SFFS instructors are working professionals with a passion for nurturing moving-image artists at all stages of their careers. They come from the ranks of professional associations like the American Society of Cinematographers, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and include Academy Award and Emmy winners and nominees. They teach at institutions like UC Berkeley, New York University, San Francisco State University, Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

Steven Arvanites
Steven Arvanites heads NYCscreenwriter.org. He has taught at the Rye Arts Center, the Northwest Screenwriters Guild and in 2010 he will teach at Hollins University’s MFA screenwriting program. Arvanites was a two-time Nicholl semi-finalist, a BlueCat winner, an Atlanta Screenwriting Competition winner, a Djerassi/SFFS Screenwriting Fellowship finalist and a Sundance Screen Lab finalist. In 2006 he was awarded an Artward Bound writing grant. His first narrative feature, I Killed You ‘Cause I Had To, is an entry in the Dark River Film Festival, and his Terror Film Festival–winning script Cadaver is currently in preproduction. Arvanites was a moderator at the Austin Film Festival ’09.

Richard Beggs
Sound designer/mixer Richard Beggs has worked on over 50 features with Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, Sophia Coppola, Alfonso Cuaron and other directors. In 1980 Beggs received the Academy Award for his work on Apocalypse Now and has been nominated for the Golden Reel Award by the Motion Picture Sound Editors numerous times. Recent film credits include The Darjeeling Limited, Children of Men, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This fall, he will work on Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere, now in pre-production. Beggs received a B.F.A in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts, and is an associate fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University.

Michael A. Behrens
Michael A. Behrens programs the Film Society’s Filmmaker Education classes. Most recently he ran the Education Program at Film Arts Foundation.  He has produced, acted and directed in the U.S., Europe and Asia for the last 18 years working in theater, film and TV. Behrens has taught at the National Theater School of Finland and Sun Yat-Sen University. He is currently producing My Garbage My Neighborhood and pursuing a Masters in Nonprofit Administration at the University of San Francisco.

David L. Brown
David L. Brown is a two-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who has produced, written and directed more than 80 productions and ten broadcast documentaries. His recent works include The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story (two Emmys, including best documentary), Seniors for Peace, Surfing for Life, Bound by the Wind and Digital Divide.

Debbie Brubaker
Debbie Brubaker is a seasoned producer in the world of indie feature films, including Peter Bratt’s La Mission, which premiered at Sundance and opened the San Francisco International. Feature narratives she has produced include The Darwin Awards,  Dopamine, Unflinching Triumph: The Phillip Rockhammer Story, Swing, Teknolust, Bartleby, and The Californians. Recent projects include All About Evil and One Way to Valhalla. Currently Brubaker is working on a documentary with Jennifer Seibel Newsom, Miss Representation.

Carey Burens
Carey Burens has over 10 years of postproduction experience, starting his career at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic. Working with the Editorial Department there he learned the benefits of organization within a large workflow pipeline that included editing, film scanning, naming conventions, computer graphics and deliverables. After leaving ILM he landed at Spy Post Digital in San Francisco working in telecine/film transfer and color correction. Now a full time colorist, he has color graded with many formats, including film, SD and HD video and RED camera footage on feature length films, shorts, music videos and commercial spots.

John Carlson
John Carlson is the Vice President of Monaco Digital Film Labs, President of the local post facilities group, Northern California Production Community, and Second Vice President of the international group, Association of Cinema and Video Laboratories. An experienced film-to-tape colorist and film timer, John has taught a unique class in film and video postproduction at CCSF, The Academy of Art University, and San Francisco State for 18 years.

Anna-Mae Chin
Marketing Manager at the San Francisco Film Society since 2007, on SFFS marketing staff since 2005, previously worked in Development and Membership at the Center for Asian American Media and the Asian Art Museum and has worked in non-profit arts for 8 years. Having gone through the festival experience as a filmmaker in 2002 she understands the marketing process from the side of the filmmaker as well as the film exhibitor.

