Team

Producer/Director/Writer Beth Harrington is an Emmy award–winning independent filmmaker whose work focuses on American culture, history, art, and music. Her film Welcome to the Club—The Women of Rockabilly (funded by ITVS) about the pioneering women of rock and roll was honored with a 2003 Grammy nomination and was seen on PBS stations across the country. In 2014, her film The Winding Stream: The Carters, the Cashes and the Course of Country Music premiered at SXSW and won numerous festival awards including many Best Documentary laurels, as well as Critics’ Picks from both the New York Times and the Village Voice. Harrington has also worked with public television stations WGBH in Boston and Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland, producing, directing, researching, and writing shows for local and national broadcast. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Communication from Syracuse University and a Master’s in American Studies from University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Consulting Producer Francene Blythe-Lewis is the Executive Director of Vision Maker Media, empowering Native filmmakers to tell their stories. Prior to joining Vision Maker, she was the Director of Programs for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, overseeing the strategic development, implementation and evaluation of public programs, outreach and funding opportunities. She has also served at National Geographic and was the Director of their All Roads Film Project, in addition to producing the female filmmaker series Women Hold Up Half the Sky. She has a broad background in project management and arts and cultures, having worked for the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Francene received her MA in Theater Management at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and her BA in Theater from Doane College. As a proud Native woman, she is Eastern Band Cherokee and Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota from her father and Navajo from her mother. Francene has received numerous awards and recognition for championing cultural diversity and equity in arts and community leadership.

Co-Producer Hatsumi Asaka’s career spans more than 30 years. She has produced programming for dozens of TV series on six national Japanese networks. After graduating from Japan Journalist College, Hatsumi began as a writer and director on some 100 TV shows for Nippon TV, Tokyo Broadcasting System, TV Asahi, and TV Tokyo. She later moved to NYC to serve as program director at TV Japan, later becoming a producer-director for NHK covering news, documentaries and sports. Her New York segments were a staple of NHK’s popular morning show “Ohayo Nippon.” In more recent years she has produced public affairs shows including NHK’s Star Women, as well as English-language content for NHK World-Japan. Most recently she served as Associate Producer on the documentary Tokyo Hula and as Assistant Technical Director at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Susan Walsh has been the Executive Director of the Center for Independent Documentary for the past forty years. Over 250 documentary films have been produced in association with independent filmmakers during her tenure, and have been screened nationally on public and cable television, as well as theatrically released and marketed to educational institutions worldwide. As the person responsible for the administration of the organization, her work includes financial management of the organization and its programs, development, and public relations, as well as providing creative and technical support to CID filmmakers. Recent CID films include the 2021 Oscar nominated Crip Camp, the 2021 Emmy award winning Ernie and Joe, and the 2022 Oscar nominated documentary Ascension. Her past work includes four years as the New England field organizer for the Independent Television Service Community Connections Project; and screen credits as co-producer on documentaries for public television with filmmaker Fred Simon. She has been recognized by Women in Film and Video with an “Image Award” for her work with independent filmmakers.

Co-Editor Kyung Lee is based in Oakland, California. Her editing credits include Navajo Math Circle (PBS), 2E: Twice Exceptional, Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Conjecture (PBS), Big Joy: The Adventure of James Broughton (SXSW, Tribeca) and The Illness and the Odyssey (Mill Valley, Guam International), as well as multi-media projects and commercial productions. Recent work includes two films for Gemma Cubero del Barrio: Ottomaticake, a story about Hawaiian cheesecake impresario and punk rocker Otto, and Homecoming, the story of two women’s pilgrimage to a remote atoll in the Cook Islands. She’s also worked as editor and post-production manager at LinkTV, the national, independent TV channel. An ethnic Korean native of Yokohama, Kyung is fluent in both English and Japanese, and speaks Korean conversationally.

Co-Editor Emily von W. Gilbert first got her start in film in a production class with the legendary documentarian and media activist George Stoney at New York University. Since moving to Portland, Oregon Emily has been in great demand, working with a number of filmmakers including Irene Taylor-Brodsky on her HBO documentaries Open Your Eyes and Beware The Slenderman, Briar Levit on her film Graphic Means, Kristian St. Clair’s jazz music doc This is Gary McFarland, Beth Harrington’s music films The Winding Stream and The Musicianer, among many others. She is currently completing work on a feature documentary about the life of musician/producer/composer Jack Nitzsche.

Cinematographer Scott Ballard is well known for his work behind the camera but is also a talented director and producer. His most recently completed projects, Death on a Rock and North & Nowhere, have played at over 80 festivals worldwide, garnering dozens of awards. He holds an MFA in Film Production from Boston University and has been part of the film production scenes in New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Boston. He is in post-production on the documentary Mr. Immortal Jellyfish Man, the story of a Japanese scientist searching for the secret of eternal life.  Scott currently teaches filmmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Cinematographer Asia Brown began her artistic media career as a photographer in the music industry, largely shooting in live performance settings. Developing an ability to react to and capture a moment in an often uncontrollable setting has served her well in her film career, as both a First AC and DP on documentaries, short films, narrative features, music videos and commercials.  Notable work include the recent film festival hit, Alicia Rose’s feature debut A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, the Amazon Prime shows The Benefits of Gusbandry and Serial Killer Ted Bundy, the feature documentary-in-progress Stu for Silverton about American’s first openly transgender mayor, and music videos for Hozier, Laura Gibson, Buttons and Brass, Petunia and the Vipers and Jenny Don’t and The Spurs, and the award-winning coming of age comedy My Summer as a Goth, to name but a few.

Sound Designer Jordan Eusebio has contributed to over 100 films, including award-winning independent features and short productions alike that have appeared in film festivals that span the globe. Notable sound credits include sound design work on the drama Superfan, the short comedy Crouching Comic, the feature horror-comedy, It Cuts Deep, now streaming on Showtime and Shudder, the animated film Severance, and many others. A graduate of Chapman University with a BFA in Film Production, he is also a producer, director and writer of his own award-winning films, the most recent of which is Western Exit, about a father’s last attempt to bring together his three estranged daughters. Jordan is currently in development on Disappear, a historical drama that draws upon his Filipino heritage. Other recent work includes sound design on Beth Harrington’s music series, The Musicianer, and field sound recording on her documentary Beyond The Duplex Planet.

Second Unit DP/Gaffer Kevin Forrest was born in New Orleans and moved to Scotland at age ten. It was there that he began editing with two VCRs and a makeshift soundboard while also obliterating several home video cameras making skateboard videos. Lessons learned and numerous feature films and music videos later he is now a freelance Director, Cinematographer and independent filmmaker living in Portland, Oregon. His film Evolution of Evil has won numerous festival awards including Best Director at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. He is also the award-winning DP of Scott Ballard’s feature Death on a Rock.  A member of the Great Notion Film Collective, Kevin is a professor at Portland Community College where he teaches Cinematography and Lighting, as well as Music Video Production.

Composer Mark Orton has written scores for numerous films—both documentary and narrative features—and is perhaps best known for his score for the Academy Award–nominated film Nebraska (2013). A recipient of a Sundance Composer Fellowship and nominee for Best New Composer by the International Film Music Critics Association, he has also provided the scores for People Places and Things, The Boxtrolls, Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl, 360 by Fernando Meirilles, and a 90th anniversary re-release of Buster Keaton’s The General, among many other films. Mark specializes in utilizing the instruments, music, and ambient sounds associated with a particular era and using these to create a fresh but still period-appropriate track for film.