Staff

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. 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. Following this, Pollak returned to her specialty, historical narrative, by joining Insignia Films to produce Reporting America at War. Heralded as “television that matters…a visual document of power and clarity,” by the Los Angeles Times, 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 has gone on to produce several films for PBS’s acclaimed history series, American Experience, including Las Vegas, the highest rated American Experience program of 2005, and New Orleans, a two-hour film presented in the aftermath of Katrina that the The New York Times called a “fascinating look at the city’s history.” Most recently, she produced Kit Carson, a biography for the American Experience which aired in February, 2008, and has taken the lead on Insignia’s forthcoming feature-length documentary, The Diplomats.

Michelle Ferrari
Writer

Over the past decade, Michelle Ferrari has earned renown as one of the most sought-after documentary screenwriters and story editors working today. Her credits include more than a half-dozen films for PBS’s award-winning American Experience series, among them the recently-broadcast Kit Carson, a 2008 Writers Guild of America nominee for Best Documentary Script, and the highly-rated Seabiscuit, which was hailed by critics as “essential viewing” and “a wire-to-wire winner,” and earned Michelle a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing. She was also the writer of Insignia’s three-hour historical series Reporting America at War, a 2004 Emmy nominee for Best Documentary that critics praised as “ uncommonly intelligent and provocative television.” Additional credits include Gold Rush, winner of the Eric Barnow Prize for American History and the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Documentary Script; Margaret Sanger, a Writers Guild of America nominee for Best Documentary Script; and Out of the Past, winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s coveted Audience Award. Michelle was the senior researcher and script editor on the landmark PBS series The West, and has served as story editor and creative advisor on scores of independent documentaries for PBS and HBO, including Everything’s Cool, The Narcotics Farm, The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo, State of Denial, T-Shirt Travels, Bombay Eunuch and two-time 2003 Emmy nominee Blue Vinyl.

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.