Projects

Nicole Opper is an Emmy®-nominated filmmaker who directed and produced the feature documentary Off and Running, an Audience Favorite at Tribeca and winner of ten international awards including Best Documentary at Outfest and Best Documentary Screenplay at Silverdocs. The film was nationally broadcast on P.O.V. in 2010. She received a Fulbright… Show more Fellowship to direct Visitor’s Day which is supported by New York State Council on the Arts, Chicken & Egg Pictures and ITVS. She’s also produced films for the Discovery Channel and Here TV, and was selected for Filmmaker Magazine’s annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film." Nicole has taught filmmaking at Stanford University and San Francisco State University, among other schools. Show less

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Lana Wilson is a New York-based writer, director, and producer. Her first film, After Tiller, went inside the lives of the four most-targeted abortion providers in the country, and was critically acclaimed for providing a moving and complex look at one of the most incendiary issues of our time. After Tiller premiered at the… Show more Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and went on to be theatrically released by Oscilloscope Laboratories in 50 North American cities. It won the 2015 Emmy Award for Best Documentary after a national broadcast on the PBS documentary series POV. After Tiller was also nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary, four Cinema Eye Honors, a Satellite Award, and the Ridenhour Prize. It was named one of the five best documentaries of the year by the National Board of Review, and featured in "Best of 2013" lists in the LA Times, Village Voice, Indiewire, Artforum, and more. Wilson’s film The Departure tells the story of a remarkable Zen priest doing suicide prevention in Japan. She also recently wrote an episode of the National Geographic Channel miniseries I Am Rebel, executive produced by Doug Liman and Matt Wolf. Wilson was previously the Film and Dance Curator at Performa, the New York biennial of new visual art performance. Her work has been supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Bertha Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, Chicken & Egg Pictures, the International Documentary Association, Candescent Films, Women in Film, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among other institutions. She holds a BA in Film Studies and Dance from Wesleyan University, where she graduated with honors. Show less

Bernardo Ruiz is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His directorial feature debut, Reportero (POV, PBS 2013) about attacks on the press in Mexico, was nominated for a 2014 News and Documentary Emmy® Award and premiered at Full Frame (U.S.), IDFA (Europe) and Ambulante (Mexico). New York Magazine called it “a powerful reminder of how journalism… Show more often requires immense amounts of physical and psychological bravery.” His latest feature documentary, Kingdom of Shadows was called “unforgettable” by The New York Times and premiered at SXSW and IDFA. Ruiz founded Quiet Pictures, a New York-based production company, in 2007 in order to produce independent documentaries. Through Quiet, he created and Executive-Produced the two part bilingual PBS series, The Graduates/Los Graduados for Independent Lens. The series, about the lives of six Latino and Latina students, was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and co-produced with ITVS. In the fall of 2015, Ruiz was a “filmmaker in residence” at the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He currently serves on the advisory board of the Full Frame Film Documentary Festival and the International Documentary Association's Enterprise Fund. Show less