People

IRENE LUSZTIG  project creator / director  

I am an internationally-exhibited, award-winning maker of nonfiction film, video, and new media. My work has been screened at film festivals, museums, and universities around the world. A lot of my work begins with research in archives, looking at historical materials and trying to bring them into conversation with the present day. I’m compelled by stories of the past that are misunderstood, overlooked, neglected, or forgotten and drawn to projects that allow me to explore historical spaces as a way to think about bigger questions of politics and ideology. I have explored issues around public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies across many previous works, including the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives and the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project. I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California and teach filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz. More about my work is on my website. 

ANISA HOSSEINNEZHAD sound recordist and production assistant, New England, the South, Rust Belt, and Mid-Atlantic states

I am a graduate of the Film & Video program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. I am from Iran currently living in Boston. My work revolves around questions of Identity and belonging. My recent film explores the lines between documentary and narrative. My works have mostly been shown in local Boston screenings like Under the Underground and Home Grown Short Films. I was also part of Yoni fest in 2015 a Film screening showcasing work made by female and female identified filmmakers held in Boston.

FRANCESCA ENZLER  San Francisco / Bay Area sound recordist and production assistant, fundraising coordinator  

I am a filmmaker, writer, and seamstress splitting my time between California and Vermont. My work investigates questions of time, memory, family, and the quotidian, particularly located in the Central Valley of California. A graduate of the University of California Santa Cruz, I received the Critical Visions Award for my body of work created there. My work has been installed and screened at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery and the Sesnon Underground Gallery in Santa Cruz and at the Artist’s Television Access in San Francisco. My short film, a famiglia production, premiered at the WNDX Film Festival in Canada. I am currently learning Japanese and preparing to grow a garden. My work lives online at memorycarefilms.com.

EMILY CHAO sound recordist and production assistant, Los Angeles, Pacific Northwest, and Southwest 

I am an award winning filmmaker and amateur archivist based in the East Bay Area. My ongoing series of diverse, short-form nonfiction films focus primarily on identity and diaspora, history and representation, and the interaction between space and memory. I am from San Jose, California and recently earned my MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts. My thesis film, Bruce Takes Dragon Town, premiered at the 2015 Viennale.

DEBORAH LIBBY  sound recordist and production assistant, Midwest 

I’m a documentary filmmaker and editor based in Chicago, and a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Documentary Media program. My current work is centered around the revival and evolution of ancient healing practices as catalysts for consciousness expansion. My MFA thesis documentary Wise Medicine led me to the jungles of Peru where I explored the globalization of indigenous plant medicine shamanism. The film made its international debut at the World Ayahuasca Conference in Rio Branco, Brazil in October, 2016. I’m currently working as a freelance editor and cameraperson in Chicago.

TATE NOVA  sound recordist and production assistant, New York 

I am a writer, producer and assistant director with experience in film, documentary, commercials, and television. I’ve been a member of the Director’s Guild of America for five years as an Assistant Director. Prior to joining the guild, I worked in documentary production and funding. As a guild member, I’ve worked on four seasons of Saturday Night Live digital shorts and hundreds of commercial productions as well as Comedy Central’s new show, “The Other Two” and feature films. I’ve also worked as a digital content creator for Logo and the National Black Programming Consortium. I have extensive travel job experience, having worked in Argentina, Chile, Vienna, and the Bahamas. I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in writing.

VICTORIA CATHERINE CHAN  sound recordist and production assistant, New York 

Originally from Montreal, I graduated in directing from ZeLIG School for Documentary in Italy and I completed the CoLAB Fellowship 2016-2017 at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, NY. My focus lies on personal stories ingrained into reality that reflect human conditions while depicting visual poetry. My films “Plan B” and “Il destino di una fabbrica” were screened in festivals in Europe and broadcast in Italy.  I was awarded the Italian Embassy Scholarship, Canadian Millennium Award and Montreal Arts Intercultural Grant. I received a screenwriting fund from SODEC, Quebec’s major film funder, and currently work on my first feature film, a dreamlike tale about my journey to reconnect with my Chinese ancestral roots in Canada.

LAURA CONWAY AND ANNA WINTER  sound recordists and production assistants, Colorado / Rockies  

Together we work as Chitchat a curatorial team based in Denver, CO. Armed with the belief that all art should tour we re-imagine and invent social/creative spaces while on road trips. January 2018 we will embark on Air-Gap a participatory film tour through Mexico. Separately Anna Winter is a digitally depraved artist working in new media. She chooses to work primarily with video to subvert, play and make a mess of formalities. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Denver in Emergent Digital Practices. Laura Conway is an animator, video artist, and performer. She plays clarinet, sings poorly and embraces all things amateur. She is the co-founder of the global analogue tape corporation BorpCorp. Laura received a Bachelor of Arts in Geography from University of Colorado, Boulder and is currently an MFA student at the University of Colorado Boulder in Moving Image Arts. 

JENY AMAYA  research assistant, Los Angeles production assistant, and postproduction assistant  

I am a graduate of Film & Digital Media and Latin America & Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz.  My work explores autobiographical narratives, notions of family, and how the temporality of the past materializes itself in the present of  the Salvadoran diaspora in California. I am the recipient of the 2015 Princess Grace Foundation Film Scholarship and currently in the production of Mama Virtual, a series of video portraits of immigrant mothers that work in the United States but have children in their home countries.

DEBRA BILODEAU  research assistant and postproduction assistant

I’m a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in the Bay Area. I studied Art and Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, where I was editor-in-chief of EyeCandy film journal and exhibited at the Sesnon Underground Gallery. My work is centered around family narrative, gender, space, and working-class identity—my ongoing project, a participatory documentary called Besaro 85, follows my parents’ daily lives in the mobile home park in which I was raised. 

MEGAN NEEDELS  research assistant 

I am a filmmaker currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area and a recent graduate of the UC Santa Cruz, Film & Digital Media undergraduate program. My films revolve around questions of gender, heredity and performance, specifically in the context of documentary reenactment. My work is largely motivated by the use of the camera as a tool of resistance and self expression as utilized by the radical women filmmakers of the 1960’s and 70’s. My most recent film, heirloom earned me the Critical Visions Award, presented by the UCSC Film & Digital Media faculty. It was screened at the Haverhill Experimental Film Festival in September 2015. I volunteer at Canyon Cinema, an experimental film archive and distribution center in San Francisco, CA.

MAILE COLBERT  sound design and tuning forks 

I am an  intermedia  artist  with a  focus  on sound and video. I am currently a PhD Research Fellow in Artistic Studies with a concentration on sound studies, sound design in time-based media, and soundscape ecology at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. My current practice and research project is titled Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place, and asks what we might gather from sounding the past.  I have exhibited, screened, and performed around the globe. You can see, hear, and read more of my work on my website.

FABIOLA HANNA  coding / interactive project interface 

I am a new media artist & software designer currently writing software that engenders constructed conversations about Lebanon’s history(ies) in the form of a web interface. I am a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz where I also hold an MFA in Digital Arts & New Media. My research lies in fields of software studies, archives & memory and new media art activism. 

For a full list of credits, download the Yours in Sisterhood press kit. Website by Faded Glory Design.