Filmmaking in the Time of Corona

Adrienne Becker is CEO and co-Founder of Level Forward, a startup studio venture that aims to focus on backing projects driven by women and persons of color. Becker is also co-Founder of Killer Content, a media company that develops and produces Award-winning, multiplatform entertainment with a curated group of storytellers and brands. Combined, Killer’s properties have earned over 80 Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe Nominations, most recently for Carol. Ms. Becker is formerly an entrepreneur-in-residence at Creative Artists Agency, partner at The Media Farm, and CEO of DailyCandy, Inc. Ms. Becker has also served as Senior Vice President at The Nielsen Company and InterActive Corp. Ms. Becker got her start on an airport tarmac in Philadelphia, where she held her first critically important position holding a rope line for then Governor Bill Clinton. She then went on to hold positions at the Department of Labor and as a Press Secretary on the ’96 campaign. Ms. Becker holds an M.A. in Communications from the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. with Honors in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis. She sits on the Boards of the Made In New York Media Center, Youth+Tech+Health, the Story Pirates, and the B-Stem Project for Women In Technology.

A veteran of the documentary film world, Carrie Lozano produced the Academy Award-nominated The Weather Underground and directed The Ballad of Fred Hersch. She was recently a senior producer on Al Jazeera America’s Peabody Award-winning Fault Lines series, and is a graduate of the documentary program of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Effie T. Brown is the CEO of Gamechanger, which launched in 2013 as the first film financing fund by and for women and now under Brown’s leadership includes projects by and about people of color, LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities as well as its expansion into television and digital content. Brown is also an award-winning film, television, and digital producer known for her highly acclaimed, multi-platform repertoire as well as championing inclusion and diversity in Hollywood, both behind and in front of the camera. Brown has produced several critically acclaimed films and award-winning projects including Real Women Have Curves (directed by Patricia Cardosa) Dear White People​ (2015 Independent Spirit Awards Best First Screenplay), HBO’s Project Greenlight (executive produced by Matt Damon & Ben Affleck), among several others. Brown also served as an executive producer on Lee Daniels’ ​Star on FOX and Disney Channel’s ​Zombies. Prior to Gamechanger, Brown founded Duly Noted Inc., a company dedicated to ground-breaking narratives that use genre to challenge and advance our culture in a disruptive way. Brown’s dream is to change the world through film and TV – celebrating our differences while bringing us all closer together.

Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, economic inequality, gender justice, sexual freedom, and ecology. Her practice boldly reshapes the myths, ideas, and cultural practices of the present, while confronting the wounds of the past. Favianna’s works serve as a record of her human experiences as a woman of color confronting interlocking cultural traditions and biases, while embracing joy, freedom and complexity as an antidote to the life-long impacts of systemic inequality. Her signature mark-making embodies the perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in working-class Oakland, California during the birth of the internet, and in the midst of an era of anti-immigrant hate and the war on drugs. As part of her practice, Favianna leads art interventions around the United States. Her artistic modalities include social practice, visual art, arts advocacy and institution building. Favianna collaborates deeply with social movements to co-create visual narratives and cultural strategies that are resilient and transformative. In addition to her expansive studio practices, she is the Executive Director of CultureStrike, a national arts organization that empowers artists to dream big, disrupt the status quo, and envision a truly just world rooted in shared humanity. In 2016, Favianna received the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship for her work around immigrant detention and mass incarceration. In 2017, she was awarded an Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity for her work around racial justice and climate change. In 2018, she began organizing with artists in the entertainment industry through 5050by2020.com, an initiative launched by Jill Soloway to build intersectional artist power.

Darrien Michele Gipson is the Executive Director of SAGindie. Darrien leads a team that is responsible for independent filmmaker outreach and specializes in teaching low-budget production focusing on the process for hiring professional actors via SAG-AFTRA’s low-budget contracts.  She is a frequent moderator and speaker on panels and production workshops, negotiates sponsorship agreements with film festivals around the country, spearheads the annual national advertising campaigns, oversees SAGindie.org and throws several epic filmmaker parties.