Film Team

Bestor Cram (Co-Director, Co-Producer)

As the leader of the organization and a participant in various capacities for other NEH funded projects, Bestor is a natural for fulfilling the role of project leader. He has worked with the entire team on many different productions and can best serve the project by administering and implementing the grant in order to get the proposed production ready for its next stage. Bestor founded Northern Light in 1982, and has built it into one of the premiere documentary production companies producing works ranging from broadcast documentaries, to historical, dramatic and educational media, to Fortune 500 image pieces. As a cinematographer, Bestor has filmed and videotaped for all the major networks. Bestor has won many grants and prizes for his work both at Northern Light, and in his independent work. His film, “Unfinished Symphony”, premiered at Sundance in the Documentary Competition in 2001 and has won top honors at film festivals around the world.

Sam Pollard (Executive Producer)

Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director whose work spans almost thirty years. He recently completed as Producer/Director a 90-minute documentary titled August Wilson :The Ground On Which I Stand for the PBS series American Masters.

His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton's Blackside production Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads. For one of his episodes in this series, he received an Emmy. Eight years later, he returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton's last documentary series I'll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community. For the series, Mr. Pollard received The George Peabody Award.

Between 1990 and 2010, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee's films: Mo' Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, and Bamboozled. As well, Mr. Pollard and Mr. Lee co-produced a number of documentary productions for the small and big screen: Spike Lee Presents Mike Tyson, a biographical sketch for HBO for which Mr. Pollard received an Emmy, Four Little Girls, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award and When The Levees Broke, a four part documentary that won numerous awards, including a Peabody and three Emmy Awards. Five years later 2010 he co-produced and supervised the edit on the follow up to Levees If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise.

Two years later Mr. Pollard completed as a producer/director Slavery By Another Name a 90-minute documentary for PBS that was in competition at the Sundance Festival in 2012 that same year he completed editing on the feature length documentary Venus and Serena that was televised nationally on Showtime.

Dan Mooney (editor)

Daniel Mooney is a film-maker, editor, and designer. He has previous worked as an editor includes Standard Operating Procedure, Whitey Bulger; The Making of a Monster, and The Confessions of the Boston Strangler. His work as a designer includes two books by Errol Morris; Believing is Seeing and A Wilderness of Error. Born in Lawrence Massachusetts, Mr. Mooney now lives with his wife and two children in Melrose Massachusetts. He currently teaches motion picture editing at Brandeis University and Boston University.

Judy Richardson

Judy Richardson as on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Georgia, Miss. and Lowndes Co., Alabama (1963-66); and ran the office for Julian Bond’s successful first campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives. She has been a producer
on numerous documentaries, including: the 14-hour series Eyes On The Prize, PBS’ Malcolm
X: Make It Plain, and all the videos for the “Little Rock 9” National Park Service Visitor
Center. She co-founded Drum & Spear Bookstore (Washington, DC), once the largest African American bookstore in the country,
and co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, which includes the memoirs of 52 SNCC women. She
is also on the Board of the SNCC Legacy Project, and on the editorial board of the SNCC / Duke University website: SNCCdigital.org. She lectures nationally about the Movement,
its history and values, and its relevance to issues we face today. In 2020 she will again co-direct an NEH 3-week teacher institute at Duke University, focused on grassroots organizing. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University and received an
honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College.

Malaika Woluchum (Associate Producer)

Malaika Woluchem, a Rochester native, has been a part of Northern Light Productions for the last eight months. A student at Northeastern University, she is a part of their Media Studies program. Already, she has worked in multiple capacities on documentary films for Northern Light including Circus Without Borders, and Beyond the Wall.

