Description
Presented by Bay Area Women Directors’ Collective
This workshop will help filmmakers embed concepts of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging across our making practices. Panelists include Emily Cohen Ibañez, CB Smith Dall, and Florencia Manovil in conversation with moderator Dawn Valadez. These filmmakers will share their experiences and strategies for building and maintaining healthy productions that incorporate mentorship, co-creation, and provide portable skills especially for BIPOC, LGBTQ, women, and non-binary people. Attendees will break into small groups and reconvene to share ways they currently integrate DEIB into their work and/or to imagine tangible new/additional practices toward greater effective inclusion.
This workshop will help filmmakers and funders embed concepts of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging across our making practices.
All attendees and staff will be required to show proof of vaccination, masks are also required for indoor sessions. Please click here to see our full BAMMS 2022 COVID protocol.
Register for our free SATURDAY PASS to get access to this and all other BAMMS sessions on Saturday, June 4
Bios
The Bay Area Women Directors’ Collective is an inclusive community of women feature film and television directors who meet regularly to share resources, collaborate on projects and build an environment in which to make their films.
DAWN VALADEZ (Moderator)
Dawn Valdez is a queer, Xicana, feminista, filmmaker, social worker, artist, youth advocate, resource wrangler, and impact strategist. Dawn Produced/ Co-directed THE PUSHOUTS (with Katie Galloway, 2018) and Directed/Produced the award-winning documentary GOING ON 13 (with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, 2008). She’s a consulting producer on Manzanar, Diverted (Ann Kaneko, 2021), producer on Vivien’s Wild Ride, co-producer on the upcoming Hummingbirds project, and an advisor on a number of other projects. She’s been awarded numerous honors, including the Al Bendich Berkeley Film Foundation Award (2017), and the Imagen’s Best Documentary Award (2018). Dawn was a recipient of the See It, Be It Filmmaker Fellowship (2020) from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and the Media/ Bentonville Film Foundation. Dawn is a consulting producer on a number of projects in development, production, post-production, and impact/distribution stages. She’s raised resources for youth and social service programs, designed youth programs, AmeriCorps programs, and health clinics, and consulted on capital campaigns. Dawn is a member of the Bay Area Women Directors’ Collective, Film Fatales, and Brown Girls Doc Mafia. She currently is the Director of Youth and Artistic Development and Co-Director with Rodrigo Reyes of the Media Maker Fellows at BAVC Media in the SF Bay Area.
Emily Cohen Ibañez (Panelist)
Emily Cohen Ibañez is a Colombian-American filmmaker based in Oakland who earned her doctorate in Anthropology (2011) at New York University. Her film work pairs lyricism with social activism, advocating for labor, environmental, and health justice. As a video journalist her work is regularly commissioned by The Intercept, The Guardian, and Independent Lens. Her award winning feature documentary, FRUITS OF LABOR had its World Premiere at SXSW 2021 and broadcast on PBS POV | American Documentary.
Florencia Manóvil (Panelist)
Florencia Manóvil is a queer Latina indie writer-director based in Oakland, California. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Manóvil moved to the US at age 18 to pursue film at Emerson College.
She was voted “Best Filmmaker of the East Bay” in 2015, after the release of her web series DYKE CENTRAL, which was lauded by press and fans alike for its then-groundbreaking diverse representation of LGBTQ characters. Other credits include feature debut FIONA’S SCRIPT (2009, 89m) and ENCUENTRO (2017, 16m), both of which screened at a variety of festivals in the US and abroad.
Manóvil is currently developing an ambitious series which explores the complexities of building the elusive equitable society, and has two feature scripts seeking funding—one, a queer wedding ensemble; the other, a social justice-themed drama.
Additionally, Manóvil has been crafting a trilogy of shorts which explore the elements—water, air, earth, and fire—as expressed through four very different women. Of these, she finished SOLSTICE (36m), which tackles issues of parenting, trauma, feminist community, and safe spaces, before the pandemic. (She intends to complete the trilogy by 2023.) Her most recent short, the intergenerational slice-of-life FROM X TO Z (11m), started its festival run in April 2022.
Niema Jordan (Panelist)
Niema Jordan is a journalist and filmmaker from Oakland, Calif. Her passion for storytelling led her to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Jordan’s early career was spent in New York at ESSENCE magazine. She returned to the Bay Area for graduate school and received her Master of Public Health and Master of Journalism from Cal.
In recent years, Jordan has continued to write for national publications including Shondaland, The Crisis and Glamour, while working in documentary film. Her production credits include The Chosen Life (associate producer), Fatherless (associate producer), Bobby Kennedy for President (researcher), The Me You Can’t See (story producer), and Eyes On The Prize: Hallowed Ground (story producer).
She is currently a producer at Trilogy Films and an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University. Jordan serves on the Board of Directors of Oakland Kids First and is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
CB Smith-Dahl (Panelist)
CB Smith-Dahl is a Director and Camerawoman. She has degrees from Spelman College and USC's School of Cinematic Arts and mentors diverse young filmmakers.
She runs her own production company, Together Pictures Incorporated, where she's created hundreds of fiction and non-fiction social media videos for clients.
As a Director of Photography, she's lensed numerous documentaries for other filmmakers including "Clarissa's Battle," Google's "Class of Covid," and "Teacher Like Me" - my work in progress! CB is known for verité work and for making folks feel comfortable with cameras.
She did all this while raising two awesome twin girls.
