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SPEAKERS, FILMMAKERS & PERFORMERS • 2024
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April 25
Mark Levy has been collecting, writing, and singing songs that focus attention on the many issues that have faced humankind. His programs have been heard throughout the country and abroad as he travels with his strong voice and many instruments, with songs that spur us to unify around the causes of peace and justice. A Santa Cruz resident for 45 years, he now makes his home in Florence, Oregon.
April 27
Bob Gliner is an award winning documentary producer with more than 40 programs to his credit including Being 80 which plays at Reel Work 24. His programs have appeared on PBS stations throughout the United States and have also been shown to classes in a wide variety of university and public school settings, as well as by nonprofit organizations. His primary focus is social problems and social change—both inside the United States and throughout the world. In addition to his competency in all aspects of film production, he is also a professor of sociology at San Jose State University.
John Brown Childs is a Black Native American scholar-activist, UC Santa Cruz distinguished professor emeritus of sociology, and veteran of the civil rights movement. He has spent a lifetime thinking about resolving conflict. He played an important role in producing and developing “trans-communality” theory and practice. This work came out of his experiences in Soledad Prison, where inmates developed their own trans-racial education system. Childs will be speaking after the screening of Being 80.
Cathy Cress is a leading national expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management. She is author of Handbook of Geriatric Care Management, known as the bible of geriatric care management. Cress is a well-known authority in midlife siblings, baby boomers, and the aging family. Cress will be speaking after the screening of Being 80.
Rick Goldsmith mission is to tell stories that encourage social engagement and active participation in community life and the democratic process, and to stimulate young minds to question the world around them. Goldsmith is a two-time Academy Award nominee. He co-produced and co-directed (with Judith Ehrlich) The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009), an Academy-Award nominee for Best Feature Documentary, an Emmy nominee, and winner of a George Foster Peabody award (for its POV nationwide broadcast on PBS).
Julie Reynolds was editor of
El Andarmagazine before becoming a staff reporter at the Center for Investigative reporting. Her work has been published in The Nation, Newsweek, PBS, NPR and other outlets. She is a co-founder of the nonprofit news site Voices of Monterey Bay.
April 28
Woody Rehanek was a farmworker and organic truck farmer in Washington State for 18 years. He worked as a special class teacher in Pajaro Valley USD for 18 years. He is a member of Safe Ag Safe Schools and CORA (Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture). He’s lived in Watsonville for the past 24 years.
Kathleen Kilpatrick has been an advocate for social and environmental justice for over 50 years, and worked in health care for 45, both in varied ways. She got a NIOSH grant to add Occupational and Environmental Health study to her Nurse Practitioner program at UW in the mid 90’s, and worked as a nurse on two pesticide exposure assessments of children in eastern WA orchard communities. She took a school nurse job with PVUSD with the desire to work with farmworker families, and got her wish. Plus, she got to join a union, PVFT! Since her retirement, she has been active with SASS, and is a founding member of CORA.
Yanely Martinez is the Central Coast Organizing Coordinator for Californians for Pesticide Reform, including Monterey Bay's Safe Ag Safe Schools group. She is also a member of the Greenfield City Council.
Mark Weller is the Organizing Director for Californians for Pesticide Reform, a statewide network of 200-plus organizations united to reduce pesticide harms. He previously worked for several unions in the Monterey Bay region, organizing community and political support for workers. Mark has a B.A. in Political Science from University of California San Diego, an M.A. in Sociology from San Jose State University, and is co-author of Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy.
May 4
Aileen Vance is a member of American Federation of Musicians, Local 1000. She is a singer, songwriter, song leader and choral director. A long-time Santa Cruz resident, she shares Pete Seeger’s dedication to &lddquo;thinking globally and singing locally,” which she does masterfully as director of the Santa Cruz Peace Chorale for over 21 years and at her regular community sing-along events. See aileenvance.com.
Bonnie Lockhart is a songwriter, music educator, feminist and activist from Berkeley, California. She is a founding member of the group Occupella - which grew out of the Occupy movement. She was a lead vocalist with the group Red Star Singers and a member of the famed Bay Area women’s band Swing Shift. She is currently spending a lot of her time working with Labor for Climate Justice, a group of California union members working to bring climate and environmental concerns forward in the workplace. She is also a member of AFM Local 1000.
Julie Olsen Edwards is an internationally-revered expert on Early Childhood Education and children’s literature, with a emphasis on diversity and inclusion. She grew up in a singing household in San Francisco, where her mother (writer Tillie Olsen) and father (labor activist and longshoreman Jack Olsen) knew and worked alongside many labor union advocates where the songs of the 30s and 40s were a part of her upbringing. In addition to her long and storied career as an educator and union member at Cabrillo College, she has also worked as a consultant to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and served on the board of the annual Jane Addams Children's Book Award.
