| Amanda
Pollak
Producer
 Amanda Pollak has been producing, researching and writing
highly acclaimed documentaries for Public Television since
1992. Her investigative skills were rewarded early on when
she received an individual Emmy for her leading role in researching TR:
The Story of Theodore Roosevelt, which the New York
Daily News proclaimed to be "one of public television's
proudest achievements." Since then, she has continued
to research and produce compelling historical films, including
the Emmy Award-winning Truman and Abraham and
Mary Lincoln: A House Divided. During the latter film’s
production, she took exclusive charge of over forty days
of Hollywood-style production, traveling across the country
to nearly twenty states. Following this effort she delved
into the history of world commerce with the movie Money
and Power: The History of Business. The New York
Times called this two-hour documentary "smart and
well-edited," and went on to laud the film's extensive
displays of long-forgotten archival material from the 1500s
to the 1900s. In 2002, she revealed her ability to work in
different genres by winning an Emmy Award for producing one
hour of David Grubin's five-hour scientific series for PBS
entitled The Secret Life of the Brain. Well received
by public and critics alike, New York Newsday named
it "provocative, and a triumph" and The Los
Angeles Times asserted "the content breaks new
ground." Following this, Pollak returned to her specialty,
historical narrative, by joining Insignia Films to produce Reporting
America at War. Heralded as “uncommonly intelligent
and provocative television” by the Washington Post, Reporting
America at War earned a Cine Golden Eagle Award and
was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2004 News and Documentary
Emmy Awards. With Insignia Films, she then went on to produce Las
Vegas, which followed New York and Chicago on
PBS’s acclaimed history series, American Experience. Las
Vegas received wide national praise, noted as being “well-produced,
brightly written and entertaining” by the San Jose
Mercury News and “thorough and amplifying history” by
the Dallas Morning News. It became the highest rated American
Experience program of 2005. Her most recent work was
on New Orleans, a two-hour history of the city presented
in the aftermath of Katrina, which aired on the American
Experience in February of 2007.
Michelle Ferrari
Writer
 Over
the past decade, Emmy-winning screenwriter Michelle Ferrari
has created a series of innovative and critically-acclaimed
documentary narratives. Most recently, she completed Insignia
Films¹ Reporting America at War, a three-hour series
for PBS that the Washington Post called "uncommonly
intelligent and provocative television." She was
also the writer of Seabiscuit, director Stephen Ives'
profile of the Depression-era thoroughbred champion for
American Experience was variously praised as "essential
viewing," "superior television,"
and a "wire-to-wire winner." Ferrari¹s work,
in particular, was hailed by critics as "sleek"
and "notably stylish," and earned her the 2003
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing. She was the
writer of the American Experience installment Miss America,
which premiered as an Official Selection of the 2002 Sundance
Film Festival, and of Out of the Past, winner of the 1998
Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. Other credits include
the PBS special Margaret Sanger, nominated for the prestigious
Writers Guild of America Award in 1999, and Calling the
Ghosts, which in 1998 received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism
Award and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Special.
Ferrari also has served as story editor and creative advisor
on numerous documentaries, including Beauty in a Jar, State
of Denial, T-Shirt Travels, Bombay Eunuch, Paving the Way
and HBO¹s Emmy-nominated
Blue Vinyl. She is a graduate of the University of California
at Berkeley and holds an M.A. in American History from Columbia
University, where she was a President¹s Fellow.
Toby Shimin
Editor
For the past ten years, Toby Shimin has shown an uncanny ability
to take complex, often controversial subjects, and craft them
into elegant and emotional films. Her most recent work can
be seen in Episode Two of Ives' Reporting America at War,
and in Seabiscuit, for which Shimin received a Primetime Emmy
nomination for Outstanding Editing. As the sole editor of
Ives' and Kantor's film Cornerstone, she combed through more
than 300 hours of footage to create a tightly structured,
fast-paced documentary about one of America's most unusual
theatrical ensembles. Her work editing A Leap of Faith about
the struggle to create a school in Northern Ireland for both
Catholic and Protestant children, and Martha and Ethel, a
surprising and moving portrait of two ninety-year-old nannies
and the lifelong relationship with the families they raised,
contributed greatly to the acceptance of both of these films
in the Sundance Film Festival, and their later success in
theatrical release and on PBS. Her other films from
the story of Bluegrass music, to a portrait of Neil Simon,
to the story of one family's struggle with their history during
the holocaust have all displayed Shimin's characteristic
deft touch with complex and deeply personal stories.
Buddy Squires
Cinematographer
Buddy Squires is one of the premiere documentary cameramen
in the country. His award-winning cinematography has formed
the centerpiece of a generation of historical films, from
Ives' films The West and Lindbergh, to The Civil War, Baseball,
Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty with Ken Burns.
His remarkable work capturing Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees
in Tanzania garnered the HBO film Chimps: So Like Us an Emmy
award and an Academy Award nomination. He has filmed baseball
pitchers with high speed cameras, open heart surgery in operating
rooms, and street performers in New York City. Squires has
shot in the jungles of Central America for Guatemala: The
Official Story (Canadian Broadcasting), in Southeast Asia
for The Khmer Rouge (TF-1 France), and in the mountains of
India for a profile of the Dalai Lama.
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