Moroni for President

Saila Huusko is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. Her work has appeared online at Al Jazeera, GlobalPost, The Guardian, and The Village Voice– among others. For three years she was the in-house multimedia producer for Crisis Management Initiative, an NGO founded by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Martti Ahtisaari. She has worked around the world, including in South Sudan and Afghanistan. Saila graduated with honors from the Columbia Journalism School and earned her BA from Middlebury College. She also holds a masters in conflict resolution from the University of Queensland.Moroni For President is her first feature film.

Jasper Rischen graduated with high honors from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, winning a Pulitzer grant awarded to top students, as well as the Henry N. Taylor Award for best foreign student and a DuPont/Judy F. Crichton Award for best thesis film. He was the recipient of a Maria Moors Cabot Prize Scholarship and was named the Paul Steiger Annual Fund Scholar. Originally from The Netherlands, he worked as the U.S. producer for leading Dutch TV news shows prior to joining Columbia. For them, he produced a wide range of stories from veterans struggling with heroin abuse to the disappearance of the middle class. Moroni For President is his first feature film.

Sara Goldblatt graduated cum laude from Yale University in 2006, with a degree in Political Science. She also holds a Masters Degree in Journalism from NYU, with a concentration in documentary filmmaking. Her first independent film, Amerka!, traces the history of the Lebanese diaspora in West Africa and its current displacement by the arrival of large Chinese populations in the area. Sara produced and wrote The Iranian Americans, which aired primetime on PBS in December 2012. In 2014, she worked with New York-based artist Sarah Morris on a commissioned film for the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. She also produced and wrote Dr. Feelgood, a feature-length documentary on the overprescription of painkillers in the United States. Sara speaks Italian, French, Spanish, and German and is a recent convert to Los Angeles after having lived in Rome, Seoul, and New York.