Forum Network

John "Brent" Hunt is the Founder & CEO of Soft Cell Biological Research headquarted in St. George, Utah. Hunt incorporated the company in August 2014.

Geoffrey is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer for Indigo, as well as a Partner at Flagship Pioneering, where he focuses on inventing technologies and starting companies to address global challenges in nutrition, environmental sustainability, and medicine. He is also a co-founder of Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ:MCRB), Kaleido Biosciences, Sienna Biopharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:SNNA), Axcella Health and others.

Dr. Pamela Templer is Professor and Associate Chair, Boston Univ. Dept of Biology. Dr. Templer is also the Director of the B.U. Ph.D. Program in Biogeoscience; Director, BU URBAN Graduate Program; Co-Director, Boston University Stable Isotope Laboratory. She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America.

Raber Umphenour is a filmmaker, director, and community leader focused on building cultural districts and developing affordable artist work-live housing. Raber co-founded Midway Artist Collective, a community based non-profit, which secured $20 million in financing to purchase a quarter million sq. ft. work-live building outright after its developer threatened market sale. Secured in only two weeks, this 89 studio building, is now affordable for artists in perpetuity. Midway is a unique rental property, providing emerging artists an affordable place to stay and work in Boston and encouraging artists to make Boston a destination and home, supporting the free flow of ideas between disciplines and generations. He has lectured at Harvard University, Common Field, MakeCity Festival in Berlin. His work has been screened at USITT, UCSD, Wake Forest, BU, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Wellesley College amongst others.

**David Colantuoni** is the Vice President of Product Management at Avid. Prior to joining Avid in 2008, David—an Emerson alumnus—served as the Director of Product Development at Boris FX.

**Gretchen Taipale** oversees Content Production at Hill Holliday, one of the country’s largest advertising agencies. Seeing a need for quick-turn content and quality in-house production, she built and runs Brigade, the agency’s robust content production team. Brigade’s group of videographers, animators, editors, photographers and producers offer a scalable content solution for major brands including Bank of America, Frontier Communications, Boar’s Head, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Optum, Novartis, and Party City. Their range of work includes studio production, documentary-style storytelling, and full scale activations, such as a recent award-winning project for Know Celiac.

Lise Balk King is a documentary filmmaker who also serves as a consultant in media and communications strategy. She specializes in the application of media tools for public policy, education, and social change. She co-produced HBO Documentary Film’s HEROIN: CAPE COD, USA (2015), and was also the film's social impact producer. She next served as a social impact producer for three more HBO documentary Films – RISKY DRINKING (2016), WARNING: THIS DRUG MAY KILL YOU (2017), and 32 PILLS: MY SISTER'S SUICIDE (2018). King also takes select independent clients on projects that have critical potential for social change and public policy impact. These issues-focused films have included the documentary THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE (2015), which highlights the need for improvement in veterans' mental health care, LONG TIME COMING: A 1955 BASEBALL STORY (2018), about racism and healing cultural rifts through the story of an early integrated Little League Baseball championship game, HILLBILLY (2018), which explores stereotypes of rural whites from the Appalachian region of the U.S., and most recently, EAT UP (2019), highlighting the systemic challenges of providing healthy meals to children in US public schools. King is currently a producer and assistant DP on a film about the crisis surrounding the diminishing right whale population, and is also producing a doc about the Provincetown SWIM FOR LIFE. King has a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she also served three years as a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She studied documentary filmmaking at Harvard Visual and Environmental Studies program.

Jodi Rave Spotted Bear is a journalist and media entrepreneur. She’s now a MacDowell Colony fellow working on a creative non-fiction book about freedom of information, the oil industry and the cultural impact on the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. Jodi has won awards from mainstream, military, university and Native press associations during nearly 15 years of reporting for daily newspapers. She spent more than a decade reporting on American Indian issues before returning to the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota where she founded the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit media organization that aims to strengthen independent media in Native communities. She’s an advisory board member for the Red Press Initiative of the Native American Journalists Association, a groundbreaking survey on press freedom in Indian Country. In support of independent media, the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance recently launched a video news pilot the organizations online news site at buffalosfire.com. Jodi is a Harvard Nieman Fellow and a Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution fellow.

Assistant Editor at WGBH.

Chris Hasting’s passion for television started at age 10 when he produced Kids News, a daily news show at his elementary school outside Philadelphia. After college, he became a founding team member in the development and production of Black Entertainment Television’s award-winning BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley. At WGBH, Chris has worked with children television’s program ZOOM and the WGBH Lab, an innovative incubator for up-and-coming filmmakers. Chris joined WORLD Channel in 2011, where he co-created the award-winning documentary series America ReFramed, Local, USA, and Doc World, and provided editorial oversight to the other original series on WORLD. Series in Chris’s portfolio have won many awards, including a Peabody Award and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Chris is committed to developing a diverse pool of filmmakers and storytellers. He’s a regular collaborator with the National Black Programming Consortium, the Center for Asian American Media, Pacific Islanders in Communications, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, and Vision Maker Media, and has served as content reader and reviewer on various open calls. In 2016, Chris became a Rockwood JustFilms Fellow and was awarded WGBH’s Margaret and Hans Rey Curious George in-house producer fellowship.

Lubo Madolev is currently the Supervising Producer at Mustache, an award-winning Brooklyn based creative content agency, part of Cognizant Interactive. A “one-stop shop” Content Agency, Mustache provides all-in creative, strategic, production, post-production, and distribution services for a 360°, 24/7 world. Lubo has led commercial productions for renowned brands such as Amazon, Google, Netflix, Showtime, Expedia, and with partners such as T Brand Studio, McCann and Conde Nast. Utilizing skills gained from working in television and documentary films, Lubo is most passionate about story-driven content that also achieves business results. In response to always-evolving consumer habits, Lubo’s team is ever optimizing and fine-tuning their creative approach to address increasingly complex production demands, often in a very limited window of time.

Content creator and cookie aficionado, Joanie makes video in all shapes and formats across the digital spectrum, from Twitch to Snapchat, YouTube to Instagram Stories. Currently Senior Producer for WGBH’s Emerging Platforms Initiative, she spends her days piloting original video content for social platforms and watching TikToks. Previously she worked as a senior producer at Priorities USA, a producer at Bustle and Elite Daily, lead field documentarian for Finding America, a producer at Digitas, and Harvard Business School's first digital content producer. She was born and raised in Charlestown, Mass. - known to fans of Jeremy Renner as “The Town” - and has an MA in international journalism, specializing in documentary making, from Cardiff University in Wales.