Alysa Nahmias, Director, Writer, Producer
Alysa is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of AJNA. She directed and produced the Emmy-winning Art & Krimes by Krimes (2021) featuring artist Jesse Krimes and distributed by MTV Documentary Films, The New Bauhaus (2019) about visionary artist László Moholy-Nagy, and Unfinished Spaces (2011, co-directed with Benjamin Murray) about the Cuban National Art Schools, which won a 2012 Independent Spirit Award, was distributed by PBS and Netflix, and is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
As a producer, her work includes the Emmy-winning Wildcat directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Frost for Amazon Studios, and the Oscar-shortlisted Unrest directed by Jennifer Brea, which won an a Special Jury Award at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by Netflix and PBS Independent Lens. Her producing credits also include the scripted feature No Light and No Land Anywhere, directed by Amber Sealey with executive producer Miranda July (Jury Award winner, LA Film Festival 2016), and the documentaries A Decent Home, directed by Sara Terry (DOC NYC, Denver 2021); What We Left Unfinished, directed by Mariam Ghani (Berlinale, SFFILM 2019) distributed by Dekanalog and Criterion; I Didn’t See You There, directed by Reid Davenport (Sundance 2022); Weed and Wine (Hot Docs, Deauville 2020), directed by Rebecca Richman Cohen; and American Masters’ Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq directed by Nancy Buirski with creative advisor Martin Scorsese (NY Film Festival, Berlinale 2013).
Alysa has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine as an independent film innovator. She is a 2020 Film Independent Fellow and a 2019 Sundance Institute Momentum Fellow. She was the co-author of a Sundance Creative Distribution Case Study on Unrest. She holds degrees from New York University and Princeton University. Alysa is co-founder of FWD-Doc as an ally who is committed to advocating for disability rights and inclusion, and she is a member of the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Amanda Spain, Producer
Amanda has been producing and directing feature documentaries and television for over 15 years. In 2013, she founded Giving Voice Films. Recently Amanda produced the Emmy-winning Art & Krimes by Krimes, On the Divide (Tribeca 2021), After Antarctica (SFFILM 2021), Television Event (Tribeca 2020), and Bathtubs Over Broadway directed by Dava Whisenant, which premiered and won a Jury Award at Tribeca in 2018, with distribution by Focus Features and Netflix. She is an executive producer along with Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum of the Netflix Original documentary Pray Away (Telluride 2020) and JR’s Paper & Glue (Tribeca, MSNBC 2021). She previously produced and directed two short documentaries for ESPN's acclaimed 30 FOR 30 series: Wrestling the Curse and Son of South Sudan. She also produced and directed In Their Boots (exec. produced by Robert Greenwald), which was nominated for an IDA award. Amanda's work has appeared on A&E, PBS, MTV, HLN and The Sundance Channel and her films have premiered at festivals around the world. She was a 2016-2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow.
Benjamin Murray, Producer
Benjamin’s feature directing debut, Unfinished Spaces, co-directed with Alysa Nahmias, won a 2012 Independent Spirit Award and screened in festivals and competitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Palm Springs Int'l Film Festival, and the Miami International Film Festival. Murray started his post-production company, The Room, in 2010 and served as Vice President of Creative Services at Technicolor-Postworks in New York. His regular clients include major networks and numerous independent production companies. Murray’s recent projects include: the Emmy-winning Art & Krimes by Krimes, the Sundance Audience Award-winning film Crown Heights, directed by Matt Ruskin; Manchester by the Sea, directed by Kenneth Lonergan; Her, directed by Spike Jonze; The Giver, directed by Phillip Noyce; No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese; Capitalism: A Love Story, directed by Michael Moore; The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, directed by Thom Zimny; Client 9, directed by Alex Gibney; Reagan, directed by Eugene Jarecki; Fog of War, directed by Errol Morris; My Architect, directed by Nathaniel Kahn; Born Into Brothels, directed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman; and Once In a Lifetime, directed by Paul Crowder. Murray holds a BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Marie Hinson, Cinematographer
Marie is an artist and cinematographer. Originally from the mountains of rural Appalachia, she now works and lives in New York. Marie’s performances, installations, and experimental films have shown in festivals and several group shows. In 2019, she debuted new site-specific performance work, “Stop on the object / move on the image” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is an alum of the artist collective Vox Populi. Recently, Marie was a cinematographer and associate producer on Queer Genius which features visionary queer artists Eileen Myles, Barbara Hammer, Black Quantum Futurism and Jibz Cameron. She was the cinematographer for Alysa Nahmias’ Emmy-winning documentary about artist Jesse Krimes, Art & Krimes by Krimes. She also shot a two year long documentary short series for Comcast about Philadelphia based visual artists. Other clients have included PBS, NBCUniversal, Facebook, Verizon, LogoTV, and Bustle. Marie’s directorial debut, Frank Bey: You’re Going to Miss Me, is supported by fellowships through Chicken and Egg Pictures and the IFP Documentary Lab.