Eugene Corr
An accomplished fiction and non-fiction filmmaker, Eugene Corr wrote and directed the documentary Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (with Robert Hillmann), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991, and the dramatic feature, Desert Bloom, an official selection of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. As an instructor, Corr founded the San Quentin Writers Group to support convict screenwriters and has taught the same course to student screenwriters at Stanford University. Corr’s writing credits include both film (Prefontaine) and TV (Getting Out). In addition he has directed episodic television (Arli$$) and served as a second unit director on motion pictures (Bull Durham). Most recently he co-wrote the documentary Butte, America: The Saga of a Hard Rock Mining Town (2008). He is currently working on his documentary, From Ghost Town to Havana, examining the role of coaches and mentors in the lives of young boys living in poor neighborhoods in Havana, Cuba and West Oakland.

Lawrence Daressa
For the past 35 years, Lawrence Daressa has been the Co-Director of California Newsreel, the nation's oldest non-profit film distribution company. In that capacity, he reviews daily sales activity of Newsreel's 250 titles from dozens of DVD and digital distribution outlets. He was a founder of the Independent Television Service and has written widely on the impact of new technology on independent media.

Michael Dougan
A U.S.C. graduate and George Cukor scholarship winner, Michael Feit Dougan's screenwriting credits began with Public Access, which earned the Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture at Sundance. His current feature-length thriller 647 is in pre-production and slated for 2009. A freelance story consultant, Michael has presented story design at Dreamworks Animation. As an academic, Dougan earned both the 2003 Presidential and ASB Teacher of the Year Award at Cogswell College and was featured in the San Jose Mercury News. Dougan currently lectures at the University of San Francisco. Dougan co-wrote Developing Digital Short Films with Sherri Sheridan in 2004. As part of his Masters Class in Screenwriting, Michael works alongside Charles Pogue (The Fly re-make, Dragonheart and Psycho III) and as a founding member of The Kentucky Film Lab, ran the Advanced Screenwriter’s Lab at the Idea Festival with Jack Epps Jr. (Top Gun, Dick Tracy, Anaconda).

Jack Curtis Dubowsky
Jack Curtis Dubowsky has scored four feature films including Rock Haven, That Man Peter Berlin and Under One Roof, as well as projects for television and advertising. He has also worked in the music department at Pixar Animation Studios. He has a MM in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has received grants from Meet the Composer, Zellerbach Family Fund and Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Dubowsky teaches at NYU in the Design, Digital Arts and Film department of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He writes about film, music and popular culture for Film International and other publications.

Mike Epple
Mike Epple is a San Francisco–based director of photography and camera operator. He shoots both film and video for television and for corporate and narrative films throughout the U.S. He has shot for the Discovery Channel, PBS and HD Net, as well as clients Visa, Yahoo and Cisco. He is experienced with state-of-the art camera systems and is well versed on the latest digital formats and techniques.

Karen Everett
Karen Everett, owner of New Doc Editing, is an award-winning editor and story editor who helps documentary directors convey their vision in a way that keeps viewers glued to the screen. During the past fifteen years, Everett has been teaching at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, one of the top American documentary programs. She is the author of the newly released book Documentary Editing. Everett has directed and produced five documentaries, including the critically-acclaimed PBS biography I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs. Her films on lesbian relationships have screened at more than 150 film festivals worldwide and the latest, Women in Love, is available through Netflix.

Peter Franck
Peter Franck’s distinguished career spans more than 40 years across the areas of constitutional law, intellectual property and entertainment law. His commitment to legal activism has led to affiliations with the ACLU, the Council for Justice and the National Lawyers Guild. Franck has come to specialize in intellectual property and entertainment law through his representation of pioneering San Francisco Bay Area musical groups and cutting-edge artists.

