Christy Carpenter
Co-Director/Co-Producer Christy Carpenter is the daughter of Liz Carpenter. She has devoted several years to reviewing the voluminous papers, oral histories, and video materials of her pack-rat mother augmenting her own personal memories. Her very deep knowledge of her mother’s life, friends, and former colleagues as well as her media savvy and passion for history offer an exceptional resource for this film. Christy is also working on a book about her mother with the goal of publishing it simultaneously with the release of the film.
Christy has more than four decades of experience as a senior executive in the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Prior to undertaking research on her mother’s papers, she served as the CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, a center for thought leadership on significant state, national, and international issues. From 2003 through 2011, Carpenter served in New York City as the EVP & COO of The Paley Center for Media – the premier institution dedicated to advancing the understanding of media, its artistic value, business dynamics, historical importance, and social and cultural impact.
Carpenter has a long-term passion for, and involvement in, public broadcasting. In 1998, President Clinton appointed her to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where she was elected vice chair. Immediately following her five-year term, she served on the board of KCET in Los Angeles, and, more recently for six years, on the board of Austin PBS. She currently chairs the Advisory Board for the University of Texas Press. Christy received her B.A. from Brown University and J.D. from the Washington College of Law at American University.
Abby Ginzberg
Co-Producer/Co-Director Abby Ginzberg, a Peabody award-winning director, has been producing compelling documentaries about race and social justice for over 35 years. Her most recent film, Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth to Power, won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary. This intimate and compelling film is about Representative Barbara Lee, best known for her lone NO vote against the use of military force following the 9/11 attacks. Representative Lee has spent the last 23 years in Congress fighting for peace, justice, and equality. It is available on Amazon Prime and Starz.
Abby is also the Co-Producer of several other films. American Justice on Trial, co-directed by Andrew Abrahams and Herb Ferrette, premiered at the 2022 San Francisco International Film Festival. Waging Change, a 2019 documentary, is about the challenges faced by tipped servers who are forced to rely on their tips and the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour. It was broadcast on public television in February and March 2021. And Then They Came for Us (2017) examines the connection between the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the current Muslim travel ban. The film was broadcast on public television in May of 2019 and 2020. Agents of 12 Change (2016, with Frank Dawson) is about the Black student movement of the late 1960s on college campuses. It won the Jury and Audience awards for Best Documentary at the Pan African Film Festival and was broadcast on public television on America ReFramed. Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa won a 2015 Peabody award and has screened at film festivals around the world, winning four audience awards.
Abby was the Consulting Producer on The Barber of Birmingham. This film, directed by Robin Fry day and Gail Dolgin, premiered at Sundance in 2011 and was nominated for an Oscar® in the Short Doc category. Abby received her B.A. from Cornell University and her J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law.
Dr. Jessica Brannon-Wranosky
Lead Scholarly Advisor/Associate Producer: Dr. Jessica Brannon-Wranosky holds the Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities & History at Texas A&M University-Commerce. She specializes in women, gender and sexuality history and digital research methods.
Her work often takes the form of large public facing history projects—including a central role in the production of the 2020 PBS documentary Citizens At Last: Texas Women Fight for the Vote, based largely on her forthcoming book, co-produced by Ellen Temple and Nancy Schiesari. Her forthcoming monograph focuses on the role Texas and Texans played in the national woman suffrage movement. She has since co-produced, with Temple and Schiesari, a series of five short films focused on Texas suffragists. She is the Project Director for Humanities Texas secondary educational curriculum and resources initiative and a traveling—both highlighting Texas suffrage history. She is co-editor with Merline Pitre, Bruce Glasrud, and Cecilia Gutierrez-Venable for Centuries of Voices: Portraits of Black Women in Texas History, a print anthology of over 60 biographical articles (TAMU Press). She served as the Founding Project Director for the Handbook of Texas Women, a statewide public education and digital content development project. From 2009-2014, she was the digital media author for W. W. Norton’s Give Me Liberty, at the time the top selling U. S. History college textbook on the market. She has also authored and directed dozens of online essays and digital exhibits, and often advises various groups and government entities on historic preservation, contextual framing, and accuracy.
Her prior print publications include Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson, A Centennial Examination (TAMU Press, 2017), a book she co-edited with Bruce A. Glasrud. Between 2016-2019 she edited three ebooks, Texas Women and the Vote, Women Across Texas History, Volume 1: Nineteenth Century and Before, and Women Across Texas History, Volume 2: Early Twentieth Century—all published by the Texas State Historical Association. Scholarly essays by her include “To Lead and To Vote: Black Woman Suffragists and the NAACP in the South,” The Black History Bulletin (Summer/Fall 2019) co-authored with Cecilia Gutierrez-Venable, and appear in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (UG Press, 2015)—a 2016 winner of the Liz Carpenter Award, Discovering Texas History (OU Press, 2014), and This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell (UNT Press, 2013). She received her Ph.D. in History from University of North Texas.
