Building Community

Angela Tucker is an Emmy nominated producer, writer and director. 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 the 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 (PBS’ Independent Lens). Her directorial work includes Paper Chase, a teen comedy in pre production; All Styles, a dance movie in post production starring Fik-Shun (So You Think You Can Dance) and Heather Morris (Glee); Black Folk Don’t, a documentary web series in its fourth season featured in Time Magazine’s 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life and (A)Sexual, a feature length documentary about people who experience no sexual attraction that streamed on Netflix and Hulu. 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.

Chithra Jeyaram makes intimate films about identity, human relationships, race, art, and health. A failed attempt to fund a film in India led her to quit a decade-long career as a Physical Therapist and get an MFA in film. Her documentary work is supported by BGDM Sustainability Grant, Jerome Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, New York State Council for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, BAVC Media Maker Fellowship, Made in New York Fellowship, American Institute for Indian Studies, Lancet, Dance Films Association, and pitched at competitive industry events like the IFP project forum, Sheffield Meet Market, and DOC NYC. Currently, she is working on a feature documentary called Our Daughters that provides a rarely-seen look at open adoption in America through an immigrant lens: A South Asian woman desperate for motherhood and a single white mother seeking a home for her twins cross paths unexpectedly. Through open adoption, both take big risks and make surprising choices for their daughters. In addition to making her own films, she enjoys and edits for a living. In the near future, she hopes to direct narrative features and fantastical episodic content. She is an avid runner and has completed 14 marathons. Food is her first love.

Emily Cohen Ibañez is a Latinx filmmaker based in Oakland who earned her doctorate in Anthropology (2011) with a certificate in Culture and Media at New York University. Her film work pairs lyricism with social activism, advocating for labor and environmental justice. She has become known for her collaborative methods that challenge the colonial heritage of documentary filmmaking. With parents who migrated from Colombia to the United States and a family legacy of escaping violence from Aleppo, Syria, Emily knows what it means to cross borders and fashion new identities.

Lorena Manríquez is an award-winning independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of a number of film industry fellowships, including the NALIP Producers Academy, the CPB/PBS Producers Academy, the IFP Rough Cut Lab, and Firelight Documentary Lab. Her first feature documentary film, Ulises’ Odyssey, screened at international festivals, and had its broadcast premiere on PBS in 2015 on WTTW Chicago. Ms. Manríquez’ film Siqueiros: Walls of Passion was awarded two California Documentary Project grants by Cal Humanities, ITVS Diversity Development Fund, ITVS Open Call funding, Latino Public Broadcasting Public Media funding, and Firelight Media Next Step funding. She has directed and produced two short documentaries for Field of Vision: Hopewell (2016), featured in The New Yorker magazine website, and Here I’ll Stay (2017) for the Our 100 Days documentary series in partnership with Firelight Media.

Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, Raquel Cepeda is a writer, director, producer, and author. Cepeda’s latest film, the award-winning La Madrina: The [Savage] Life of Lorine Padilla is streaming on Showtime. Directed, written, and produced by Cepeda, the documentary follows a beloved South Bronx matriarch and former “First Lady” of the Savage Skulls gang as she struggles to remain visible in a rapidly gentrifying community she helped rebuild in the 1980s. Employing rich never-before-seen archives of the borough that gifted the world both salsa and hip-hop culture, we will go on a complicated and, at times, surreal journey through five decades of Bronx history and resilience in La Madrina’s own words. Cepeda’s documentary film, “Some Girls,” focuses on a group Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, the white supremacist narratives about American history they’ve been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. Cepeda’s first documentary feature, “Bling: A Planet Rock,” is about American hip-hop’s obsession with blinging and how that intersected itself into the decade-long blood-diamond conflict. Cepeda is currently developing several documentary and narrative projects under her production shingle, Resurgent Pictures.