Klara Grunning-Harris
Emmy Award winning Klara Grunning-Harris is the Vice President of KUDOS Family, an international media/film co-production and distribution company based in Norway. Grunning-Harris worked nearly a decade for the Independent Television Service bringing domestic and international film to US broadcast and digital platforms. She has produced and shot independent work for the last 15 years and has served as panelist, jury and advisor in industry settings in the US and on the international market. Gumby Dharma, an episode on stop-motion animator Art Clokey she produced for the KQED program Truly CA, received the 2008 Documentary Emmy.

Hilary Hart
Director of Publicity at the San Francisco Film Society since 1998, and a veteran of the SFFS publicity staff since 1993, Hart previously worked as publicity coordinator at San Francisco International LGBT Festival and director of publicity at Cinequest, San Jose Film Festival. She has attended Sundance and Telluride for over 15 years. Hart learned the basics of grassroots publicity while working at a Bay Area repertory movie theater and later Landmark Theatres for 19 years, before segueing to the film festival world.

Barry Jenkins
Barry Jenkins is a writer/director living in San Francisco and a member of the Bandry Films collective consisting of himself, Justin Barber, James Laxton and Alejandro Cruz. His recent or current projects include the feature film Medicine For Melancholy, as well as the recently completed short A Young Couple an a commissioned work for the Northwest Film Forum’s One Shot Film Series.” He is a contributor to Short End magazine, where he continues to work on the dialogue series Notes On A Cinematographer.

Aaron Kerner
Aaron Kerner is an Associate Professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. His curatorial and research work examines the problems of representations, exploring the difficulty of representing catastrophic events and the uneasy transfiguration of history and memory into narrative form.

Jacob Krueger
Jacob Krueger’s first film, The Matthew Shepard Story (2002), won the Writers Guild of America Paul Selvin Award and a Gemini Nomination for Best Screenplay. The NBC film, directed by Roger Spottiswoode (And the Band Played On) and produced by Goldie Hawn, was based on the life of Matthew Shepard, a gay hate-crime victim. The film won Stockard Channing a SAG Award and her first Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress and Sam Waterston a Gemini Award for Best Supporting Actor. Krueger attended Dartmouth College and was a Presidential Scholar in Creative Writing.

Karen Larsen
Karen Larsen heads her own public relations firm specializing in publicizing independent feature and documentary films, film festivals, and special events.  She is currently publicist for the Mill Valley Film Festival, Film Arts Festival, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Asian American Film Festival, and Indiefest. She has served as a consultant to the National Educational Media Network and to many independent filmmakers. In addition, she handles Bay Area publicity for Sony Pictures Classics, IFC, Zeitgeist Films, Regent Releasing, BEV Pictures, and others. She has taught classes at Media Alliance, National Educational Media Network, and the Film Arts Foundation.

David Walter Lech
David Walter Lech is a Bay Area based filmmaker and photographer. In 2008 he attended the Sundance Film Festival for his work on the feature film The Wind and The Water (Burwa Dii Ebo), which premiered in the World Dramatic Cinema Competition. He was also a Sundance panelist, hosted by festival director Geoffrey Gillmore. He travelled to Panama to shoot The Wind and the Water, made collectively with the indigenous Kuna people of the San Blas Islands. While working as Director of Photography, he also worked as Workshop Coordinator, teaching filmmaking to a group of Kuna youth. His experience working in a collaborative, community based model was a great asset to Kunjo, which he recently travelled to Punjab, India to shoot. He has lensed many other films in a wide variety of formats including the 35mm feature film Mitsein.

Richard J. Lee
Richard J. Lee has been an attorney in private practice for more than 30 years, helping to protect and empower families, businesses, nonprofit organizations and independent filmmakers. Lee helped establish the Film Arts Foundation in 1976 and welcomes the transition of its services to the San Francisco Film Society. As one of the first panel members of Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts (now California Lawyers for the Arts), he represents nonprofit corporations, including numerous filmmakers.