Miranda Yousef, Editor, Writer
Miranda Yousef, ACE, is a feature documentary editor with credits on films that have played Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, PBS and HBO. Recent credits include: Worn Stories series on Netflix with executive producers Jenji Kohan and Morgan Neville; Phoenix Rising the HBO miniseries about Evan Rachel Wood with director Amy Berg; Daughters of the Sexual Revolution, which premiered at SXSW 2018; The New Bauhaus, directed by Alysa Nahmias, which premiered as the Opening Night Selection at the NY Architecture and Design Film Festival and at the Chicago International Film Festival episodes of CNN’s Emmy nominee “The Seventies” and HBO’s “State of Play”; Academy Award winner Jessica Yu’s 2014 film Misconception; Inequality for All, winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival; Burn, which won the Audience Award at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival; and Academy Award winner Morgan Neville’s Troubadours, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, played on PBS’s “American Masters,” and was nominated for an Emmy award. Other projects have included Academy Award nominee Kirby Dick’s 2009 release Outrage, 2008 IDA Audience Award winner Food Fight, and 2008 Sundance Film Festival favorite I.O.U.S.A. Miranda studied documentary filmmaking with Marina Goldovskaya at UCLA, and won the DGA Award for Best Director, Women’s Category, for her graduate thesis film.
Kristen Nutile, Editor
Kristen is a documentary editor and filmmaker based in New York City. She recently edited the Academy Award-nominated Netflix Original documentary Heroin(e) and the feature documentaries Art & Krimes by Krimes and The Business of Birth Control. Her editing credits also include Unfinished Spaces, which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and is screening as part of the prestigious Sundance Film Forward 2012 and won an Independent Spirit Award, as well as Starboard Light, Invitation to Dance, Every Day is a Holiday (an ITVS Lincs Production), From Prison to Home, and Speak Out. She holds co-editing credits on Writ Writer for PBS and The House of Suh. In addition, she was a contributing editor on Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey and Calypso Rose: Lioness of the Jungle. She has also edited for Maysles Films Inc. and Human Rights Watch, and her work has appeared on Showtime, Ovation, and PBS. Kristen has directed nine documentaries, which have shown all over the world including the Sundance Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, and she is the recipient of the Albert Maysles Award for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking. She holds Master's degrees in both Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University and Biology from San Francisco State University.
Benedict Kasulis, Editor
Benedict a graduate of the Florida State University Film School and has been editing in New York and Los Angeles for 16 years. His documentary feature credits include Just Like Us, 14 Minutes from Earth, and Tradition is a Temple. His documentary series work includes QB1, Murder Mountain and Warriors of Liberty City. He won five New York Emmys for his work on subway musicians and teen poetry slams. Benedict measures the importance of a project by whether or not it is something he would be excited to show his three-year-old daughter when she is old enough. He strives to make work good enough to overcome her initial eye-rolling reluctance.
Molly Schwartz, Animation
Molly Schwartz shows her animated videos, drawings and interactive works in public art commissions, installations, exhibitions and festivals worldwide. She art directs, designs, animates, composites, codes, and creates special effects. Molly was the lead designer and animator for the documentary film Watchers of the Sky (directed by Edet Belzberg), which won a Sundance Special Jury Award for Animation. Recent projects include designing Seeing with Sound, including projection, animation, lighting, and physical installation, a part of the Unseen Oceans Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton (Rory Kennedy), Rancher Farmer Fisherman (Susan Froemke, John Hoffman), CANCER: Emperor of All Maladies (Barak Goodman and Ken Burns), CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap (Robin Hauser Reynolds), Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (Stanley Nelson), A Good Job: Stories from the FDNY (Liz Garbus), Back on Board (Cheryl Furjanis) and The Abominable Crime (Micah Fink) and many more. Schwartz is an adjunct professor teaching at NYU's ITP.
Amanda Jones, Composer
Amanda Jones is an Emmy- and Grammy- Nominated Composer who is rapidly becoming a standout voice amongst a new generation of television and film composers. Her recent credits include Apple TV+’s documentary series Home for which she received her first Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Music Composition For A Documentary Series or Special . Jones has the distinction of being the first African American female to be nominated in the Primetime Emmy score category. Her television credits also include CW’s upcoming series Naomi, HBO Max & Sony Pictures Animation’s series, Young Love, Nat Geo’s current series, Nat Geo Presents Impact with Gal Gadot, Freeform’s Good Trouble, Love In The Time Of Corona, HBO Max's Adventure Time Distant Lands: Obsidian and Together Again, OWN’s anthology series Cherish the Day, produced by Ava DuVernay and starring Xosha Roquemore and Alano Miller; Showtime’s Twenties, produced by Lena Waithe and starring Jonica T. Gibbs, Christina Elmore and Gabrielle Graham; HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show, produced by Robin Thede and Issa Rae, starring Quinta Brunson and Gabrielle Dennis; CW/Refinery 29’s comedy series Shitty Boyfriends, by executive producer Lisa Kudrow; and Eric Wareheim's Adult Swim comedy series Beef House, for which she wrote the main title theme, Topic’s mini-series Passing: A Family in Black & White; and many more. In addition to her television credits, her short and feature film credits include the upcoming HBO Max Documentary Feature “Dreamland: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street,” Duplass Bros’ produced feature “7 Days,” Sujata Day’s upcoming feature film, Definition Please, starring Levar Burton; Andre Hormann’s documentary feature Ringside, which premiered at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival; Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan’s Oscar-nominated documentary short St. Louis Superman.
MTV Documentary Films presents
an AJNA Production
in association with Wavelength and Giving Voice Films
Featuring performances by musicians from Musicambia.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS:
Jenifer Westphal
Joe Plummer
Patty Quillin
Hallee Adelman & Ivy Herman
Sheila Nevins
CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS:
Nion McEvoy & Leslie Berriman
Sheri Sobrato-Brisson
Ruth Ann Harnisch
MADE WITH SUPPORT FROM:
Sundance Institute Momentum Fellowship
New York State Council on the Arts
Meadow Fund
The Harnisch Foundation
LEF Foundation
Wavelength
World of HA
Wyncote Foundation
FISCAL SPONSORSHIP:
International Documentary Association and Women Make Movies