Rich Remsberg (Director Of Archival Research)

Rich Remsberg has 20 years of experience in the research field, and his professional focus has been archival research of footage, still photos, and other vintage media for films. With a background working on projects for PBS, The History Channel, and independent films, he has covered subjects ranging from John James Audubon and Woody Guthrie to the US Army’s secret biological warfare program and the history of the banjo. His interest in archival image research grew out of his experience as a photojournalist. Rich’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek.com, and The Christian Science Monitor, and he has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was on the professional staff at the Indiana University School of Journalism for six years and has served on the faculty of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center Field School.

Dick Lehr (Content Consultant)

Dick Lehr is a journalist and author, currently teaching media law and ethics, news writing, history and principles of journalism, and investigative reporting to undergraduate and graduate students in the Journalism Department of BU's College of Communication. Dick worked for the Boston Globe for 18 years, and was promoted to Special Projects Reporter, responsible for initiation of long-term reporting projects. He is the author of several books including the New York Times bestseller Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI and a Devil's Deal, and the Boston Globe bestseller The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide. Dick is the recipient of several prestigious journalism and book awards, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1997. Dick was a consultant for Dateline NBC on a program about FBI corruption surrounding the Boston gangster James J. "Whitey'' Bulger, as well as coverage of the 2008 murder trial of former FBI agent John J. Connolly.

Paul Miller Aka Dj Spooky (Original Music Composition And Performance)

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Metallica, Chuck D, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae. His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013.

In 2014, he was named National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He produced Pioneers of African American Cinema, a collection of the earliest films made by African American directors, released in 2015. Miller’s artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and; The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.

Lois Vossen (Executive Producer For Independent Lens)

Lois Vossen is the founding executive producer of Independent Lens, a multiplatform series on the PBS primetime schedule. The series broadcasts 22 original documentaries each season, produces short form digital programming, and docuseries. Independent Lens has received 19 Primetime and News & Documentary Emmy Awards, 19 Peabody Awards, 5 duPont-Columbia Journalism Awards, 9 Academy Award nominations, and was honored with the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017 International Documentary Association (IDA) Best Series Award. Vossen was Associate Managing Director of the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Labs previously, and has served on the jury of SXSW, DOC New Zealand, Toronto International Film Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Film Festival, among others. She represents the Documentary Peer Group on the Television Academy Board of Governors and is a member of the Film Academy (AMPAS) documentary branch. Independent Lens co-funded and co-produced documentaries include One Child Nation, Always in Season, Bedlam, I Am Not Your Negro, The Judge, TOWER, Trapped, (T)ERROR, The Invisible War, The House I Live In, Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution, The Trials of Muhammad Ali, among many others.

Susan Gray (Co-Director, Co-Producer)

Susan Gray has spent much of her working life making films about the African American experience in America. She co-directed Public Enemy, a documentary film about the Black Panthers that was broadcast on Showtime and throughout Europe, and shown in major film festivals in competition around the world. At the Columbia School of journalism she won the documentary film award for A Dream Deferred a film about Harlem’s gentrification, and spent two years as a field producer doing primary research in Anacostia—a predominantly African American section of Washington, D.C.—for the PBS documentary, Across the River with Hedrick Smith. She has studied and worked in Kenya and South Africa, and recently directed Circus Without Borders, which follows a Guinean and an Inuit circus troupes. Susan has a journalism degree from Columbia University, with a concentration in documentary film, and an MA from the Johns Hopkins School for International Studies with a concentration in Social Change and Development. While working in Europe, she was awarded the Prix Europa, Europe’s highest documentary prize, for a PBS documentary she directed called Citizen Berlusconi about Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s then prime minister. Her films have appears on PBS, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Arte, Showtime, in theaters, and television throughout the world.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Executive Producer)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co- authored nineteen books and created fourteen documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots, series three of which is currently in production. His six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, Professor Gates now serves as chairman of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co-founded in 2008, while overseeing the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection on his writings, was published.

The recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony’s Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012. He earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979.