Richard Levien
Richard Levien has a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University. Now a freelance film editor, he enjoys the collaborative process of helping the director find an original vision. Recently he edited and did motion graphics for the short film On the Assassination of the President which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2008. He also edited the cult internet hit Store Wars, which was seen by 5.5 million people in the first 6 weeks of its release. Levien recently completed his first film as a director. Immersion premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2009. Levien was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He enjoys a good cup of tea and follows the (mostly ill) fate of the New Zealand cricket team. He is one of the few New Zealanders who played no part whatsoever in the making of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

A.D. Liano
Tony Liano has directed and produced several films, including Barberland, The Three-Cornered Hat and Seven Fallen Objects. Most recently, he produced Everything Strange and New directed by Frazer Bradshaw, and screened at Sundance 2009. Liano was Senior Vice President of Digital Programming at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and before that a marketing executive at Microsoft.

Damian Lucas
Damian Lucas was the cinematographer for Limbo Lounge, a dramatic feature which screened at San Francisco's own IndieFest. He is a cinematography professor at Academy of Art University, the owner of Little Giant Lighting & Grip Co, and an all-around film production man about town.

Chris Martin
Chris Martin studied photography and film at Brooks Institute of Photography and began learning telecine and coloring at Varitel in San Francisco, where he worked on music videos and commercials. In 2005, Martin joined Spy Post as lead colorist, where he has worked on the commercials (Comcast, Budweiser, Microsoft, Scion, Adidas), music videos (Carrie Underwood, LeAnn Rymes, Zioni), narrative (Black August, Village Barbershop, Quality of Life and Everything Strange and New) and documentary films (The Weather Underground and multiple projects for the PBS series American Experience).

Joseph Mendoza
Joseph Mendoza has been a lighting specialist for the film industry in San Francisco Bay Area for over 12 years. An alumnus of San Francisco State University, Joseph started his own company six years ago and now owns the Little Giant Lighting and Grip Company in San Francisco. His work includes everything from large Bollywood films to French bubblegum commercials. Recently he began producing commercials, shorts and anything he can get involved with creatively.

Christopher Million
Chris Million has been an award-winning director of photography for numerous documentaries and TV series over the last 20 years. For eight years he shot the Emmy-winning PBS educational show Real Science! in locations ranging from Alaska to the Everglades. In 2004, Chris won an Emmy Award for his work as DP on the PBS documentary Return to the Valley. He recently wrapped shooting on two documentary features; A Permanent Mark, shot on location in VietNam and It Came From Kuchar, which premiered in March at South by Southwest. His other broadcast credits include programs for NBC, A&E/History Channel and MTV/VH1. Chris is currently directing Jack London: Twentieth-Century Man, a feature-length documentary about the author and his times.

Holly Million
Holly Million is a consultant, author and filmmaker with nearly two decades worth of experience in fundraising. In addition to securing funding for A Story of Healing, which won a 1997 Academy Award, Million has raised money for numerous documentary and dramatic films that have aired on PBS, HBO and other broadcast outlets. She is the author of Fear-Free Fundraising: How to Ask People for Money, available on Amazon.com. Visit Million’s fundraising blog at fearfreefilmfundraising.blogspot.com.
 
Jason Mitchell
From studying acting at Carnegie Mellon to serving as a broadcast journalist in the Navy with material airing on CBS, BBC and NHK, Jason Mitchell has been involved in many aspects of the business. This broad experience has cultivated an artful style which has paired well with his technically savvy productions. Recent roles have been as a director, cinematographer and photographer for his company Purebred Productions producing commercials, industrials and award winning films including They Turned Our Desert Into Fire. Purebred Productions features a 36x40 stage in South San Francisco with camera, lighting and editorial, they continue to develop art photography and narrative projects while serving the greater SF Bay Area film community.

Hiro Narita
Hiro Narita, ASC has spent more than 30 years working in various capacities with all kinds of  directors, ranging from such European Masters as the late Michelangelo Antonioni, local notables, Carroll Ballard and John Korty, right through to an assortment of movie bandidos working out of  single trucks.

