Town Hall: Can Art and Culture Accelerate Change?
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Session Description
Can art catalyze positive social change? Does culture drive or reflect the collective values of societies? This interactive town hall forum, first seen at the Sundance Film Festival in collaboration with For Freedoms, will examine these questions from a critical perspective using performance and media as creative provocations for a lively, audience-driven discussion.
Time & Location
Time:
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM, Thursday, April 11, 2019
BST
Location:
Pyramid Room (TBEC)
Speakers
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Moderator
Co-Founder, The Federation
Tanya Selvaratnam is a writer and an Emmy-nominated and multiple Webby-winning producer. She has produced for the Vision & Justice Project, Joy To The Polls, Glamour Women of the Year, The Meteor, For Freedoms, Invisible Hand, Rubell Family Collection, The Shed, NGO Forum/Fourth World Conference on Women in China, World Health Organization, Planned Parenthood, and numerous artists such as Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems. Since 2007, she has been a producer for Aubin Pictures, whose latest film AGGIE is about collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund and the creation of the Art for Justice Fund to fight mass incarceration. In 2020, she was a volunteer for the Biden-Harris Policy Committee and served as Content Chair of Arts for Biden-Harris.
Selvaratnam’s essays have been published in the New York Times, Vogue, Glamour, CNN, The Art Newspaper, SheKnows, and McSweeney’s. She is the author of "THE BIG LIE" and "Assume Nothing: A Story of Intimate Violence" (Harper, February 2021). "Assume Nothing" has been optioned by ABC Signature/Disney Television Studios and is in development with Joanna Coles as executive producer.
She has served on the boards of the Third Wave Fund, For Freedoms, Boom Arts, The Wooster Group, Groundswell Community Mural Project, Let It Ripple, and DV Leap; and is an advisor to The DO School.
Selvaratnam received her graduate and undergraduate degrees in Chinese language and legal history from Harvard University. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Long Beach, CA, Selvaratnam is based in New York City and Portland, Oregon.
tanyaturnsup.com
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Speaker
Shirley Abraham is a Cannes prize-winning Indian documentary film maker. Her work is supported by the Sundance Institute, MacArthur Foundation, New York Times, IDFA Bertha Fund, Bertha Foundation, BBC, Filmmaker Fund, Catapult Film Fund and Asian Network of Documentary. She has been a fellow of Sundance Labs, Cluster of Excellence Heidelberg, TasveerGhar, India Foundation for the Arts and Goethe-Institut.
The Cinema Travellers is the debut feature documentary of Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya. The film premiered as an Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival 2016, to a standing ovation. It won the Special Jury Prize for L'Oeil d'or: Le Prix du documentaire. The film continues to have a prestigious festival run playing a hundred and twenty five film festivals worldwide. It is the first Indian documentary to have achieved the rare festival trifecta of Cannes, Toronto and New York Film Festival. The film has won nineteen awards, including the President’s Medal in India.
Shirley and Amit have recently made Searching for Saraswati, India’s first Op-Doc for the New York Times. The film is supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Institute, Catapult Film Fund and Hartley Film Foundation.
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Speaker
Judy is the pioneering filmmaker and behind Docubox, The East African Film Fund. Starting her career as a copywriter then Creative Director at McAnn Erickson, the leading advertising agency in East Africa during the 90s, she wrote some of the regions favorite adverts before transitioning to filmmaking and playing a pivotal role in sparking a modern filmmaking movement in Kenya.
She wrote and directed early films like the romantic comedy 'Dangerous Affair' and socially charged narratives such as 'Killer Necklace' (2009) and 'Something Necessary' (2010). Her passion for documentaries, fuelled by her experience creating non-profit videos, is showcased in ‘Headlines in History’ (co-directed with Sir John Akomfrah) and 'Scarred: Anatomy of a Massacre' (2013).
In 2013, Judy established DOCUBOX, the first filmmaker-founded fund in Sub-Saharan Africa dedicated to supporting independent African documentary filmmakers, by offering screenings, grants, labs and hugs. Over the past decade, DOCUBOX has invested nearly $2 million in over a hundred features and short films, training, development and screenings. She's currently trying to raise an endowment fund for the organization and needs all the help she can get to make this happen!
Judy is a founding member of the Creative Economy Working Group (CEWG, an active member of the global D.I.S.C.O network (Decentralised Independent Story + Culture Organisers) and has been part of the Academy of Motion Pictures & Sciences since 2017, serving on the Documentary Branch Executive Committee since 2018.
