OUR CATALOG

Rob Epstein

After taking a bus from New York City to San Francisco at age 19, Rob Epstein answered a classified ad seeking a production assistant on a documentary in early development and met his mentor Peter Adair, thus beginning his filmmaking career. Rob quickly rose to co-director, with the other members of the Mariposa Film Group. The film became the landmark documentary WORD IS OUT, released in theaters in 1977, and recently restored for DVD.

In addition to his Oscars for THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK and COMMON THREADS, Rob has received several Peabody and Emmy Awards, and Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships. In 2008, Rob was recognized with the Pioneer Award from the International Documentary Association for distinguished lifetime achievement. He has also received achievement awards from Frameline (1990) and Outfest (2000). Rob and Jeffrey were Sundance Screenwriting Fellows in 2009 with the screenplay for HOWL.

In addition to his filmmaking career, Rob is a professor at California College of the Arts, where he also serves as chair of the Film program. He has been a visiting professor at the Graduate Film Program at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. He currently serves on the Sundance Institute's Board of Trustees as well as the board of the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where he currently serves on the Board of Governors and chairs the Documentary Branch. (8/14)

Frances Reid

Frances Reid has been producing, directing, and shooting documentary films for over 30 years. Her production with Deborah Hoffmann was Long Night's Journey Into Day: South Africa’s search for Truth & Reconciliation. It won the Grand Jury Award for best Documentary at Sundance 2000, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 and a DGA award in 2002, and has been exhibited at festivals worldwide, including the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2000 where it won the "In the Spirit of Freedom" award.

In 1995 Frances produced and directed Skin Deep, a film exploring race relations on college campuses. It was broadcast nationally on PBS and is now in use by nearly 2,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. In 1994, she received an Academy Award nomination for her documentary short Straight from the Heart. Additional producing and directing credits include such films as the groundbreaking documentary on Lesbian mothers and child custody, In the Best Interests of the Children (1977), a Blue Ribbon Winner at the American Film Festival. Her film The Faces of AIDS (1992) won a First Place at the Black Filmmakers‚ Hall of Fame. Her cinematography credits include The Times of Harvey Milk, Visions of the Spirit, The Ride to Wounded Knee, Reno’s Kids, and scores of other award-winning documentaries including Deborah Hoffmann’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.

Frances has traveled widely to speak and lecture with her films and on filmmaking and cinematography. Most recently she served on the Grand Jury for the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. She is also the recipient of the James Phelan Art Award in Video. Frances is one of the original members of Iris Films, founded in 1975.

Frances' most recent projects are Happy, a documentary on the science of happiness, and Rainy Season, a short documentary. (8/14)

Greta Schiller

Greta Schiller is an award-winning independent producer/director of documentary films and the co-founder of Jezebel Productions, a women’s nonprofit production company since 1985. Over the first three decades of her career, her work focused on unearthing lost histories of marginalized groups and writing their experiences into the cultural narrative. For her films BEFORE STONEWALL, INTERNATIONAL SWEETHEARTS OF RHYTHM, TINY & RUBY: HELL DIVIN' WOMEN, PARIS WAS A WOMAN, and THE MAN WHO DROVE WITH MANDELA, among others, she has received two Emmy Awards, the first US/UK Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Film, Audience Awards for Best Film at numerous festivals from Berlin to Paris to Seattle, and artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

With these classic documentary films now screening in retrospectives around the world, Greta has turned her attention to films about science, society and the environment. She produced NO DINOSAURS IN HEAVEN, an essay film about Creationists earning science degrees in order to sneak the teaching of religion into American public schools, and THE MARION LAKE STORY, which follows the largest community-run ecological restoration project in New York State. Her current film, BELLS OF AZABA, supported in part by a Global Fulbright Award, tells a tale of epic proportions set in an ecological reserve on the Spanish/Portuguese border. Greta is based in NYC and holds dual UK/USA citizenship. (6/19)

Lucy Winer

Lucy Winer, director, writer and producer, has focused on issues of social concern throughout her career. Her credits include the critically-acclaimed feature about sexism in America, RATE IT X; the first of its kind, Emmy nominated documentary about lesbian and gay seniors, SILENT PIONEERS; and the ground-breaking, four-part public television series, POSITIVE: LIFE WITH HIV. Recently she directed the PSA campaign for the UN Refugee Agency's Aid Darfur campaign, featuring Meryl Streep and Tony Bennett as celebrity spokespeople. Winer's work has been called “warm, witty and genuinely touching” by the L.A. Times; “immensely affecting” by the Village Voice; “hilarious” by the Hollywood Reporter; “intriguing, often hair-raising” by the New York Times; “produced with humor, insight and irony” by Variety. With Karen Eaton, Winer produced the award winning, ITVS documentary, GOLDEN THREADS, about ninety-three-year-old lesbian activist and organizer, Christine Burton, which aired on POV. She is currently in post production on KINGS PARK, a documentary feature which takes an inside look at public mental health care in America through the story of a single abandoned institution, Kings Park State Hospital. (3/10)