Bill Nichols
Bill Nichols is a film professor specializing in documentary and ethnographic films, film history and theory, and rhetoric and visual representation. Among his ten published books, three are on documentary and his Introduction to Documentary is the most widely used textbook on the concepts and principles of documentary film. He has curated film programs, lectured in Europe, Latin America and Asia and is a professor of cinema at San Francisco State University.

Matt Notaro
Matt Notaro has edited and developed rich media for agencies including McCann-Erickson, Venables Bell & Partners and Ogilvy One. His clients include Sony, HP, Target, T-Mobile, Intel and Visa. He has edited projects with all of Kontent's Kollective directors including Mark Decena, David Munro, Sam Green, Eric Escobar and John Dilley. Notaro is the original hyphenate/slash at Kontent with a range of skills that span editing, graphic design, music composition and flash development.

Jennifer Nowicki Clark
Jennifer Nowicki Clark is the co-director of Creative Narrations, a consulting agency specializing in community-based multimedia training. Based in Oakland, she has more than ten years experience in language, civics and technology education and has trained many teachers and community practitioners nationally and internationally in digital storytelling as well as multimedia literacy and production.

Dan Olmsted
Dan Olmsted is a Berkeley-based sound mixer and designer with extensive and varied credits in the field. An alumnus of SFSU’s film production program, Olmsted honed much of his craft at Berkeley’s Saul Zaentz Film Center, where he served as a rerecording mixer for many years. He also performs music in a variety of local bands. Recent credits include Strange Culture (Lynn Hershman Leeson), White Light, Black Rain (Steven Okazaki) and Soldiers of Conscience (Gary Weimberg).

Joanne Parsont
Joanne Parsont is a year-round consultant with SFFS’s Youth Education program. A freelance film programmer, writer, editor and media educator, she has worked in the Bay Area film festival community for 15 years, specializing in outreach and education, youth media, and children’s and documentary programming. With a BA from Duke University and an MA in Mass Communication Studies from the University of Michigan, Joanne previously worked in Washington, D.C. for the Public Broadcasting Service and the Learning Channel before arriving in the Bay Area in 1994.

Miguel Pendás
Today the creative director of the San Francisco Film Society, Pendás graduated from the cinema program at San Francisco State University in 1987 and completed an AFI-Academy Director’s Internship after graduation. His film Refugees, a California Council for the Humanities-funded documentary about Central American refugees in the United States, has been shown on PBS. Pendás has appeared on local television taking viewers to his favorite San Francisco film locations and he recently lectured at the San Francisco Museum & Historical Society on the film noir era in San Francisco.

Shaka Jamal Redmond
Shaka Jamal Redmond, a grassroots artist from Oakland, is a graduate of Tuskegee University in Alabama and is currently working on his MFA in Cinema at SFSU. Redmond’s goal to engage both his love for the arts and for community development led him to work with Digital Underground Storytelling for the Youth (DUSTY) in West Oakland, where he taught digital storytelling and created his first music video on his experience in South Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He is co-owner of Black Apes Project, a multimedia collaboration, and the owner of OLU 8: Film. Redmond is a talented producer, writer and performing artist for the hip hop funk band Hairdoo. His work has premiered at the Pan African Film Festival and the San Francisco Black Film Festival.

Danae Ringelmann
Danae Ringelmann co-founded IndieGoGo to democratize filmmaking. She brings entertainment industry and film finance expertise, and serves as an Advisor to The Conversation. Prior to IndieGoGo, Danae was a Securities Analyst at Cowen & Co. where she covered entertainment companies including Pixar, Lions Gate, Disney, and Electronic Arts. Danae also focused on cable network, NFL, newspaper and hedge fund clientele while at JP Morgan's Investment Bank and Private Bank. In the wake of 9/11, Danae co-produced a concert reading of Incident at Vichy, an Arthur Miller play addressing the politically charged topic of racial profiling. Danae is a CFA charter holder and holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Danae graduated with a B.A. in Humanities from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar and varsity rower.

