The Art of the Pitch

Catherine Eaton is a director, writer and actor. Her debut feature, The Sounding, starring Harris Yulin (Training Day, Ozark) and Frankie Faison (The Wire, Silence of the Lambs), has won two-dozen awards on the festival circuit (including four Festival Grand Prizes) recently sold to HBO for international release, myCinema for North American theatrical release, and Giant Pictures for North American digital release. Catherine and The Sounding are the subject of a branded mini-doc by Stella Artois currently running on Hulu. Catherine was chosen for Tribeca’s “Through Her Lens” Lab and Grant, and was selected as a Shadowing Director for Show Runner Ryan Murphy’s Half Program on the hit Fox show 9-1-1. Her newest series Breaking News – based on her personal experience working with freelance news crews in conflict zones – was selected for IFP’s Independent Film Week Project Forum. Catherine shares an Emmy with the production team on The Human Toll of Ethanol for Bloomberg TV, and did freelance production work for various news crews for five years. As an actor, she’s been seen on Broadway, TV and film, and is currently nominated for a Helen Hayes Award. Catherine teaches The Art of the Pitch, Screen Directing and Screenwriting at Harvard, and coaches clients privately on pitching. She has an undergraduate degree in International Law from Cornell University and an MFA from the Univ of MN / Guthrie. Her father is from Paraguay, and her mother is French-American.

Deborah Goodwin is a writer-director-producer whose work in film and television began as a Development Executive for Sanford-Pillsbury Productions (Desperately Seeking Susan, River’s Edge, How to Make an American Quilt). Deborah’ Urbanworld Film Festival, Best Screenplay win for her darkly provocative family drama Cherry’s launched her filmmaking path. She has written for Emmy-winning and Independent Spirit Award nominated Producers, and for shows like the cult favorite horror series Tales from The Cryptkeeper. She is a Film Independent and IFP lab fellow, best known for her horror fable Vampires in Venice, her Icelandic noir Snaeland which she co-wrote and produced premiered at The Vail Film Festival and screens in the Brooklyn Film Festival this week! Deborah is a Sundance Collab advisor and screenwriting professor at Brooklyn College, and a newly minted co-creator, writer of the noir-crime-thriller series Hot Freeze.

Jessica Sanders is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and award-winning commercial director. Steve Jobs hand picked Jessica to direct Apple’s iPad launch campaign. Her Sony “Make Believe” film won the prestigious Young Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Jessica’s TV pilot Embrace won the 2020 SXSW Film Festival Grand Jury Award. Jessica’s VFX heavy short film End of the Line, premiered at Sundance, adapted from acclaimed writer Aimee Bender’s surrealist short story exploring power and its abuse, about a man who buys a tiny man in pet store. Staring Simon Helberg (Big Bang Theory), Brett Gelman (Stranger Things), the film is on TNT and Refinery29 for their Shatterbox Film Series. Jessica is directing and producing Picking Cotton, a narrative scripted feature film based on the best-selling book. Picking Cotton is based on a story in her Sundance-winning documentary After Innocence, a feature documentary film about innocent men wrongfully convicted of crimes, cleared by DNA evidence and their struggle to reenter society after spending decades in prison. The film was a game-changer in criminal justice reform and premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize. Jessica directed the award-winning Bunion, a short romantic comedy with Alia Shawkat, Michaela Watkins and Avi Rothman. Jessica’s latest feature documentary March of the Living, is a about the last generation of Holocaust survivors returning to the sites of the Holocaust in Poland with teenagers from around the world.

Kate Tsang is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and director. She’s created award-winning shorts (So You’ve Grown Attached, Welcome to Doozy) and written for fantastic shows (Adventure Time: Distant Lands, Steven Universe Future). Her magical coming-of-age feature, Marvelous and the Black Hole, stars Miya Cech (The Astronauts, Always Be My Maybe) and Rhea Perlman (Cheers, Mathilda). And, was a recipient of a $1 million grant from Tribeca Film Institute/AT&T’s Untold Stories pitch contest. Kate likes cheese, tea, cheese tea, and stories about kind weirdos.