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  • Henry Corra is a New York City based documentary filmmaker best known for his highly acclaimed films *Umbrellas* (1995), *George *(2000), *Frames* (2004), *Same Sex America* (2005) and the Emmy-nominated film *NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell* (2007). In 1994 Corra launched his own production company, Corra Films Inc. Corra Films, located in the heart of downtown Manhattan, draws on the talents of some of New York's most innovative and original filmmakers, editors, artists, musicians and designers who share a commitment to exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary film language and the nonfiction narrative approach. Corra's films have been exhibited worldwide in theatrical venues in New York City, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin, and in broadcast venues including HBO, SHOWTIME, LOGO, CBS, PBS, VH1, ARTE and CHANNEL 4.
  • Born in Hong Kong and raised in Boston, Ellie Lee is one of those artists to whom pushing boundaries seems second nature. An animator with two award-winning shorts, Lee is also a seasoned documentarian. Her striking, charcoal-animated documentary, *Repetition Compulsion*, dealing with abused women, went on to become the first animated film to be broadcast on the acclaimed PBS documentary series, P.O.V. "It was conceived originally as a documentary, but the animation came about because I had these skills and abilities in that field and that seemed like the best way to tell the story, with the movement of the charcoal drawings capturing the violence without needing to actually show the women's faces." In 2000, Lee made the transition to live action, fiction narrative with her latest work, the haunting and elegiac short, *Dog Days*, a cautionary tale that takes place in a futuristic wasteland. "With Dog Days I really felt that my past as an animator and studying doc filmmaking at Harvard really came together to help make it a better film, says Lee. The film took top honors at the 2000 Hamptons and Florida Film Festivals, and is currently running on IFC.
  • David L. Kirp is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. A former newspaper editor as well as an academic, his interests range widely across social policy. Throughout his career, he has written about gender, race, education, affirmative action, housing and AIDS. Much of his work addresses the question of justice, not as theory but in practice.
  • Robert Siegel, a senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine *All Things Considered*, got started in radio news when he was a college freshman in 1964. He's still at it. As a host, Siegel has reported from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Israel. He now concentrates on domestic stories. During the fall of 1992, Siegel took a short leave from the show to anchor *Talk of the Nation*, NPR's nationwide live call-in program. A graduate of New York's Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, Siegel began his career in radio at the college radio station WKCR-FM where he anchored coverage of the 1968 Columbia demonstrations. The station's work received an award from the Writers Guild of America East.
  • Beatty joined *The Atlantic Monthly* as a senior editor in September of 1983, having previously worked as a book reviewer at *Newsweek* and as the literary editor of *The New Republic*. In addition to editing many of *The Atlantic*'s major nonfiction pieces, Beatty is in charge of the book-review section, and he has contributed numerous articles to the magazine himself. Recent subjects have spanned the globe: NATO, the United States Navy, and the Irish Troubles among them. His 1993 contribution to *The Atlantic Monthly*'s Travel pages, "The Bounteous Berkshires," earned these words of praise from *The Washington Post*: "The best travel writers make you want to travel with them. I, for instance, would like to travel somewhere with Jack Beatty, having read his superb account of a cultural journey to the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts." Beatty is also the author of *The World According to Peter Drucker*, published in 1998 by The Free Press and called "a fine intellectual portrait" by Michael Lewis in the *New York Times* Book Review. Born, raised, and educated in Boston, Beatty wrote a best-selling biography of James Michael Curley, the Massachusetts congressman and governor and Boston mayor, which Addison-Wesley published in 1992.
  • Ellen Hume is an Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University in Budapest. She was also the Founding Editor and Publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire. Hume is an experienced journalist, teacher, speaker, administrator, conference director and television commentator. As the founding Executive Director of PBS's Democracy Project, from 1996 to 1998, she developed special news programs that encouraged citizen involvement in public affairs. She oversaw PBS's 1996 and 1998 election coverage, creating PBS Debate Night, a nationally televised Congressional leadership debate, as well as local candidate debates on PBS stations across the country. Hume has more than 30 years of experience as a reporter and analyst for US newspapers, magazines and television. She was a White House and political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal from 1983 to 1988, and a Washington based national reporter with The Los Angeles Times from 1977 to 1983.
  • Austin Hoyt was a Producer and Executive Producer at WGBH Boston from March 1965 to March 2003 when he founded his own company, Austin Hoyt Productions. Hoyt won a Peabody Award for his contributions to American Experience's special series of Presidential portraits and biographies of Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower.