Micah Fink, the founder of Common Good Productions, is an award winning producer, director and writer specializing in international affairs, public health, and environmental issues. He is also on the faculty at the Graduate Program in Social Documentary at the School For Visual Arts in NYC.
Recent projects include producing of CNN's "Memo to the President with Fareed Zakaria" (2013), producing discussion segments and short films for Al Gore’s “Climate Reality Project,” (2011 and 2012), and directing and producing "Mann V. Ford" a feature documentary for HBO (2011).
Micah’s work has been recognized with several Emmy nominations, two Cine Golden Eagle Awards, a Silver Screen award, and an International Film and Video Award. He was a Japan Society Fellow in 2005 and a Kaiser Media Health Fellow in 2005. Micah has a MS in Journalism from Columbia University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Over the last fifteen years, he has worked on more than three dozen films for PBS Wide Angle, National Geographic Explorer, National Geographic Wild, Frontline, WNET, The Teaching Channel, and ABC News.
You can learn more about Micah’s company, Common Good Productions, and see examples of his work at www.commongoodprod.com.
Karen Sim began her documentary filmmaking career as an editor on Maro Chermayeff’s Juilliard, a 2-hour special for the PBS series American Masters. She then further honed her skills in storytelling by working with Frontline producer/director Ofra Bikel, editing a number of her films, including the Emmy award winning An Ordinary Crime and The Burden of Innocence. Since then, she edited Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie and worked with Liz Garbus as her producer and editor on a number of projects, including COMA, Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and most recently ROBOT for Focus Forward Films which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
Gabrielle's film making career in documentary has brought her to many places including Thailand, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Mexico and throughout the United States. She has worked as a DP, producer and editor for clients such as ABC, PBS, HBO, Discovery/Times, TLC, NHK, The WashingtonPost.com, and A&E.
Acclaimed as the composer of "truly beautiful music" that is "hauntingly moving" as well as "audience-engaging", Philadelphia native Amanda Harberg composes music that continually engages audiences and performers alike on emotional as well as intellectual levels, and is performed regularly all over the world. The 2012/13 season includes performances of Ms. Harberg's music by the Albany Symphony's "Dogs of Desire", the Grand Rapids Symphony, the Olympia Philharmonic Society, the National Symphony of Ecuador, the Thuringer Symphoniker, the University of Nevada Symphony Orchestra, the Harmonium Choral Society and many more.
Harberg has recordings out on Koch International, Albany Records, Centaur Records, Walking Frog Regards, and several upcoming recordings. Harberg has received many commissions, including those from the Juilliard School, the New York Youth Symphony Chamber Music Program, the American Music Center, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and many more.
Awards include a Fulbright/Hays Fellowship, two Creative Connections grants, Juilliard's Peter Mennin Prize, a MacDowell Colony summer residency and regular ASCAP Plus awards. Harberg is the co-director of the Music and More series in Glen Ridge NJ, where she lives with her family.
Molly Schwartz was born in New York City, raised in Oklahoma. She earned her BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by a semester studying art, language, history and mountains in Nepal. After school she studied art conservation & restoration of works of art on paper, learning about qualities of paper and the cumulative effects of time. In Los Angeles she learned digital effects and time in fractions of seconds.
She has lived in Chicago, Katmandu, Los Angeles, and since 1999, Brooklyn. Schwartz shows her animated videos and drawings in public art installations, festivals, and exhibitions worldwide. She freelances for independent film and television. In May 2011 she completed her MPS graduate degree in visual programming and physical computing at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. She was awarded a Research Resident position for the 2011-2012 year at ITP.
Tara Nadolny is an associate producer and researcher at Common Good Productions. Tara received a BAH in Film and Media and German language from Queen's University in 2010 and she is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Media Studies at The New School in New York City.
Jon Sawyer is founding director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage and engaging the broadest possible public in global affairs. The Center partners with major newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets as well as universities and high schools across the country and in Europe. In 2012 the Center provided $850,000 in direct support to journalists working on 85 projects.
Jon, previously Washington bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was selected three years in a row for the National Press Club's award for best foreign reporting. The Pulitzer Center has won an Emmy for new approaches to news and documentary, the National Press Foundation's prize for best online journalism, the National Press Club's prize for best online journalism, and the Asia Society's Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for best use of technology in international education..
Nathalie Applewhite is managing director of the Pulitzer Center. She joined the organization in 2006, shortly after its founding, and has played a key role in the development of the Center's model and approach towards international journalism initiatives and educational outreach. She won an Emmy with the Center as the managing producer for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive documentary website that explores living with HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Prior to joining the Center, Nathalie worked as an independent documentary producer, director and editor, as a consultant for the Executive Office of the Secretary General at the UN, and as a project manager and media specialist for the University of Pennsylvania.