May 6
Maureen Gosling has been a documentary filmmaker for more than thirty years and is best known for her twenty-year collaboration with acclaimed independent director, Les Blank (Burden of Dreams, Always for Pleasure). Gosling has also been sought after as an editor, working with such directors as Jed Riffe (Waiting to Inhale, California's "Lost" Tribes and this film), Tom Weidlinger (Heart of the Congo, A Dream in Hanoi), Shakti Butler (The Way Home), Ashley James (Bomba: Dancing the Drum), Amie Williams (Stripped and Teased) and Pam Rorke Levy (The Mission District: The Hidden Neighborhoods of San Francisco). Her work has often focused on themes of people and their cultural values, music as cultural expression and the changing gender roles of men and women. Her films have been seen in countless film festivals around the world, on national public and cable television, on television in Europe, Australia and Asia, and have been distributed widely to educational institutions.
Gosling's Blossoms of Fire, a feature documentary filmed and edited completely on 16mm, represents her debut as a Producer/Director. The film, distributed in the U.S. by New Yorker Films, is a celebratory tribute to the Isthmus Zapotec people of southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Blossoms of Fire has garnered rave reviews, charming audiences from San Diego to Marseille. Among its awards, the film won the Coral Award for Best Documentary by a Non-Latino Director about Latin America at the Havana International Film Festival. The film has also been broadcast on HBO Latino, Spanish, Swedish and Maori Television channels.
Gosling's current projects in development as Director/Producer include No Mouse Music! The Story of Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records (with Chris Simon) and Bamako Chic, Women Cloth Dyers of Mali (with Maxine Downs). Gosling's story of becoming a filmmaker is included in the book for junior high school girls, You Can Be a Woman Movie Maker, published by Cascade Pass. The book includes a 15-minute video on DVD entitled Maureen Gosling, Documentary Filmmaker.
Jed Riffe produced and directe, over the last 30 plus years, five award-winning internationally broadcast documentary films including the national Emmy nominated documentary Ishi, the Last Yahi, and produced 20 broadcast documentaries in collaboration with other highly regarded filmmakers. Jed conceived and served as one of three series producers for the California and the American Dream, an independently produced four-hour, nationally broadcast PBS series. He is honored to be a member of FWD-Doc, a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow/Alumni and a Gerbode Fellow for Excellence in Non-Profit Management. Riffe has supervised and conducted archival research for Peralta Community College District-Africana (Interactive) Community Studies Center; Protesta Productions-The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane; Frances Causey Films-The Long Shadow; Paragon Media and The California and the American Dream PBS Series and other companies producing national and internationally broadcast documentaries and interactive media. Riffe maintains and continually adds to his archival databases which feature a significant collection of footage, still photos and archival images on slavery, Jim Crow, American Indian tribal communities, American Indian-white history and relations; Eugenics as well as many other subjects. Many of these images are rare and hard to find. Riffe has created and maintains databases with thousands of images. He has worked with intellectual property attorneys Michael Donaldson, Alan Korn and others.
Santa Cruz Peace Chorale is a mixed-voice community chorus with a mission to promote local and worldwide peace and social justice through singing, and to enlighten as well as to entertain. The group presents an occasional concert in addition to singing at community events, soup kitchens, and street demonstrations. The chorus is open to all singers without audition and is run by its members.
May 10
Samnur Vardar studied English Literature at Istanbul's Bogazici University, where her passion for films and interest in journalism led her to the graduate Media Studies programme of New York’s New School for Social Research. Her documentary making career began at Turkey’s first news channel where she wrote, produced, edited and directed projects on a wide range of issues, and left with lifelong friends and film partners.
May 18
Sebastián Díaz, Director and Producer of A Thousand Pines, is a filmmaker and Emmy-awarded editor originally from Mexico. His short documentary Toñita’s premiered at MoMA Doc Fortnight. His award-winning documentary Brilliant Soil has screened internationally. Sebastián received a PBS Emerging Filmmakers award with A Thousand Pines. He sits on the board of UnionDocs, NYC.
Noam Osband, Director and Producer of A Thousand Pines, is a filmmaker, radio producer, and anthropologist. His first feature was the nationally-broadcast film Adelante, and his documentary, The Radical Jew, won Best Short Documentary at the Charlotte Film Festival and the Tallgrass Film Festival. He is also a radio and print journalist, whose bylines include The Atlantic, BBC4, Criminal, and Freakonomics Radio.
Angeles Moreno is an experienced multi-faceted graphic designer recognized for innovative ideas and aesthetics that are clean, sleek, and modern. She has developed cohesive, responsive, and immersive branding across multiple medias and platforms for a diverse clientele—including industries such as art, education, environmental, entertainment, health & wellness, and technology—for solopreneurs up to non-profits and massive corporations. She is considered a critical design thinker who applies insight and thought into practice, and her drive for ingenious design concepts is refreshing and admired.
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