LYDA KUTH
Director/Producer/Co-writer

Lyda Kuth is a founding board member and executive director of the LEF Foundation, a private foundation that supports the contemporary arts. Under her leadership, the LEF New England office launched the Moving Image Fund in 2001. In 2009, Kuth initiated changes to the LEF New England grant program to focus support primarily on documentary film and video. Through her work at LEF, Kuth has championed important films by world-renowned filmmakers such as Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Alfred Guzzetti, Chico Colvard, and filmmaking partners Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, and Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan. Kuth has been honored by Women in Film and Video/New England and received the prestigious Commonwealth Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her support of artists in the region. She also serves on the board of Creative Capital, a national nonprofit organization that provides financial and advisory support to individual artists. In 2005, she established Nadita Productions to produce unique and thought-provoking documentaries. With co-director and Boston University professor Mary Jane Doherty, she is working on a documentary about the world-famous Cuban ballet, which was accepted to IFP’s 2011 Independent Film Forum. “Love and Other Anxieties,” a midlife story, is her directorial debut.

LUCIA SMALL
Editor/Producer/Co-writer

Lucia Small has been an independent filmmaker for twenty years. She has worked in both documentary and fiction form. In 2005, she teamed up with seminal documentarian Ed Pincus to co-direct, edit and produce “The Axe in the Attic.” Supported by a grant from the Sundance Documentary Institute and the LEF Foundation, “Axe” had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in 2007. The film screened internationally, including at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Cinema du Reel, and Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and is being distributed by The Cinema Guild and IndiePix Films. In 2002, Small’s directorial debut “My Father, The Genius,” garnered several top festival awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary and Best Editing (edited by Karen Schmeer) at the Slamdance Film Festival, and a First Appearances nomination at IDFA. The film was broadcast on the Sundance Channel and distributed by New Yorker Films. In 2007, Small shifted her career focus from producing and directing to editing and writing. Since then she has consulted and worked on various projects, including co-editing “Broadside,” a two-hour historical American Public Television documentary, and “Casino Nation,” an ITVS/Sundance project currently in production.

AMY GELLER
Producer

Amy Geller began in film as a television field producer and production manager for J. Arnold Productions, with work shown on network television, A&E, HBO, MTV, and CNN. Since, Geller has been producer and line producer on numerous shorts and documentaries, including the docudrama “Murder at Harvard,” a PBS/BBC broadcast for American Experience. She also produced the Sundance Institute-supported, “Stay Until Tomorrow” (2005), an independent feature that won prizes at several film festivals, and “The War That Made America,” a four-hour PBS mini-series broadcast in 2006. Geller’s most recent production, the feature documentary “For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism,” has screened at over 60 film festivals, theaters, and universities in the US and abroad. It was also broadcast internationally in Spain, France and Israel, and nationally on the Documentary Channel and WGBH-Boston.

MARY JANE DOHERTY
Cinematographer

Mary Jane Doherty, one of Ricky Leacock’s last students in the legendary MIT Film Program, has been an Associate Professor of Film at Boston University since 1990. She’s also an award winning freelance editor, director, and cinematographer. Past productions include a short film for former Vice President Al Gore, a feature-length documentary on organized religion, and a short experimental documentary on rapid land use change in China. Currently, she is in her third year of shooting and directing two feature documentaries about children growing up in Cuba’s world-class national ballet program.

ERIN TRAHAN
Associate Producer

Erin Trahan’s background in film includes production, programming, and multi-platform film journalism. As a journalist, she has contributed to The Boston Globe, New Hampshire Public Radio, Girl Scout Leader Magazine, NewEnglandFilm.com and elsewhere and has co-authored three Frommer’s Guides to Montreal and Quebec City. She currently edits and publishes The Independent, an online magazine about film, and its related books on filmmaking. Erin has a particular interest in facilitating public dialogue about arts and culture and has led panels and discussions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston Public Library, the Salem Film Festival, New Hampshire Film Festival, the Newburyport Film Society, The Newburyport Documentary Film Festival, and others. She earned an MFA in poetry from Bennington College and her poems and essays appear in literary magazines and an anthology about Madonna. A past president of Women in Film & Video/New England, she now serves on the board of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

P. ANDREW WILLIS
Composer

P. Andrew Willis is a Boston-based composer and musician. He studied at the University of Louisville and Berklee College of Music where he focused on film scoring and electronic music. Since 2000, he has scored or contributed music to many film, television, and installation projects, including Errol Morris’s most recent feature-length documentary “Tabloid;” “We Shall Remain,” a multi-part television series about Native American history, broadcast on PBS’s American Experience; and several pieces for the International Spy Museum. He’s performed, recorded, and toured the US as a member of several bands, including The Web, which allow him to share the stage with acts like Pere Ubu, Sebadoh, and Will Oldham. In 2008 he performed as a member of the live musical accompaniment for filmmaker Ken Brown’s Psychedelic Cinema project at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston.

JESSIE BEERS-ALTMAN
Assistant Editor

Jessie Beers-Altman is a freelance producer and editor in the Boston area. Her experience includes credits for PBS, Animal Planet, and the Discovery Channel, as well as numerous independent, theatrical, and commercial productions. Her directorial debut, “The Spirit of a Runner” (2009), profiled ultrarunner Suprabha Beckjord in the 2008 Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100-Mile Race. Beers-Altman recently worked as the Assistant Editor of “The Last Mountain,” a feature-length documentary about the ills of mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia, and the activism surrounding the issue. The film was an official selection in the Documentary Competition category at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. In addition to her freelance work, Beers-Altman is currently working on a feature-length personal documentary about the life and career of her father, the late artist Harold Altman.