2019 Advisors

Karim Ahmad is the Director of Outreach & Inclusion at the Sundance Institute, where he oversees emerging artist outreach initiatives and cross-discipline creative / professional development activations and partnerships. He also leads inclusion strategy across the organization, and advocacy for marginalized artists in the field. Previously, he was Senior Strategist for ITVS, where he oversaw numerous film funds and headed digital content production and creative development for episodic and immersive media. He was the Creator and Senior Producer of Indie Lens Storycast, an Independent Lens branded YouTube channel on PBS’ Digital Studios MCN, and the Creator and Showrunner of the iconic sci-fi series, FutureStates . Karim is also an independent cross-platform writer and producer and can be found on Twitter as @thatkarimahmad.

Jannette Bivona is the Initiatives and Field Relations Manager at ITVS where she works across all funding initiatives for production and development and facilitates outreach strategy in the field. Recent ITVS-funded films include Always in Season, Minding The Gap , and Trapped . Jannette also serves as a reader and screener for a number of funding initiatives and film festivals. Prior to joining ITVS, she was the Executive Assistant at the Telluride Film Festival, where she managed submissions and programming among other duties.

Maggie Bowman is a documentary film producer and director. As Series Producer for Hard Earned , she led the team at Kartemquin Films that made the 6-hour series about American families working low-wage jobs. Hard Earned won a duPont-Columbia Award in 2016, following domestic and international broadcasts on Al Jazeera. Previously, Bowman produced Election Day (SXSW 2007, POV 2008). Prior to her work in film, Bowman was a union organizer and consultant, working on campaigns with taxi drivers in the Bronx, nurses in Iowa, and home health aides in Brooklyn. She was a Fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley in 2017, and she recently served as Kartemquin’s inaugural Artistic Fellow, a position in which she provided mentorship and creative guidance to Kartemquin filmmakers at various stages of the filmmaking process. She is now co-directing the forthcoming series We Are Witnesses: Chicago , with Kartemquin, The Marshall Project, and the Illinois Humanities Council. She is an active member of the Documentary Producers Alliance.

Cristina Ibarra has been making award-winning films for PBS that explore the US-Mexico border for the past sixteen years. Her most recent film, The Infiltrators , premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Her documentary Las Marthas premiered on Independent Lens in 2014; The New York Times called it “a striking alternative portrait of border life.” Her PBS documentary collaboration, The Last Conquistador , had a national broadcast on POV; USA Today called the film “Heroic.” Her first short fiction, “Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela,” won multiple awards and was broadcast on PBS. Ibarra has created mini-films with the NY International Latino Film Festival, LPB, and the Latina collective fulana.org. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, CPB/PBS Producer’s Academy, the Latino Producers Academy, Firelight Producers Lab, and Creative Capital among others. She is a fellow of the Sundance Women’s Initiative.

Jason Ishikawa is an Executive at Cinetic Media where he overseas international sales and worldwide distribution strategies for the company. His responsibilities include working in and across Cinetic’s financing, corporate, and project consultation, and domestic sales arm for feature narrative and documentary films. Recent sales titles include Abacus, Blaze, Cold Case Hammarskjold, Hale County This Morning This Evening, Knock Down the House, Last Men in Aleppo, Love Means Zero, RBG and We the Animals . Other recent Cinetic Media projects include Academy Award winners Free Solo and Green Book . Prior to joining Cinetic, Jason worked at The Film Sales Company where he was the Senior Director of Acquisitions, Financing, and Sales. Jason graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and holds a BA in Cinema Studies.

Alex Rivera is a filmmaker who, for the past twenty years, has been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer , a science-fiction feature set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and had a commercial release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries. Alex is currently developing Sleep Dealer as a TV series with the support of a major studio. He is a Sundance Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and was named one of Variety Magazine’s “10 Directors to Watch.” In 2015 Alex was awarded major support from the Surdna Foundation and the Ford Foundation for The Infiltrators , which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and received an Art & Technology Lab Grant from LACMA, as well as support from Time Warner for an experimental project in virtual reality. Other recent collaborations include a series of activist music videos produced by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) with artists including Manu Chao, La Santa Cecilia, and Aloe Blacc, which have collectively received over 20 million views. He studied at Hampshire College.

