UNITY/EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH | SCREENINGS/EVENTS | THE TEAM | RESOURCES AND LINKS | CONTACT
Jean Tsien, Executive Producer/Supervising Editor, has been working in the field of documentary for over 30 years as an editor, producer, and consultant. Tsien’s editing debut, SOMETHING WITHIN ME, won the Triple Awards at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Her notable editing credits include: the 2001 Academy Award, Best Documentary Feature nominee, SCOTTSBORO: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY; three Peabody Award-winning films: MALCOLM X: MAKE IT PLAIN, TRAVIS and SOLAR MAMAS; PLEASE VOTE FOR ME, a 2008 Grierson award recipient for most entertaining documentary; DIXIE CHICKS: SHUT UP & SING and MISS SHARON JONES! both of which were short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. As a strong believer in mentorship and nurturing emerging talents, Tsien has served as an editing advisor at the Sundance Institute Edit and Story Lab since 2010, CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum, Chicken & Egg Pictures Accelerator Lab, Hot Docs Blue Ice Lab, IDFAcademy, IFP Lab, and Dare to Dream Asia. Tsien is a member of American Cinema Editors, and a member of the Documentary branch of the Academy.
Renee Tajima-Peña, Series Producer, is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose work focuses on communities of color, immigration, gender, and social justice. She is series producer of ASIAN AMERICANS, the first ever docuseries on Asian American history. Her previous films include WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?, MY AMERICA…OR HONK IF YOU LOVE BUDDHA, LABOR WOMEN, SKATE MANZANAR, THE NEW AMERICANS, and NO MÁS BEBÉS, and she recently launched BUILDING HISTORY 3.0, an interactive exploration of Japanese American incarceration camps through Minecraft. Her films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, SXSW, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto international Film Festivals and the Whitney Biennial. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Broad Fellowship, and the Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video. She is professor of Asian American Studies and holds an endowed chair in Japanese American studies at UCLA.
Eurie Chung, Producer for Flash Cuts, is an independent producer focused on community-based documentaries. While pursuing a graduate degree at UCLA in Asian American Studies, Chung fell into community filmmaking, directing & editing METRO ES PARA TODOS: HEE POK ‘GRANDMA’ KIM AND THE BUS RIDERS UNION, a documentary short profiling an elderly Korean immigrant activist, for her master’s thesis. She has continued working on a wide range of independent documentaries, producing the interactive documentary project K-TOWN ’92, as well as documentaries OFF THE MENU: ASIAN AMERICA and LIFE ON FOUR STRINGS: THE JAKE SHIMABUKURO STORY. Chung also manages Flash Cuts, a post-production facility which has finished TYRUS, MELE MURALS, and AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS, among others.
Leo Chiang, Producer (Episodes 1 & 3), is a documentarian based in Taipei and San Francisco. His Emmy-nominated film, A VILLAGE CALLED VERSAILLES, picked up eight film festival awards and aired on PBS’ “Independent Lens” series. OUT RUN, his recently completed film, received support from ITVS, Sundance, and Tribeca. His other films include MR. CAO GOES TO WASHINGTON(Inspiration Award, Full Frame 2012) and TO YOU SWEETHEART, ALOHA (PBS broadcast 2006). Chiang received his MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is currently the co-chair of New Day Films, a 45-year-old co-op of social-issue documentarians. He is also a consulting producer for CNEX, the Chinese documentary foundation.
Grace Lee, Producer (Episodes 2 & 4), is an independent producer, director and writer working in both narrative and non-fiction film. She directed the Peabody Award-winning documentary AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS, which The Hollywood Reporter called ”an entertainingly revealing portrait of the power of a single individual to effect change.” The film won six audience awards before its broadcast on the PBS documentary series POV. Her previous documentary THE GRACE LEE PROJECT won multiple awards, broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Other credits include the Emmy-nominated MAKERS: WOMEN IN POLITICS and OFF THE MENU: ASIAN AMERICA, both for PBS; JANEANE FROM DES MOINES, set during the 2012 presidential campaign, which premiered at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival as well as AMERICAN ZOMBIE, a personal horror film, which premiered at Slamdance. She has been a Sundance Institute Fellow, a 2017 Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Award winner, an envoy of the American Film Showcase, and is co-founder of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc). She is currently a producer/director on a five-part landmark PBS series ASIAN AMERICANS as well as AND SHE COULD BE NEXT, about women of color transforming politics and civic engagement.
Geeta Gandbhir, Producer (Episode 5) is an award winning director, producer and editor. As director, she won Best Documentary at the News and Doc Emmys for I AM EVIDENCE, an HBO Documentary Film, and Best Government and Politics Documentary for ARMED WITH FAITH, a PBS Documentary film. As editor, she won a Primetime Emmy for Best Editing for Spike Lee’s HBO documentary series WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE and also for the HBO film BY THE PEOPLE, THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA. A documentary film she co-produced, THE SENTENCE for HBO, also won a Special Jury Primetime Emmy. Other films she edited, MR DYNAMITE: THE RISE OF JAMES BROWN, MY NEIGHBORHOOD, and WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE all won Peabody Awards.
In 2019 she directed the series WHY WE HATE with Amblin Entertainment and Jigsaw Productions for Discovery, and a feature doc titled HUNGRY TO LEARN for Soledad O’Brien Productions. In 2017 she directed an episode of the Netflix series RAPTURE for Mass Appeal. Other award- winning feature docs she co-directed include PRISON DOGS which premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES: PEACEKEEPERS which premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and aired on PBS. She created and is co-directing and co-producing a series on race with The New York Times Op-Docs titled THE CONVERSATION which won the AFI Documentary Film Festival and a MacArthur Grant. She also co-directed and edited the film, REMEMBERING THE ARTIST: ROBERT DENIRO SR. with Perri Peltz for HBO which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014.
Mark J. Harris, Consulting Producer, is an Academy-Award winning documentary filmmaker, journalist and novelist. Among the many documentaries he has written, produced and/or directed are THE REDWOODS, a documentary made for the Sierra Club to help establish a redwood National Park, which won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary in 1968. THE LONG WAY HOME (1997), a film made for the Simon Wiesenthal Center about the period immediately following the Holocaust won the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary (1997). INTO THE ARMS OF STRANGERS: STORIES OF THE KINDERTRANSPORT was produced for Warner Bros. and won an Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary in 2000. In 2014, it was also selected for permanent preservation in the National Film Registry. In addition to filmmaking, Harris is also a journalist and has published short stories and five novels for children. He has taught filmmaking at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts since 1983.