Susanne Mason
Archive Producer: Susanne Mason conducts research, archive production and clearances for documentaries and docuseries. Recent assignments include A Double Life (Mill Valley Film Festival); The Lady Bird Diaries (Hulu); LBJ: Triumph and Tragedy (CNN Originals); Shouting Down Midnight (MSNBC); The First Rainbow Coalition (Independent Lens); Jump Shot: The Kenny Sailors Story; The Infiltrators (Sundance); and The Radical Story of Patty Hearst (CNN). She is an independent filmmaker whose films focus on criminal justice and environmental issues. Her first feature documentary, Writ Writer won the American Bar Association’s prestigious Silver Gavel Award for documentary.
Eli Olson
Editor: Eli Olson is an Emmy® Award-winning editor and storyteller. In 2022, Eli worked on the Hi I’m series on the episode “Hi I’m Nancy Rubin” which is currently airing on HBO Max. In 2021, Eli cut Brother, an animated short documentary about a brother and sister’s journey through opioid addiction. Brother is streaming on PBS Independent Lens. In 2020, Eli edited the Frontline Episode “Covid’s Hidden Toll,” an investigation into the human rights abuses of California’s farming industry. The episode won a Scripps Howard Award for excellence in national/international investigative reporting and was nominated for a Peabody Award.
In 2018, Eli had four films selected for the Mill Valley Film Festival: From Baghdad To The Bay, Time for Ilhan, I am Maris, and Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn? Van Dorn won the Active Cinema Audience award at MVFF. Baghdad won Best Documentary at Cinequest 2018 and Time for Ilhan was an official selection of the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.Eli won an Emmy® for her work on My Flesh and Blood for HBO films, which also took Best Documentary honors as well as the Audience Award and Best Director prizes at the Sundance Film Festival.
Ken Schneider
Editor: Ken Schneider, ACE, is a Peabody-winning director and editor who believes in the power of film to affect hearts and minds. Ken has edited over 40 feature-length documentaries, focusing on war and peace, human rights, artists’ lives, American history, and contemporary social issues. Ken co-edited the Oscar-nominated Regret To Inform, a film the New York Times described as “unforgettable … exquisitely filmed, edited and scored.” His films have appeared on HBO, Showtime, PBS’ American Masters, POV, Independent Lens, Frontline, Al-Jazeera’s Witness, and in television and film festivals worldwide. He lives in San Francisco with his family.
Ken’s editing can be viewed at kenschneidereditor.net.
Loi Ameera Almeron
Associate Editor: Loi Ameera Almeron is an investigative producer and video editor of award-winning documentaries based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Documentaries she produced and edited have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, NAACP Image Awards, and many international film festivals; and are available on HBO, PBS Frontline, AppleTV+, Amazon Prime, and Good Docs.
Eric Friend
Sound Designer: Eric Friend has worked as a re-recording mixer, sound designer, engineer, and composer for the past twenty five years on feature films, commercials, shorts, documentaries, animation, television, podcasts, and streaming programs for such clients as HBO, Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, Comedy Central, Sony, Nickelodeon, Disney, Netflix, Facebook and Sesame Street. Eric’s work has been featured at numerous film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Tribeca, SXSW, Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, and more.
Curtis Heath
You can hear his music in the Disney feature film Peter Pan & Wendy, as well as critically acclaimed features such as David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Old Man and the Gun, Yen Tan’s 1985, Channing People’s Miss Juneteenth, Kris Swanberg’s I Used to Go Here, the Duplass Brother’s recent Showtime series Cinema Toast, HBO’s original documentary Through Our Eyes, and 6 seasons of Exactly Right’s hit true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked.
Cinematographers
Miguel Alvarez
Miguel Alvarez has received awards from the Directors’ Guild of America, Panavision’s Emerging Filmmaker program, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, and the Austin Film Society for his films. His documentary work has appeared on PBS and The Washington Post. He served as producer on Anne Rapp’s documentary on Horton Foote, The Road To Home and also was Executive Producer for Austin Film Festival's award-winning television show, On Story. He also is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin.
Jason Longo
Jason Longo is an Emmy winning cinematographer, editor, and director who has photographed over 150 documentary films and televisions programs in over 65 countries on six continents. He is a frequent contributor to the PBS series Frontline, NOVA, the American Experience, and American Masters. He also was a Director of Photography for the eight hour PBS series Native America and is a contributing DP for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, now in season eleven.
Michael Hargett
Bio coming soon.
Michael Moser
Bio coming soon.