Emmy Award-winning producer Amy Shatsky is the Series Producer of Independent Lens, PBS’s primetime documentary anthology series. She supervises the editorial, contracting, packaging and delivery of films for broadcast. Independent Lens films have garnered numerous accolades including Emmy Awards, Academy Award Nominations, DuPont Awards, and Peabody Awards, and the series was honored as Best Series by the International Documentary Association. In addition, Amy manages a portfolio of ITVS-funded films, and provides content development feedback to filmmakers. Amy joined Independent Lens and ITVS after more than 15 years producing documentaries and narrative feature films in New York. Her credits include award-winning films and television programs for HBO, PBS, Disney Channel, Starz, and Comedy Central, which have premiered at such venues as Sundance, SXSW, Venice, Tribeca and Toronto. Amy is a member of the Producer’s Guild of America and holds an MFA in film production from New York University and a BA from Cornell University.

Summer Shelton was the recipient of the 2018 Independent Spirit Piaget Producer’s Award. She produced Maine , which premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, and Keep the Change , the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival Best Narrative Feature that was also awarded a FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize at the 2017 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. She was Executive Producer of People Places Things , which premiered in US Dramatic Competition at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival; produced “Icarus” (short), which premiered at the 2015 New Directors/New Films Festival; and produced Little Accidents , which had its World Premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. She Co-Produced Goodbye to All That (2014) and Adult World (2013), both of which premiered at Tribeca. She has worked alongside critically acclaimed director Ramin Bahrani as Associate Producer of Goodbye Solo (2008), an official selection at Venice; Co-Producer of Plastic Bag (2009); Associate Producer of At Any Price (2012), which premiered at Venice; and Producer of “Ég Anda” (2012), a short film created as part of Sigur Rós’s Valteri mystery film experiment. She was the recipient of the inaugural Bingham Ray Creative Producing Fellowship awarded by the Sundance Institute (2012), a Rotterdam Producing Fellowship (2013), and Film Independent Sloan Producing Fellowship (2014).

Laura Singleterry is a New Orleans-based filmmaker. She received a BA in Communications: Drama and Film from the University of New Orleans. In 2005, she produced the independent feature, Down in New Orleans , which was filmed pre-Katrina and awarded a prize at WorldFest Houston. She lived in Austin from 2005-2009 working as a 2nd AD. She was a Supervising Producer on Campus Radio and worked as a Producer for Extra Butter Pictures, LLC. In 2009 the short film she produced, “Privateer,” premiered at the Festival de Cannes in the Short Film Circle. She returned to New Orleans in 2010 and in 2012 took a break from production to work as a client specialist for Scenios, the NYC cloud-based production platform. Also in 2012, she opened New Orleans Artist Agency to represent actor Nathan Grubbs and manages a small roster of clients. She works as a Producer ( Gumshoe! ), Line Producer ( Swamp People S10, Frenchy & Jett , Crescent City , Fractured ), UPM ( Deed S2, Swamp People S9, American Dream , Deed S1, 68 Kill , Monsoon Mangoes , Indiscretion , Brawler ) and Music Supervisor ( White Rabbit ). In addition, she has provided accounting services for independent film productions. She is currently line producing a documentary about veterans with PTSD and the communities that support them. Laura provides budget breakdowns and packages as well as tax credit consultation.

Rahdi Taylor is Head of Artists in Residence at Concordia Studio, a mission-driven studio launched by Davis Guggenheim with Laurene Powell Jobs to produce and finance the next generation of story-driven nonfiction. She spent 10 years at Sundance Institute where she served as Head of the Sundance Documentary Fund. Her role was to award financing and creative support to documentary films globally. Films supported include Academy Award nominees Minding the Gap, Hale County, Strong Island, I am Not Your Negro, and Trouble the Water , among others. Additional films supported include Shirkers, 306 Hollywood , and United Skates . Taylor enjoys leading field-wide interventions, and designed and directed the Documentary Core Application, a common funding proposal adopted by most US and several international documentary funders. She also created the Doc Film Money Map, a tool to catalyze nonfiction filmmakers to use state tax incentives for indie doc financing. She authored the Impact Storyboarder to translate organizing principles and practices for nonfiction filmmakers for more powerful campaign strategy. Prior to Sundance, Taylor worked in film distribution as Director of Marketing and Communications for California Newsreel, and as Director of Production Assistance (Development) at Women Make Movies. She serves frequently in the field as a juror, panelist, and industry advisor for international film festivals, funding panels, and pitch forums.