Professor Gates has directed the W. E. B. Institute for African and African American Research—now the Hutchins Center—since arriving at Harvard in 1991, and during his first fifteen years on campus, he chaired the Department of Afro-American Studies as it expanded into the Department of African and African American Studies with a full-fledged doctoral program. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution.

Kwyn Bader (Writer)

Kwyn Bader, the screenwriter of Birth of a Movement, is also the writer and director of the SXSW Film Festival Winner for Best Feature Film, Loving Jezebel and screenwriter of the Ossie Davis narrated documentary film Tuskegee Airmen: American Heroes. He has written feature and TV screenplays for Hollywood studios including Paramount Pictures, Fox Searchlight and USA TV. Kwyn served as the story consultant on the Sundance Film Festival Winner for Best Feature Documentary, Alive Inside, and wrote the animated social action campaign film 60 Million to support the theatrical release of Participant Media’s documentary, He Named Me Malala. He is also a dedicated creative executive currently serving as the Global Director of Creative Strategy for ViacomCBS Consumer Products, helping translate shows and movies from iconic brands like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Paramount into products sold all over the world.

Matthew MacLean (Producer/Writer)

Matthew MacLean comes from 10 years of experience as a journalist, where he honed his tight writing style and meticulous editing skill. While continuing a freelance career in print, he has since concentrated on writing for the screen, while also utilizing his reporting skills for interviews and research as an associate producer. At Northern Light, Matthew has written dozens of grants, proposals and treatments for the internal development of television and museum media projects, including three films for PBS. He has also written script dialogue for reenactment videos featured at several museums, including the State of New York’s John Jay Historic Site, the Boston Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, and the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

Jesse Beecher (Cinematographer)

Jesse Beecher has worked as a cinematographer and associate producer at Northern Light Productions, on projects that have taken him to Guatemala, El Salvador, Estonia, and all over the United States. Recent cinematography projects include a three-day shoot accompanying a blind hiker up Mt. Washington on his mission to summit all 48 4,000 foot peaks in New Hampshire; several pieces for the Cyber Warfare exhibit at the International Spy Museum; and a film about Rosanne Cash recording her album The List. He is a graduate of Emerson College, where he studied Documentary Film Production.

Michael Curry Esq.

Michael Curry, Esq. is the past president of the Boston Branch of the NAACP (2011-2016). Mr. Curry has over twenty years of dedicated service to the NAACP on the city, state-area conference and national levels. Elected to the National NAACP Board of Directors in 2014, Mr. Curry also has also been chosen to serve on the National NAACP’s Executive Committee, as well as appointed to Chair the National Board’s Advocacy & Policy Committee and Vice-Chair the Political Action and Legislation Committee. He also serves on the Legal, Image Awards and Constitution Review committees. In 2017, he co-founded the National NAACP’s Next Generation Leadership Development Program, aimed at training the next generation of civil rights leaders. Today, over 225 young adults have completed the program, and many have assumed leadership roles in NAACP units and state conferences throughout the nation. Curry draws on his over twenty-five years of legislative, regulatory and public aﬀairs experience, as well as his work in civil rights, business and health law to advance the mission of the NAACP.

Mr. Curry serves as the Deputy CEO & General Counsel at Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, which represents 52 health centers, serving over 1 million patients out of over 300 practice sites throughout the state. He also serves on the boards of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network, and formerly Roxbury Community College, and serves as Adjunct Professor for the Suffolk University Moakley Center for Public Management. He has received numerous local and national awards for leadership and advocacy. Mr. Curry earned a Bachelor’s of Arts from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from New England School of Law, and later graduated from the inaugural class of the Executive Leadership Council’s Pipeline to Leadership Program.

Mr. Curry was raised by a single mother on welfare in Lenox Street Housing Projects in Boston and often says, “Where I’m from keeps where I am in perspective.” He is the father of three boys: Marcus (25), Michael Jr. (17) and Malcolm (11). In 2016, Michael was asked to play William Monroe Trotter, the African American newspaper editor and activist, in the documentary film Birth of a Movement – The Battle Against America’s First Blockbuster. William Monroe Trotter, the nearly forgotten editor of a Boston Black newspaper The Guardian, helped launch a nationwide movement in 1915 to ban Hollywood's first blockbuster movie, the controversial, silent film entitled The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith.

