Gregory Carr discusses Africa’s Lost Eden, a film about saving Mozambique’s flagship national park, Gorongosa, after years of civil war. In 2007 Carr signed a 20-year agreement with the government of Mozambique to restore and co-manage Gorongosa. He sits on the boards of Internews and the Gorongosa Restoration Project.  Carr co-founded Africa Online in 1996 and served as its chair until 1998, when Carr resigned from his for-profit boards and dedicated himself to humanitarian activities.  In 1999 he formed the Carr Foundation dedicated to human rights, the environment and the arts.  That same year he co-founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.  Through research and teaching, the Carr Center seeks to make human rights principles central to the formulation of good public policy in the United States and throughout the world. Greg Carr received a Masters in public policy from Harvard in 1986, when he also co-founded Boston Technology, an international telecommunications firm, and served as its chair until 1998.

Godfrey Cheshire will be present for discussion after his film Moving Midway. He is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. A native of North Carolina, Cheshire co-founded Raleigh’s Spectator Magazine and began writing film criticism professionally in 1978. After moving to New York in 1991, he served for a decade as chief film critic for New York Press; his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications. His reviews currently appear in North Carolina’s Metro Magazine. He has also won three Arts Criticism awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Cheshire’s areas of special interest include Iranian film, the conversion to digital cinema and cinematic representations of the American South. He is a former chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle and a member of the National Society of Film Critics.

Sandy Cioffi, director of Sweet Crude will speak after her film on Friday, March 19. A Seattle-based film and video artist, Cioffi has produced and/or directed several films, including the critically acclaimed Crocodile Tears, Terminal 187 and Just Us. She first ventured into video production as a volunteer for Witness for Peace during the Contra War in Nicaragua. She traveled with students from the U.S. to film South Africa’s transition from Apartheid in 1995. She used film as a documentation and verification tool to provide video evidence on compliance with the Good Friday Peace Agreement during the 1998 Marching Season in Northern Ireland. Sandy has worked extensively with the Hate Free Zone in Seattle, producing films about treatment of immigrants post-September 11th. In 2005-2008, Sandy made four trips to the volatile Niger Delta in Nigeria to film Sweet Crude, documenting conditions there and interviewing the region’s key stakeholders, including leadership of the armed resistance movement. In April 2008, she and her film crew were detained by the Nigerian State Security Services and held in military prison for seven days. Beyond the making of Sweet Crude, she has been active in political advocacy for the Delta’s people, appealing to media, U.S. legislators, international diplomats and NGOs to raise visibility of the humanitarian and global economic issues.

Phil Comeau will speak after this film Frédéric Back: Nature Above All. Phil is a Nova Scotia native and lives in Montreal Canada. Since 1977, he has directed documentaries and dramas in over 20 countries. His films have won 31 international film awards and have been broadcast on over 60 TV networks worldwide. Among his documentary films and series, he directed Mayday, The New Detectives, Risk Takers, Tall Ship Chronicles, World Legends and Archeology. In 2006, he was promoted to Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France for his contribution to cinematographic arts.

David Conover will speak after his work-in-progress film Behold the Earth.  After graduating from Bowdoin College, David Conover worked as a professional seaman and spent five years designing and teaching sea courses for 14-18 year olds at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Maine and Florida. This was followed by a Master's Degree in Education at Harvard, where he became a Kennedy School teaching fellow in leadership studies. In 1987, Conover directed and produced his first documentary, Outward Bound, which aired on National Geographic Explorer. David's subsequent early film experiences took him to a river in Kamchatka on a project for Channel 4/PBS.  He also worked on a film about measuring Mt. Everest for PBS NOVA. He was introduced to the changing commercial fisheries, an interest he maintains to this day, through his work with PBS NOVA. His relationship with PBS programming continued with a six-show stint as a producer on the outdoor how-to series Trailside.

Wade Davis is an explorer-in-residence at National Geographic Society and will speak after the film Light at the Edge of the World: Heart of the Amazon.  An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Wade Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology, and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, from Harvard University. Davis spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. Author of ten books, including "The Serpent and the Rainbow", "One River", and "Light at the Edge of the World", he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lowell Thomas Medal (Explorers Club) and the Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary nonfiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorers Club, one of 20 so named in the 100-year history of the club.

