Profiles archive

Lansana ‘Barmmy Boy’ Mansaray is a multi-talented director of photography, filmmaker and musician who lives in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Barmmy is a founding member and the production manager of the WeOwnTV Freetown Media Center. He is the Producer/Director of photography for Survivors, a feature length documentary about the Ebola outbreak currently in production.

As Director of Education at the Jacob Burns Film Center, Emily Keating has overseen the development, implementation, and expansion of the education programs since their inception in 2001. The education programs are achieving national impact, equipping and inspiring nearly 15,000 students a year to communicate in the language of our visual culture: image, sound, and story.

Donnie Nicole Smith started her professional career over 10 years ago as a teacher in the Chicago Public School System. Donnie is the Executive Director of Donda’s House Inc., a nonprofit organization she co-founded with Kanye West and her husband, Che “Rhymefest” Smith. Donda’s House provides free access to the arts for youth.

Jenni Wolfson is the Executive Director of Chicken & Egg Pictures, which supports women non-fiction filmmakers whose artful and innovate storytelling catalyzes social change. Jenni was previously the Managing Director of WITNESS, the international human rights video advocacy organization co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel.

Vashti Dubois currently serves as the Executive Director and Founder of a new institution The Colored Girls Museum, which focuses on celebrating the achievements and perspectives of the Ordinary Extraordinary Colored Girl. Headquartered in Historic Germantown this living museum has been engineered to pop up in other cities and neighborhoods around the country—transforming ordinary spaces into A Colored Girls Museum outpost which collect, archive, and share the stories of indigenous colored girls in that place.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an activist, cultural organizer, and Director of Programs at Antenna, New Orleans. In 2014, Imani co-founded Blights Out, a collective of citizens, artists, architects, and activists daring to design a new model for development that creates art and action to impact issues of blight, gentrification, and housing affordability. She is a member of Occupy Museums, an international artist/activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge and deconstruct the commodification of art and culture.

Zun Lee is an award-winning Canadian photographer, physician and educator. He was born and raised in Germany and has also lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago. He currently resides in Toronto. He has been published in the New York Times, Slate, Wall Street Journal, TIME, The New Yorker, MSNBC, Washington Post, Forbes, and Hyperallergic.

Mirasol Enriquez is a film and media scholar, video editor, educator, and cultural worker who has devoted her career to community building through film and the other arts. She is currently the Director of Community Media at the Austin Film Society, where she oversees the organization’s education programs and Austin Public, the community media center AFS manages for the city of Austin.

Trained as an ocean engineer and an artist, Jane Chang Mi considers land politics and postcolonial ecologies. Exploring the traditions and narratives associated with environment through her interdisciplinary and research-based work, she utilizes art to work through these multi-layered and complex subjects.