Executive Producer/Director

Crystal Renée Emery has accumulated more than twenty-five years professional experience in the entertainment industry, having produced, written, directed and worked on productions throughout the United States and Europe. She polished her craft under the tutelage of industry giant Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem) and is one of a select group of young directors to work extensively with directing icon Lloyd Richards (Piano Lesson). She is a published children’s author.

Consulting Producer

Pat Bates brings over twenty years of producing experience to the project. As a freelancer, she has produced for Harpo Studios (The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Dr. Phil Show), Lifetime Television (What Should You Do?) , TVOne (Behind the Scenes with Michelle Singletary) and KCET ( A Place of Our Own and Los Ninos en Su Casa). Pat has also been a staff producer at Dateline NBC, CNN Productions, Fox News Productions and WCVB-TV Boston. Pat's work has earned nine regional Emmy nominations, two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.

Advisor and Production Supervisor

St. Clair Bourne had, over the past thirty-five years, produced, directed, and written some forty-five film productions. These included documentaries for HBO, PBS, NBC, BBC and National Geographic, as well as work on his own independent productions. The feature-length documentary he produced, Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Park, was broadcast by HBO. With actor Wesley Snipes as narrator and executive producer, St. Clair directed John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk and Paul Robeson: Here I Stand!, a two-hour documentary for the American Masters PBS series. He also was a co-producer on an HBO dramatic feature Rebound, the true story of playground basketball legend Earl “The Goat” Manigault as well as Woodie King’s independent theatrical feature The Long Night. St. Clair had recently been the executive producer for two productions—Visitors, Melis Birder’s documentary about the family and friends of the incarcerated, and Filiberto: Dead or Alive, about the Puerto Rican nationalist Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Bourne himself was lately in post-production on a film about an 86-year-old veteran photographer Ernest Withers and a documentary series about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party for PBS. This film is dedicated to the memory of St. Clair Bourne.

Director of Photography

Bobby Shepard is one of today’s most respected cinematographers and is credited as Director of Photography or Producer in over two hundred documentary, dramatic, commercial, and sports films. Bobby first earned praise for his camera work in Eyes on the Prize, the Emmy Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated PBS multi-part documentary on the civil rights movement. Since then he has been Director of Photography or Producer for virtually every major documentary film series on television, including With Bill Moyers on PBS, HBO’s America Undercover, PBS’s Life 360, ABCNews Nightline Up-Close, A&E Biography, and The American Experience on PBS.

Editor

K. A. Miille brings tremendous experience in editing documentary, dramatic, and advertising projects. Her work in the documentary genre includes the critically acclaimed Still, The Children Are Here produced by Mira Nair, HBO’s Emmy-nominated Half Past Autumn, The Life and Works of Gordon Parks produced by St. Clair Bourne, and Sidewalk, based on Mitchell Duneier's book and directed by Academy Award nominee Barry Alexander Brown. Most recently she completed work on the environmentally charged documentary Return to Penguin City, a film that charts global warming’s effects on Antarctica’s ecology. The film will air on The Discovery Channel’s Wild Kingdom series. Kim has also worked on feature films with notable directors and producers including Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee. With Spike Lee she has collaborated on the Peabody Award-winning A Huey P. Newton Story, on Miracle’s Boys, and on the soon to be released crime thriller, You’re Nobody ‘til Somebody Kills You.

Composer

Bill Toles is a musician, producer, filmmaker and sound designer. In film, he has scored several recent documentaries including Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, produced for PBS/American Masters and premiered February 1999. Directed by St. Clair Bourne, this film won the Strand Award for Best Documentary from the International Documentary Association. Another of Bill’s projects, Innocent Until Proven Guilty, directed by Kirsten Johnson, was invited to the 1999 Berlin Film Festival and won an Honorable Mention at the 1999 Urban World Film Festival. Innocent can be seen on the HBO Signature channel. He has also mixed sound for and contributed to the score of the documentary Hughes' Dream Harlem, directed by Jamal Joseph, which debuted on the Black Starz Movie Channel and was recently picked up by PBS. He contributed the sound design for the award-winning short Like Twenty Impossibles by Annemarie Jacir (2003), which was invited to the 2003 Cannes Film Festival as an Official Selection of The Cinefoundation, as well as being nominated as a regional finalist in the 2003 Student Academy Awards. He recently wrapped production as sound designer/sound mixer on Kathleen Foster’s documentary Afghan Women: A History of Struggle. For the theater he did sound design and was one of several composers with Sekou Sundiata's blessing the boats which toured continuously for five years, and has contributed as a composer to 51st Dream State by Mr. Sundiata which made its debut at BAM in 2006.

Medical Consultant

Dr. Bert Petersen is a breast cancer surgeon of national renown. His expertise grounds the film’s contents in the realities of medical care as practiced by physicians in this country. Dr. Petersen has been honored with many distinguished awards for his work in the community and for educating minority women about the importance of early detection and prevention of breast cancer. These include the National Cancer Institute/National Black Leadership Initiative on Cancer’s Unsung Hero Award, the WNBA and National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations’ Breast Health Hero 2000 Award, and the Networks Journal’s 40 Under 40 Achievement Award. He was named to the 2001 Hall of Fame in New York magazine’s “Best Doctors of New York,” cited as one of the “100 Best Black Doctors in the United States” by Black Enterprise magazine, chosen as “Top Doctor” for Redbook magazine, and selected as one of the top surgeons in the United States by The Consumer’s Research Council of America.

Project Consultant and Outreach Coordinator

Ms. Michelle Materre’s professional background spans more than 25 years experience as film producer, writer, arts administrator, outreach/distribution/marketing specialist and college professor. She was a founding partner of KJM3 Entertainment Group, the company responsible for marketing the successful theatrical release of Daughters of the Dust, the highly acclaimed film by Julie Dash, as well as L’Homme Sur Les Quais (The Man By The Shore) by Raoul Peck. Michelle continues to serve as an independent media consultant to filmmakers and film/video organizations on issues related to strategy, fundraising, distribution, marketing, outreach, and programming and production issues. She has advised award-winning independent filmmakers and noteworthy film projects such as Sisters in Law by Kim Longinotto, released by Women Make Movies; The Boys of Baraka by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, released by ThinkFilms; Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice by Stanley Nelson; Chisholm ’72—Unbought & Unbossed by Shola Lynch; the Channel Thirteen/WNET’s national series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow; COLORVISION for American Public Television; West 47th Street by Bill Lichtenstein and June Peoples; Love and Diane, by Jennifer Dworkin; and Ralph Bunche:The Odyssey Continues by William Greaves, among others. Ms. Materre is currently an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City, and formerly on the Board of Directors of New York Women in Film and Television.