Filmmakers

Garland McLaurin is a Peabody-Award winning filmmaker; his love for storytelling comes from its power to artistically explore the complex and conflicting social and psychological layers of people and society. His web series POPS explores fatherhood for African American men, and was funded by ITVS Digital and National Black Programming Consortium. He… Show more co-directed/produced the Peabody-winning documentary series, 180 Days a Year Inside an American High School and Hartsville that aired on PBS. He served as co-cinematographer on Wes Moore’s Coming Back documentary series, highlighting veterans, and for award-winning documentary filmmaker Yoruba Richen's The New Black (Independent Lens), which explores the fight for marriage equality in the African American community. His other professional credits include: field producing on CNN’s Black in America 4, producer/shooter for WAMU 88.5 American University/BET’s special Homecoming: The Killing of DJ Henry. Additional past digital media work includes work for Black Public Media, Time.com, NY Times video division and video editing at the National Geographic digital news division. He holds a BA in Radio-TV-Film from Howard University and an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate film school. Show less

Loira Limbal (Director/Producer) is an Afro-Dominican filmmaker and DJ interested in the creation of art that is nuanced and revelatory for communities of color. She is the Senior Vice President of Programs at Firelight Media. Firelight is committed to making films about pivotal movements and moments in the U.S. Firelight's flagship program - the… Show more Documentary Lab - is a fellowship that provides mentorship, funding, and industry access to emerging filmmakers of color. Limbal’s current film, Through the Night is a feature documentary about a 24 hour daycare center. Through the Night was part of the 2019 Sundance Edit & Story Lab and was selected for world premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. Her first film, Estilo Hip Hop, was a co-production of ITVS and aired on PBS in 2009. Additionally, she co-produces and helms the popular Brooklyn monthly #APartyCalledRosiePerez. Limbal received a B.A. in History from Brown University and is a graduate of the Third World Newsreel's Film and Video Production Training Program. She is a Sundance Institute Fellow and a former Ford Foundation Justfilms/Rockwood Fellow. She lives in the Bronx with her two children.  Show less

Bing Liu moved from China to Alabama to California to Illinois before he was eight. He received a B.A. in English literature from UIC in May of 2011. Since July 2011, Bing has been a member of the International Cinematographer's Guild, working on projects including Shameless, Empire, and Chiraq to fund his documentaries. In 2015, his short film about two… Show more Vietnamese immigrants, Nuoc, won Best Directed Documentary at the Collected Voices Film Festival. Since September 2015, Bing has been a Story Director and DP for a documentary mini-series on race and education directed by Steve James. He has taken his directorial feature, Minding the Gap, through Kartemquin’s Diverse Voices in Documentary, Tribeca All Access, Firelight Media’s Producer Lab, and Chicago Media Project’s DOC10 pitch session. Show less

Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose directing credits include the nationally televised documentaries, Calavera Highway (PBS), "The Mexico Story" of The New Americans series (PBS), My Journey Home (PBS), Labor Women (PBS), My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha (PBS), The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel), The Best Hotel on Skid Row… Show more (HBO), and Who Killed Vincent Chin? (PBS). Her films have premiered at festivals around the world including Cannes, San Francisco, Sundance, Toronto, and the Whitney Biennial. Among her honors are a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, International Documentary Association Achievement Award, and two Rockefeller Foundation fellowships in documentary film. Tajima-Peña is a USA Broad Fellow in media arts, and a professor and graduate director of the social documentation program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.     Show less

Daresha Kyi: Daresha writes, produces, and directs film and television in Spanish and English. In 2018 she directed "Trans In America: Texas Strong" as part of an ACLU web series on transgender rights, which won two Webbys, garnered over 2 million views on YouTube, and premiered at SXSW in 2019. She also directed a series of shorts for the Family… Show more Independence Initiative about their work empowering families to escape poverty. In 2017 she co-directed the multiple award-winning film, "Chavela." Currently a Chicken & Egg and Creative Capital fellow, this former Firelight Documentary Lab fellow has produced programming for FX, WE, AMC, Oxygen, E!, Telemundo, Bravo, and FUSE, among others. Show less

Phil Bertelsen is an Emmy and two-time Peabody award-winning filmmaker based in New York City. He was Series Producer and Director of the 6-part documentary series Who Killed Malcolm X (Netflix). As a result of the investigative work and new evidence provided in the series, the Manhattan DA’s office is reviewing the decades old assassination case and… Show more reconsidering the conviction one of the assassins. Prior to that he produced and directed a documentary special for NBC News called Hope and Fury: MLK, the Media and the Movement. Bertelsen is currently completing an independent feature documentary about a civil rights era photographer who was revealed to be an FBI informant. Bertelsen also directed a feature-length documentary special called Through The Fire: The Presidency of Barack Obama with Executive Producer Stanley Nelson and Firelight Media. His film School of the Future, made for the PBS science series NOVA, examines how science and technology are transforming the way students learn and teachers teach. He produced and directed multiple episodes of the Columbia-DuPont Award winning documentary series The African Americans--Many Rivers To Cross, hosted by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and several episodes of Finding Your Roots. The PBS series, now in its sixth season, traces the genealogy of celebrated Americans. Previous work includes the award-winning Chisholm ’72; the feature documentary, Beyond The Steps about Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. His work has screened and broadcast internationally on PBS, MTV the Sundance Channel, Arte and Canal Plus. He has received support from the Ford Foundation; ITVS; National Black Programming Consortium and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among others. He has also taught on the adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; The City College of New York, and at Temple University in Philadelphia. Prior to coming to New York, Phil helped launch public television station WYBE-TV in Philadelphia. He holds an M.F.A. in Film from New York University where he was a Spike Lee Fellow, and a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Rutgers University in his native New Jersey. Show less