Julie Anderson (Executive Producer for WNET)

Julie Anderson is an Academy Award nominee, multiple Emmy, Peabody Award-winning Producer, and project manager who has worked with ESPN, WNET, HBO, CNN among others, and has consulted for the Tribecca Institute, Sundance Institute, Hot Docs, IDFA, the Discovery Campus in Berlin, and many other leading film festivals and institutions worldwide.

As a Development executive, Julie was the lead producer on ESPN’s Michael Vick Project, HBO Documentary films God is The Bigger Elvis & Miss You Can Do It (2012); and helped to launch the iReport Film Festival, CNN’s first online film festival in 2008. Her producing work on the PBS led to Peabody Award-winning projects The African Americans, Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates (2015) and Jazz Ambassadors (2018).

John Kusiak (Original Music Composition)

John Kusiak composes music for film, television and live performance. He has scored hundreds of projects, including feature films: Tabloid, Secrecy and The Fog of War (additional music), television documentaries for HBO (The Jinx), Netflix (Team Foxcatcher), PBS (American Experience) and IFC (First Person) and large-screen exhibitions (Yellowstone National Park and the Smithsonian). His score for Errol Morris’ “Tabloid” won the 2012 Cinema Eye Honors Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Score.

Other projects have included music for the opening films of two Academy Awards programs (2002 and 2007) and two seasons of First Person, a television series directed by Errol Morris and chosen by Time as one of the 10 best series of 2000. He has scored commercials for United Airlines, Quaker Oats and MasterCard, among others. John also writes music for live performance, including collaborations with Boston-based Prometheus Dance, whose Apokalypsis (2000-present) was selected by The Boston Globe as one of the 10 best dance performances of 2000. A full list of credits is available at kusiakmusic.com.

Outreach Team

With Generous support from

The MCMillan Stewart Foundation

The Hershey Family Foundation

Dolita Cathart

Dolita Cathart is a student of Boston history, and dedicated her PhD research to William Monroe Trotter and the evolving role and political transformation of Boston’s elite black community on the national stage. Cathcart’s earlier work on the civil rights movement of the 1960s in addition to her work on early 20th century elite black activists provides the bridge between the early development of a 20th century movement and the result of that evolving movement at mid-century. Her painstaking research has yielded colorful details that will help us bring Trotter and turn-of-the-20th-century Boston to life. 14 Birth of a Movement - Narrative | Center for Independent Documentary

Atiya Martin

Dr. Atyia Martin is the CEO and Founder of All Aces, Inc., an alternative to traditional diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting and professional development. Instead, All Aces is a Racial Equity Applied Learning [REAL] Partner for organizations: It's mission to activate consciousness, catalyze critical thinking, and transform capabilities that advance racial equity and build resilience. They offer practical professional, personal, and organizational development which includes their online learning community, IntentionallyAct.com. Additionally, Dr. Martin is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Northeastern University's Global Resilience Institute. She has 20 years of experience in resilience, applied learning, social and organizational equity, emergency management, public health, and intelligence.

Robert Bellinger

Robert Bellinger has a PhD from Boston College, and Med, from Harvard University and a BA from Amherst College. He is a professor at Suffolk University of African American and American History. He also teaches African diaspora studies, and the history and culture of Senegal. His research interests include late 19th century African American history, West African history and Culture, and West African drum traditions. In addition to his teaching and research, Prof. Bellinger is also involved in training student teachers to teach history in the middle and secondary schools, working on the inclusion of African and African diaspora history and culture into school and university curriculums, and working with study abroad programs that provide students an international, cross-cultural enhancement of their academic work.