the inaugural Green Festival in New York City, Diane was Chair of the Board of Green America, a social enterprise network. She served on the Board of Directors of Opportunity Finance Network which lends to community development financial institutions in low income communities in the US. She was a member of the investment committee of the Universal Healthcare Foundation of Connecticut and on the Board of Directors of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a national non-profit founded by Ben Cohen. She has advised on a documentary about women war reporters in WWII and was executive producer of a You Tube video, the “Misinformant” starring Jack Black and America Ferrera about health care and climate policy. She has an MBA in Finance from Columbia University and a BA in Political Economy from Wellesley College.
Michele Midori Fillion, Associate Producer
Michele’s passion is women’s history. As a journalist, writer, producer, and director she reports untold stories about women, and has worked in Canada, France, and India. She wrote, produced, and directed the documentary film, No Job For a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII, which premiered on PBS and was broadcast nationally and internationally. She is currently developing a feature-length film, Woman In Progress and a feature documentary Nowhere To Go. She holds graduate degrees in feminist theory (University of Toronto) and in journalism (University of Western Ontario). Michele resides in New York city.
Lou Cove, Associate Producer
Lou Cove is the founder of CANVAS, a funding and field-building collaborative that seeks to encourage, support and promote a 21st century Jewish cultural renaissance. Lou also serves as senior advisor to the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, where he co-created the PJ Alliance - a cohort of mega-supporters dedicated to PJ Library’s national and global growth. He is also the author of MAN OF THE YEAR (Flatiron Books), an Amazon 2017 memoir of the year, a PEOPLE magazine pick of the week ("Hilarious and poignant") and a Booklist Starred Selection ("The kind of book readers fall in love with"). Lou served as executive director of Reboot - a think tank and incubator for modern Jewish culture - where he oversaw the development of numerous Jewish cultural projects, including Sukkah City, 10Q, the National Day of Unplugging, and the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation. Lou was also vice president of the National Yiddish Book Center where he helped build an endowment, a new building, and a sustainable platform devoted to reclaiming a lost literary canon.
Katherine Ripley Frisoli, Line Producer
Katherine's documentary work include many historically rich documentary films with important archival materials. She has worked as the associate archival producer of many projects including, The Road We've Traveled, a documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim about President Obama for his re-election campaign, and she was part of the archival research team for the celebrated video that screened nationally prior to the President's speech during the Democratic National Convention. Her credits include associate researcher on Bhutto, and Countdown to Zero, both of which premiered at Sundance, Foo Fighters: Back and Forth directed by James Moll premièred at SXSW Film Festival and on VH1, and Pearl Jam Twenty directed by Cameron Crowe, premiered theatrically across the US and on PBS American Masters. Frisoli served as Co/Producer and Archival Clearance Producer on California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown which aired on varies PBS stations across the country. Currently she is working with ESPN on a documentary about Olympic ice skater Katarina Witt for their celebration of the 40th anniversary of title IX. In addition to her research and producing work, Katherine directs short documentaries. Her short film Rhena, about a young girl's struggle with Spinal Muscular Atrophy can be seen on Current TV.
Barbara Cohen, Composer
Barbara Cohen is an accomplished composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter, whose work embraces a variety of genres – from world and modern–classical music to folk to trip–hop and electronica. Her career as a recording artist includes co–founding the Virgin Records’ band, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, collaborating with England’s rave luminaries, Orbital, singing lead vocals for the French experimental duo, Air, and releasing critically acclaimed solo albums. Cohen’s ability to blend disparate musical elements extends to her scores for film and television. These range from the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary, The Judge and the General to the dream-like cabaret-influenced HBO feature, Habana Eva and guitar–driven score for the MTV feature, Pedro; and Middle Eastern arrangements for feature documentaries The Lost Dream PBS/POV and Al Jazeera America’s Words of Witness.