Her industry efforts were recognized with the an award from Women in Film Kenya for the Most Influential Woman in Film 2021, as well as a Head of State commendation, and a Lifetime Achievement the following year from The Kenya Film Commission.
Judy has been itching to get back into writing and directing for years and is working on two new short fiction films as well as developing a Manifesto Film for African Filmmakers.
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Speaker
Jennifer Pahlka works on making government work for people in the digital age. She is the founder and former executive director of Code for America and served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2013–2014, where she founded the United States Digital Service. She also co-founded United States Digital Response, which helps government respond to the Covid-19 crisis with volunteer tech support. She was named by Wired as one of the 25 people who has most shaped the past 25 years. She served on the Defense Innovation Board for four years. Her book Recoding America comes out in June 2023. Jennifer is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, California.
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Speaker
Artistic Director, Kiln Theatre
Indhu Rubasingham is the Artistic Director of Kiln Theatre. Productions as Artistic Director include: Red Velvet (Evening Standard Award and Critics’ Circle Award, also at St Ann’s Warehouse, NYC and Kenneth Branagh Season, West End), A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes, Multitudes, The House That Will Not Stand, Handbagged (Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, also West End transfer and UK tour), Paper Dolls, The Invisible Hand, Holy Sh!t, and White Teeth.
Other selected directing credits include: The Great Wave, Ugly Lies the Bone, The Motherf**ker With The Hat, The Waiting Room, The Ramayana (National Theatre); Women, Power and Politics, Stones in His Pockets, Detaining Justice, The Great Game: Afghanistan, Fabulation, Starstruck (Tricycle Theatre); Belong, Disconnect, Free Outgoing, Lift Off, Clubland, The Crutch, Sugar Mummies (Royal Court); Ruined (Almeida); Yellowman, Anna in the Tropics (Hampstead); Secret Rapture, The Misanthrope (Minerva, Chichester); Romeo and Juliet (Festival Theatre, Chichester); Pure Gold (Soho Theatre); The No Boys Cricket Club, Party Girls (Stratford East); Wuthering Heights (Birmingham Rep); Heartbreak House (Watford Palace); Sugar Dollies, Shakuntala (Gate); A River Sutra (Three Mill Island Studios); Rhinoceros (UC Davis, California); A Doll’s House (Young Vic).
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Speaker
Chief Impact Officer, Participant
Holly Gordon is the Chief Impact Officer at Participant, overseeing the company’s social impact strategy and campaigns, furthering Participant’s mission to create storytelling that inspires positive social change. These global, multi-year campaigns are driven by the company’s content and powered by strategic partnerships to address the most important issues of our time.
Prior to joining Participant, Gordon co-founded Girl Rising, a global campaign for girls’ education. Selected by Fast Company as a member of the League of Extraordinary Women and named by Newsweek/Daily Beast as one of 125 Women of Impact, Gordon is also an Executive Producer for the Girl Rising film at the center of the movement. Forbes Magazine named the Girl Rising campaign the #1 Most Dynamic Social Initiative of 2012. In 2015, Holly was selected as a Presidential Leadership Scholar and currently serves on the boards of MAKERS and Girl Rising.
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Moderator
Brenda Coughlin joined Sundance Institute in September 2018 as Director of Producing and Impact Strategy, a newly created position designed to drive the Institute’s cross-disciplinary and artist-forward impact strategy, focused on the production of compelling work across documentary, fiction, and emerging media, as well as Sundance’s engagement programs and advocacy for independent art and media. She overseas Creative Partnerships, including Stories of Change, the Institute’s 10+ year partnership with Skoll Foundation, and leads Sundance’s field-building initiatives for non-fiction producing.
Prior to joining Sundance, Brenda’s projects as an independent producer include Academy Award-nominated Dirty Wars (2013) about the US drone program, and director Laura Poitras’ last two features: Academy Award-winning CITIZENFOUR (2014), about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Cannes premiere Risk (2016), about Julian Assange. She produced Laura Poitras’ 2016 solo exhibition, Astro Noise, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which featured six new immersive installations. Other producing projects include Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), Steve Maing’s Crime + Punishment (2018), and Nancy Schwartzman’s Roll Red Roll (2018).
With the late historian Howard Zinn, she co-founded the performing arts and education non-profit Voices of a People’s History, and is a producer of the associated The People Speak project, executive produced by Matt Damon.
Brenda has worked as a consultant and on staff with foundations and non-profits for many years, including Bertha Foundation, Compton Foundation, First Look Media, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. She is on the boards of Lannan Foundation and of Curious Communications, home of The Laura Flanders Show.