Angela Tucker is an Emmy-nominated producer, writer, and director. Her directorial work includes Paper Chase , a teen comedy in pre-production with Gunpowder and Sky; All Styles , a dance movie available on Showtime; Black Folk Don’t , a four-season documentary web series featured in Time Magazine ’s “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life,” and (A)sexual, a featurelength documentary that streamed on Netflix and Hulu for four years. She is in her sixth year as Series Producer of the PBS strand, AfroPop and was Co-Producer on The New Black . Previously, she was Director of Production at Big Mouth Films, a social issue documentary production company. There, she worked on several award-winning documentaries, including Pushing the Elephant (Independent Lens). In 2006, she co-founded TuckerGurl LLC, a production company passionate about telling compelling and irreverent stories about underrepresented communities. Tucker was a Sundance Institute Women Filmmakers Initiative fellow. She received her MFA in Film from Columbia University.

A veteran of the independent film industry for over 20 years, Michael Tuckman began his career at The Cinema Guild, where he was hired to start the company’s theatrical distribution division. Tuckman went on to serve as Vice President of Theatrical Sales for THINKFilm, handling the planning and implementation of all theatrical release strategies, including the breakout successes of Oscar-winning and nominated films including Spellbound, Half Nelson , and Born Into Brothels , as well as the box office smashes The Aristocrats and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead . He now operates his own distribution services company, mTuckman media (MTM), through which he works directly with filmmakers under their own banners. Most notably, he has handled Koganada’s Columbus , which grossed over $1 million at the box office; Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color ; Detropia , from the Academy Award-nominated directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady; and Rory Kennedy’s Academy Award-nominated Last Days in Vietnam . Others collaborations include Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse, The Paris Opera Ballet, At Berkeley, In Jackson Heights , and Monrovia, Indiana , as well as national releases for Sundance standouts such as 306 Hollywood and American Promise . MTM handled the theatrical campaign for the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Square , as well as We Come As Friends , which was named to the shortlist for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His company also provides theatrical booking and consultation services to distributors including Tribeca Film, Drafthouse Films, PBS Films Distribution, and Paladin, among others, with releases including the 2012, 2013, and 2014 Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Language film, Bullhead, War Witch, and The Broken Circle Breakdown , as well as the 2014 Academy Award-nominated documentary, The Act of Killing , in addition to leading the breakout indie hit of 2015, What We Do in the Shadows , to a gross of over $3.5m in domestic box office. As of the Fall of 2016, Tuckman is also an Associate Assistant Professor at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, teaching a survey course on Theatrical Distribution and Exhibition.

Chloe Walters-Wallace is a Jamaican-bred creative with a passion for travel, anthropology, dancehall and installation art. Currently, she manages the Firelight Media Documentary Lab, a fellowship that provides mentorship, funding, and access to first- and second-time filmmakers from racially and ethnically underrepresented communities, as well as “Groundwork,” a new initiative which aims to expand the pipeline of emerging independent diverse makers from the South and the Midwest. Previously, Chloe was program director of the New Orleans Film Society’s Emerging Voices Mentorship Program, which establishes meaningful connections between industry leaders and Louisiana-based filmmakers of color. In 2018, she helped design and launch the Southern Producers Lab, a regional program bringing together 13 emerging, diverse producers from across the American South. Chloe has served on juries for NEA Media Arts, Create Louisiana, The Tricentennial Story Incubator, CAAM, Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, PBS Online Festival, Reel South, Cucalorus W-I-P Lab, and the Tribeca Film Institute IF/Then Short Documentary Program. Chloe lives between New York and New Orleans and is on the board of Court 13 Arts.