Judith Roscoe
Having already been an accomplished writer and fiction instructor at Yale when she wrote her first screenplay, The Road Movie, Judith Roscoe brings a wealth of experience to both creating original stories and crafting compelling adaptations, such as her adaptation of author Robert Stone’s novel, Dog Soldiers, which became Who Will Stop the Rain. Other credits include Eat a Bowl of Tea, Havana, Endless Love, and Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley Underground, soon to be released. Recently she consulted on Roger Spottiswood’s Shake Hands With the Devil, to be released this year, and for The Bang Bang Club, a feature about young conflict photographers in South Africa, which is presently in production.

Lisa Rosenberg
Lisa Rosenberg is a screenwriter whose writing credits include independent features, The Riddle and Savage Dawn; the dramatic short, Friends; the treatment for The Oddest Couple documentary for KCET; the PBS children’s series Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego home version; and many short educational dramas that air on PBS stations.  She was a writer/producer on the Los Angeles Emmy award-winning non-fiction public television series, Psychology: The Study of Human Behavior for KOCE. She also wrote for the Internet-based dramatic and documentary political series, Reinventing America I and II. Currently, she is marketing her dramatic feature based on Edie Meidav’s award-winning novel, Crawl Space, and writing a romantic comedy. Rosenberg has also been a story analyst for Tri-Star Pictures, ITC, and Zoetrope, and consults privately with writers, who have won or placed in the Nicholl, Slamdance, and Zoetrope Screenwriting Contests, won or been finalists for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Awards and the Golden Gate Awards, presented films at Sundance, Cannes, and the Berlinale, and sold or produced screenplays and films in the United States and Germany.

Jay Rosenblatt
Jay Rosenblatt is an internationally recognized artist who has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980 and has completed 25 films. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim, USA Artists and a Rockefeller Fellowship. His films have received over 100 awards and have screened throughout the world. A selection of his films had theatrical runs at the Film Forum in New York and at theaters around the country. Eight of his films have been at the Sundance Film Festival and several of his films have shown on HBO/Cinemax, the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel. Jay is originally from New York and has lived in San Francisco for many years. He has been a film and video production instructor since 1989 at various film schools in the Bay Area, including Stanford University, S.F. State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology and, in a former life, worked as a therapist.

George Rush
George Rush is an attorney, sales rep and producer of hundreds of films including Everything Strange and New, Audience of One, D tour and It Came from Kuchar.

Debra Russell
Debra Russell, Certified Business Coach, is passionate about the world of entertainment and facilitating growth in people's lives. As a coach and workshop leader for artists, Russell works with creative individuals to help shape their success in their chosen field. Russell specializes in the performing arts working with musicians and actors, and on the business and production side with producers, engineers, venue operators and executives. In addition to working with private clients, Russell, founder of Artist’s EDGE has presented several innovative programs for entertainment industry trade conferences including NAFA, TAXI Road Rally, and West Coast Songwriter’s Conference.

Tiffany Shlain
Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and an award-winning filmmaker. Her films include The Tribe and Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness, and have been selected at over 100 festivals—including Sundance and Tribeca—and received over 22 awards. Tiffany founded The Webby Awards in 1996 and was creative director and CEO for nearly a decade. She is currently in production directing a feature length documentary, Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence. Tiffany is a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. She lectures worldwide on the Internet and her filmmaking. She has just been invited to give one of the keynotes at the Berlin International Film Festival in Feb 2009. She is the director of The Moxie Institute, an organization that creates film, books and theater experiences around social issues using emerging technologies.

Britta Sjogren
Britta Sjogren is a screenwriter and independent film director of award-winning, internationally screened films. Two of her films premiered at Sundance; one was selected for the narrative competition, and the other won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short. Sjogren is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as other arts grants. She wrote the book Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (2006) and has worked as an independent script consultant, script reader for Amblin and Constantin Films and film programmer/curator. She is an associate professor and MFA coordinator in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University, where she teaches screenwriting, production and theory.

