Alexis Clements (Director/Producer)
Alexis is an award-winning writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. This is her first film. Her creative work has been published and produced in a number of venues in the US and Europe. She co-edited the two-volume anthology of plays, Out of Time & Place, which includes her performance work, Conversation. She was invited to guest edit the 40th anniversary volume of Sinister Wisdom titled “Variations.” A regular contributor to Hyperallergic, her writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others. She has been an invited speaker at Harvard University, Emerson College, TEDx Chelsea, and the Playwrights Forum, among others. She recently co-founded Little Rainbows: Storytime and the Lesbian Herstory Archives and served on the Executive Board of CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies.
Ali Cotterill (Editor)
Ali is a filmmaker and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. As a filmmaker, her films have screened at 100+ festivals around the world, won several awards, and been broadcast on Logo TV and Current TV. Her feature directorial debut, North Pole, NY, premiered at IFF Boston 2018 and picked up the Audience Award for Best Feature at the Indie Street Film Festival. As an editor, she’s edited 250+ short doc films for Fortune 500 companies and non-profits alike. She also edited and co-wrote the documentary feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, which premiered at MOMA’s Documentary Fortnight (World Premiere) and Hot Docs (Canadian Premiere) and won Best Documentary at the Milan and Pittsburgh LGBT film festivals. She’s a proud member of the Video Consortium, Film Fatales, and Brooklyn Doc Club in NYC.
Jeanette Sears (Cinematographer)
Jeanette is a New York-based filmmaker, transplanted from a small town in Ohio. They have worked on various fiction and documentary films, music videos, and videography events. They are a recent graduate of the City College of New York, with an MFA in Media Arts Production (Cinematography emphasis). Jeanette is a graduate of the Ohio State University’s Film Studies undergraduate program, and moved to New York to pursue their passion for filmmaking. While attending the City College of New York, they began a documentary project, Generations of Silence, which is currently in production. The film examines the experiences of four LGBT veterans and their struggles in serving in the US Military from before, during, and after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Jeanette has always had an interest in anything involving a camera, and this stands true today. They are a freelance cinematographer, videographer, and photographer.
Bennett Singer (Consulting Producer)
Born and raised in Chicago, Bennett Singer is an award-winning filmmaker who has been making social-issue documentaries for more than 20 years. With Nancy Kates, he produced and directed Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; was broadcast nationally on PBS and Logo/MTV; and won more than 20 international awards, including the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. The film has been shown at more than 500 campus and community screenings and by dozens of social-justice organizations, including GLSEN, The National Black Justice Coalition, the NAACP, the ACLU and Amnesty International. Singer’s additional credits include the Emmy- and Peabody-winning series on the history of the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize II; With God On Our Side; and The Question of Equality, all broadcast on PBS. He was a consulting producer on Codebreaker, a documentary/drama on Alan Turing, and co-director of Electoral Dysfunction, an award-winning PBS documentary about voting in America. Singer served for eight years as Executive Editor of TIME Magazine’s Education Program and has created curriculum materials to accompany dozens of film projects, including The Diary of Anne Frank, The Laramie Project and Boycott. The recipient of a Fellowship in Video from New York Foundation for the Arts and a 2014 Yaddo Fellow, Singer is the editor of Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian and co-author of LGBTQ Stats, an “astounding” (Booklist, starred review) almanac of facts and figures that chronicle the ongoing LGBTQ revolution. Published in 2017 by The New Press, the book was one of four nonfiction titles honored in the American Library Association’s 2018 Stonewall Book Awards. Singer lives in Brooklyn, New York with his husband, filmmaker David Deschamps.
Sarah Nakano Purgett (Production Assistant)
Sarah is a graduate of Cooper Union’s School of Art in New York. Originally from Minnesota, she is interested in issues related to LGBTQ archives and cultural anthropology. She has experience working with various artists, galleries, museums, and art events as a production/operations assistant.
Jillian Brodie (Archival Assistant)
Jillian is a New York born and raised archivist and artist. Much of her work focuses on film, art, and lesbian and queer cultural production. She has experience working with artists, in art galleries, and on a number of independent film projects. She is also a member of curatorial collective, Two Chairs.
National Advisory Board
Erica N. Cardwell
Erica is a critic and educator based in New York. After nearly a decade as a youth worker and arts administrator serving marginalized women and communities of color, Erica shifted her career to writing and teaching in 2015. In that same year, she was awarded a Nonfiction fellowship from the LAMBDA Literary Foundation. Erica writes about the intersection of in/equity and imagination for Black artists and artists of color. Her essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming for The Believer, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Passages North, The Lightwork Annual, Rewire, Sinister Wisdom, The Feminist Wire, Bitch Media, The London Progressive Journal, Green Mountain Review, Triangle House Review, and Ikons Magazine. She has taught creative writing, composition, and social justice in schools throughout New York City and is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher Journal. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Erica lives in Brooklyn with her wife and her turtle, Smiley Mousa.
Julie R Enszer, PhD
Julie is a scholar and poet. Her scholarship is at the intersection of U.S. history and literature with particular attention to twentieth century U.S. feminist and lesbian histories, literatures, and cultures. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, Journal of Lesbian Studies, American Periodicals, WSQ, Frontiers, and other journals. Enszer is the author of three collections of poetry, Lilith’s Demons, Sisterhood and Handmade Love . She is also the editor of Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry and of Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal.
Jen Jack Gieseking, PhD
Jack is an urban cultural geographer, feminist and queer theorist, environmental psychologist, and American Studies scholar. He is engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in digital and material environments, with a focus on sexual and gender identities. Jack’s work pays special attention to how such productions support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice. Their second book project, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008, is forthcoming from NYU Press. He is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Jack uses both they/them/theirs and he/him/his pronouns.
Hillary Kolos
Hillary served as the Director of Digital Learning at the DreamYard Project in the Bronx, NY. As a graduate student in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, she worked as a research assistant for Project New Media Literacies and researched gaming culture. Hillary graduated from NYU with a BFA in Film/TV. She interned at Maysles Films, Big Mouth Productions, and POV and went on to work on projects for Learning Matters, Aardman Animations, and filmmaker Paul Devlin. In addition, she has consulted for the Pearson and Adobe Foundations and taught after-school classes in several New York City public schools.
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
Shawnta is a separatist, zinester, archivist, writer, and black-dyke-participant of intentional, community-specific, collective spaces. A coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and collective member of WOW Cafe Theater as producer of women of color theater, namely, Rivers of Honey. Shawn is a Librarian appointed as Assistant Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. From (the people’s republic of) Brooklyn, Shawn founded the Queer Housing Nacional List, and has since purchased a home designated for queer women of color (QWOC) with her wife in the Bronx. A board member of Fire & Ink, a national organization for LGBT writers of African descent, and founder of Lambey Press, independently publishing QWOC; Shawn is a co-editor of upcoming special issue of Sinister Wisdom focused on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.