We are happy to announce three new Board members have joined our team at Working Films! Our Board of Directors reflect the diversity of our field– they’re community leaders, storytellers, filmmakers, and visionaries who bring expertise and deep passion for the work we do.
“On behalf of the Working Films Board, we are honored and thrilled to welcome the newest Board members to our growing organization,” said Board Co-Chairs Felix Endara and Kim Pevia. “Ann, Courtney, and Adamu each bring an array of talent, energy, and passion that will support the work and mission of Working Films—including a growing and dynamic staff—that leverages the power of storytelling and documentary film to catalyze social change. Welcome to the dream team!”
Please join us in welcoming our newest Board members: Adamu Chan, Ann Bennett, and Courtney Symone Staton:
ADAMU CHAN
Adamu Chan is a filmmaker, writer, and community organizer from the Bay Area who was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison during one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country. He produced numerous short films while incarcerated, using his vantage point and experience as an incarcerated person as a lens to focus the viewer’s gaze on issues related to social justice. In 2021, he was a recipient of the Docs in Action Film Fund through Working Films, and was tapped to produce and direct his film What These Walls Won’t Hold, which won Best Documentary Mid-Length at the 2023 San Francisco international Film Festival. In 2022, Adamu directed a documentary short for the doc-series Bridge Builders, partnering with ITVS/Independent Lens, about a community member working at the intersections of immigration, incarceration, and gender justice. He is also a 2022 Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Mellon Arts Fellow and a 2023 Rockwood Institute Documentary Leaders Fellow. Adamu draws inspiration and energy from the voices of those directly impacted and seeks to empower them to reshape the narratives that have been created about them through film.
ANN BENNETT
Ann Bennett is an Emmy-nominated documentary-filmmaker, multimedia-producer, and teaching-artist who has devoted her career to telling diverse stories through film, television, and interactive projects. She has produced documentaries for the PBS series American Experience, Independent Lens, and America ReFramed many of which have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival including; Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, and the multiplatform community-engagement initiative Digital-Diaspora-Family-Reunion. Bennett is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and Harvard College, and she has won fellowships with the Sundance Producer Lab, Impact Partners, Laundromat Project, and Culture Push’s Black Utopian Practice.
COURTNEY SYMONE STATON
Courtney Symone Staton, from Greenville, North Carolina, is a Black organizer, poet, and filmmaker dedicated to creating space for collective liberation through the sharing of stories. Her debut documentary, a participatory short Silence Sam, about the systemic silencing of activism during a movement to remove a Confederate monument from campus, premiered at BlackStar Film Festival in 2019, and since then has had impact-driven screenings across the South. Courtney believes deeply in reclaiming Black history, and uplifting stories of Black changemakers whose legacy we live in in the present, creating and leading Youth FX’s History Reclamation Project, a program reconnecting local high school students to Albany’s legacy of activism through participatory documentary filmmaking. A NeXt Doc fellow and impact producer of The Neutral Ground, Courtney works to drive viewers past the point of empathy to the point of healing and action.
For a complete list of our Board of Directors, click here!
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