Maryam Soleiman
Maryam Soleiman is Director of Business Affairs for The Rights Workshop, a preeminent SF-based music supervision, licensing and clearance company located at the SF Film Centre in the Presidio. Soleiman oversees the day-to day affairs of the company’s many areas of concentration, as well as advising filmmaker-clients with respect to issues concerning rights and clearances, music licensing and copyright law. Prior to joining The Rights Workshop, Maryam worked for Live Nation where she administered Live Nation's intellectual property assets.

Matthew Tabak
Matthew Tabak is a writer/producer/director. His credits include Auggie Rose starring Jeff Goldblum and Anne Heche and HBO’s Point of Origin, starring Ray Liotta. He has been nominated for the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay Award and has written scripts for Sony, Universal, and Francis Coppola among many others, including a screen adaptation of of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He is also a former Studio Executive, having worked for Warner Bros, Paramount, Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer where he supervised the development and production of both hits and misses. He resides in San Francisco with his wife Samantha.

Cliff Traiman
Cliff Traiman works as a Director of Photography on commercial, industrial and narrative productions. He has shot several feature length films including Village Barbershop, Broken Arrows, Apartment 202, and Kung Phooey, as well as the 2004 season of the nationally syndicated TV show, Ultimate Living.  He has been part of the lighting and grip crew on films such as The Matrix II & III, The Game, What Dreams May Come, Sphere, The Rainmaker, Ed TV, The Wedding Planner, and True Crimes. He lives in Northern California and is a partner in the world famous Little Giant Lighting & Grip Company.

Michele Turnure-Salleo
Michele Turnure-Salleo heads the Film Society’s fiscal sponsorship, grants and residencies programs. Turnure-Salleo has produced and directed projects for film and television for more than 15 years in Sydney, Berlin, Vancouver, Banff and Marseille. She was associate producer of Regret to Inform, an Oscar-nominated documentary about the effect of the Vietnam War on war widows.

Sean Uyehara
Sean Uyehara is a programmer at the Film Society, where he inaugurated KinoTek, a programming thread dedicated to exhibiting cross-platform technologies and emergent media. Uyehara is also the establishing programmer of the San Francisco International Animation Festival and lead programmer of film and music, live events and multimedia performance at the San Francisco International Film Festival and SF360 Film+Club.

Marcus Villegos
Marcus Villegos is an internet marketer that uses the power of the web to reach the masses. He has coached and empowered a variety of music artist, entrepreneurs, network marketing organizations of the unlimited reach that the internet contains. In a short period of time he has been able to establish massive followings and friends using Twitter and bring any message to any audience using cutting edge marketing principles.

Morrie Warshawski
Morrie Warshawski works with nonprofits and filmmakers to help them realize their full potential through strategic planning. He has worked in the field for over 30 years as an administrator, consultant, facilitator, teacher and writer. He was the Executive Director of two media arts centers (Bay Area Video Coalition and The Media Project) and has served on numerous grant panels. Warshawski has written many articles and two books on fundraising, Shaking the Money Tree: The Art of Getting Grants And Donations for Film And Video (3rd edition, Wiese Books) and The Fundraising Houseparty: How to Party with a Purpose and Raise Money for Your Cause.

Brooke Wentz
Brooke Wentz is a seasoned intellectual property rights executive who founded the Rights Workshop, a consulting and mediation business. Author of Hey, That’s My Music! Music Supervision, Licensing and Content Acquisition, Wentz has 25 years of experience in music licensing and publishing, record production and performing rights organization administration. Her credits as a music supervisor include The Devil and Daniel Johnston, American Hardcore, Ballets Russes and the Academy Award nominated documentary The Weather Underground.

Jason Wolos
Jason Wolos is a writer, director and videographer. His short films have been screened worldwide and include Waiter Duty, which is also used as a training video in restaurants and The High and the Mighty, shown as part of IFP’s program Independents in Flight. His freelance camerawork has been shown on PBS, 60 Minutes and in festivals such as Sundance and Los Angeles. His feature Trattoria is planned for production in 2009.