Lev 'Ljova' Zhurbin, Composer
Ljova was born in 1978 in Moscow, Russia, and moved to New York with his parents, composer Alexander Zhurbin and writer Irena Ginzburg, in 1990. He divides his time between composing for the concert stage, contemporary dance and film, leading his own ensemble LJOVA AND THE KONTRABAND, performing with and composing for TRIO FADOLÍN, as well as a busy career as a violist, fadolínist & musical arranger. Among recent projects are commissions from the City of London Sinfonia, The Louisville Orchestra, a new work for Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, a string quartet for Brooklyn Rider, a clarinet quintet for Art of Élan, and works for The Knights, Sybarite5 and A Far Cry, as well arrangements for the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, tenor Javier Camarena, conductors Gustavo Dudamel and Alondra de la Parra, songwriters Ricky Martin, Natalia Lafourcade and Carlos Vives, composer/guitarist Gustavo Santaolalla and Osvaldo Golijov. Ljova frequently collaborates with choreographers Aszure Barton, Damian Woetzel, Christopher Wheeldon, Katarzyna Skarpetowska (with Parsons Dance). In 2018, he was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University’s Atelier program, co-teaching a course on collaboration with puppeteer Basil Twist.
Larry Banks, Cinematographer
Larry has distinguished himself as a feature cinematographer with such films as JUICE, STRAPPED, FLY BY NIGHT and SUBSTITUTE 2. He has also been the Director of Photography on numerous Music Videos and TV shows. Working with notable Directors like Spike Lee and Forest Whitaker; Larry has also DP’ed and directed commercials for Nike, Levi’s and AT&T. Larry directed a documentary called BLUES STORIES, a piece of modern history on the roots of American music of the ‘20s and ‘30s featuring Taj Mahal. He went on to shoot a TV pilot called Black Jaq, produced by Sony Tristar and directed by Forest Whitaker. Larry is also the president and CEO of Untamed Heart Inc., a production company which produces PSAs, narrative shorts and documentaries. Larry is a professor and the Chair of the Media Arts Department at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, where he endeavors to engage and shape the filmmakers of tomorrow. Larry also leads workshops for Learning Ally on dyslexia through Headstrong Nation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the self-determination of adult dyslexics and near-diversity. He was an invited guest speaker at the Dyslexic Advantage conference and serves as Board Chair of Headstrong Nation. At present he brings his many years of film making and educational leadership experience together with his deep concerns for this misunderstood population as he is creating a documentary to be entitled "Dyslexic Talents”, featuring the stories of innovative and successful dyslexics coupled with open and honest discussions with leading scientific researchers, on the strengths of the dyslexic brain.
Allen Moore, Cinematographer
A graduate of Harvard University, Allen has been producing, directing, photographing and editing his own documentaries for more than 30 years. Among the honors awarded to Allen are several state artist fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Filmmaking. Allen has also served as a director of photography for several of Ken Burns’s films, including The Civil War, The Congress, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, Mark Twain and Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip. For his work on Baseball, Allen received a Primetime Emmy® Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Cinematography. In addition to his work on Ken Burns’ films, Allen has been a Director of Photography on a number of other award-winning documentaries. He received a second Primetime Emmy® Award nomination for his cinematography work on Ric Burns’ American Experience series on New York. Other film credits include: Wild by Law, The Donner Party, The Way West, Divided Highways, The Harriman Expedition, and Monkey Trial, winner of the George Foster Peabody Award.
Maia Harris, Writing Consultant
Maia Harris began her career on the groundbreaking and award-winning civil rights television history series, Eyes on the Prize. In addition to her work as a producer and writer, Harris is an accomplished grant writer who has successfully raised NEH funds for numerous documentary projects including No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report World War II (PBS World), Slavery and the Making of America (PBS), The Italian Americans (PBS) and GI Jews (PBS). Her producing and writing credits also include Banished (PBS) directed by Marco Williams, premiered Sundance, The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo (PBS), Storyville: The Naked Dance (PBS), Listening to Children: A Moral Journey with Robert Coles (PBS) and Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel (AMC). Maia is the recipient of a Lyndhurst Prize, two Emmy® Awards, two Emmy® Award nominations, and a Louisiana Division of the Arts fellowship. Also an educator, she co-founded the New Orleans Charter Middle School, and holds a B.A. in Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and an M.Ed. from Columbia University.