Lauren DeAngelis is a 2009 Student Academy Awards bronze winner, for her film A Place to Land. She will be speaking on a panel at American University on March 24.  Lauren is a non-fiction filmmaker and recent graduate of American University's Master of Arts program in Film and Video. She is passionate about our impact on wildlife and the environment. Lauren recently won a 2008 TIVA Peer Award for "Sleeper," a music video she helped edit and produce for rock band The Sketches. When she's not busy producing films or hanging out with animals, Lauren works as an online writer/editor for U.S. News & World Report.

Jonathan Diamond is the executive producer, director and writer of The Learning Child Series that includeds his film When Learning Comes Naturally, which he will be speaking after in the 2010 Festival. He has also produced the public television special Women Going Global, and has created and produced series for Animal Planet, Discovery Health and ESPN. As president and founder of the independent documentary production company, Jonathan Diamon Associates, Diamond has been committed to producing video and television programs in the public interest on such topics as education, health and the environmenta for broadcast, cable and home video distribution. 

Barry Dixon is featured in Green House: Design It, Build It, Live It and will be present for a disccusion following the film. An interior designer practicing in the Virginia countryside near Washington, DC, Barry Dixon has taken his own brand of warmly hospitable Southern design style to projects around the world.  A childhood spent abroad in exotic locales such as India, South Africa & French Polynesia affords his work a singular global perspective.  Multiple magazine pictorials (Southern Accents, Veranda, House Beautiful, Metropolitan Home, Traditional Home) as well as continuous television appearances (Good Morning America, HGTV) have spurred the success of his furniture line with Tomlinson/Erwin-Lambeth.  Recent accomplishments include a fabric collection for Vervain/S. Harris, a rug collection with Megerian, and his new book ‘Barry Dixon Interiors’ with Brian Coleman.

Pete Docter will speak after his film Up.  One of the most prominent creative forces in the Pixar-led animation renaissance, Pete Docter first gravitated to animation at the age of eight by creating his own animated flip-books. That experience gave the blossoming artist a deep-seated love of illustration, and he received a formal education in that arena by attending the character animation college program at Valencia-based CalArts. At Pixar, Docter served as animator and screenwriter on 1995's Toy Story, served as storyboard artist on the 1998 A Bug's Life, and authored the screen story for the 1999 Toy Story 2, before authoring and co-directing 2001’s Monsters, Inc.

David Douglas will speak on a panel after the series of films at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Douglas is on the board of the Washington DC-based Water Advocates, the first advocacy organization devoted full-time to increasing America's public and private involvement and funding on behalf of safe, affordable and sustainable supplies of drinking water and adequate sanitation around the world. He has headed for 18 years the all-volunteer Santa Fe-based nonprofit, Waterlines, which has provided technical help and funding for drinking water projects in over 200 rural communities in 12 developing countries. He has worked as an environmental lawyer and written extensively on international drinking water and sanitation issues for environmental, religious and developmental magazines. He is also a trustee of the Wallace Genetic Foundation.

Steve Dunsky will speak after his films Butterflies & Bulldozers: David Schooley, Fred Smith and the Fight for San Bruno Mountain and Green Fire: The Life and Legacy of Also Leopold. Steve Dunsky collaborates with his wife, Ann, who works for the agency as an editor. Their productions are shown in visitor centers from Washington, D.C., to Washington state and from Alaska to Indonesia. Several of their programs have been presented on public and cable television, and the pair has won several awards for their work.

Ann Dunsky will speak after her films Butterflies & Bulldozers: David Schooley, Fred Smith and the Fight for San Bruno Mountain and Green Fire: The Life and Legacy of Also Leopold. Ann Dunsky collaborates with her husband, Steve, who has been a writer/producer/director with the U.S. Forest Service for the past 15 years. Their productions are shown in visitor centers from Washington, D.C., to Washington state and from Alaska to Indonesia. Several of their programs have been presented on public and cable television, and have won multiple awards.