Collaborative Studio Fellows 2012-2013

Andrew Hinton

Collaborative Studio Projects
» For Sale in Los Sures
» Southside Stories

Andrew Hinton is a documentary filmmaker drawn to individuals and stories with positive change at their heart. His most recent film Tashi & The Monk won two awards at its premiere at Mountainfilm in Telluride, MT. His previous film Amar was the 2012 Vimeo Documentary Award winner. He is from the UK but now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Anthony Simon

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Third Shift
» Goodbye Southside

Anthony Simon works with fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, music production, and street art. He works professionally as a freelance video editor with clients including Maysles Films, The Guardian, and The Yes Men. Simon received his BA at The Evergreen State College and was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow. He is currently developing a feature-length documentary about his family’s involvement in the major industries of Kauai, Hawaii. The story begins with his Great Grandfather’s immigration from the Philippines to work in sugar production.

Beyza Boyacioglu

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Toñita’s
» Goodbye Southside

Beyza Boyacioglu is a documentary filmmaker, video artist and curator from Turkey. She was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow, where she co-directed Toñita’s. She curates Fiction-Non, a documentary series exploring narrative/non-fiction hybrid films at Maysles Cinema in New York. Her work as a video artist has been exhibited at MoMA (New York), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), NoteOn (Berlin), and Sakip Sabanci Museum (Istanbul). Boyacioglu is currently based in Boston where she is pursuing a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and works as a researcher at the Open Doc Lab.

Constanza Mirré

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Rosemary’s Street
» The Other
» Como Preparar Patitas de Cerdo

Constanza Mirré is a photographer and independent documentary producer. She is the author of Bares de Buenos Aires, a photo book published by Ediciones Lariviére in Buenos Aires Argentina and by Le Passage in Paris. She produced Argentina in the UK, a book published in 2008 by the Argentine Embassy in the UK. Published in print magazines internationally, Mirré has worked as a travel, film still and fashion photographer in New York City.

Emilia Bilińska

Collaborative Studio Projects
» The Other
» Rosemary’s Street

Emilia Bilińska was born in Bydgoszcz, Poland. She graduated with a degree in Philosophy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, and in Film and Television Production at the National Film School in Łódź. She was a production manager at Wajda School in Warsaw, production assistant at the TR Warszawa theatre, assistant director for TV series, copywriter, translator, assistant curator, and contributor for Art Experts Magazine, EKRANy, and FilmPro. She has conducted interviews with Tadeusz Rolke, Tilda Swinton, Michael Obert, Reggie Watts, Pulp, Florian Habicht and covered film festivals including SXSW, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival. She was among 12 filmmakers from around the world who were invited to participate in the UnionDocs Collaborative Program from 2012-13, where she directed her second documentary, The Other. Since September 2012, she has been based in New York where she works as a correspondent for several online outlets.

Federica Sasso

Collaborative Projects
» The Last Bread
» For Sale in Los Sures
» Southside Stories

Federica Sasso is an Italian journalist and radio producer based in New York City. She writes for Italian outlets and is a contributor to the Swiss national broadcasting company for which she produces audio documentaries. Sasso was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and studied documentary film at the Scuola di Cinema, Televisione e Nuovi Media of Milan.

Jen Epstein

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Southside Stories
» Como Preparar Patica de Chancho
» The Other

Jen Epstein is a researcher, writer self-shooting media maker who has devoted many years to working as a manager in film and television for a variety of New York Post-Houses and Media Companies. She’s currently an Operations Project Manager for Discovery Communications.

Her passion for documentary arts began while working as a production assistant/researcher on several documentary features including BrotherMen, a performance based documentary film that aired nationally on PBS. She holds a BA in Communication Arts from Ramapo College of New Jersey, and earned an MA in Media Studies with a concentration in Documentary Studies from the New School.

Maria Rosa Badia

Collaborative Studio Projects
» The Last Bread
» For Sale in Los Sures
» Como Preparar Patica de Chancho

Maria Rosa Badia is a storyteller and filmmaker from Barcelona, where she graduated in Journalism with a minor in international politics and cultural communication. She has been based in New York City since 2008, where she freelances as an editor and multimedia producer. She was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow. She is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, a community of professional filmmakers in Brooklyn who are dedicated to innovative approaches to filmmaking.

Michael Vass

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Goodbye Southside
» Third Shift

Michael Vass is a filmmaker and writer based in New York. His award-winning films have screened at festivals and galleries, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. He was the 2012 winner of the Canadian Art Foundation Writing Prize, and his writings have appeared in Cinema Scope, Cineaction, Canadian Art, C Magazine, MACHETE, and The Rusty Toque. Michael received his BFA from Simon Fraser University and his MFA from York University. He’s an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Directors’ Residency.

Parul Wadhwa

Parul Wadhwa is an independent filmmaker who works in documentary, hybrid forms and asian art-house cinema. She comes from a varied background of curating film festivals, archiving film memorabilia, managing film and video art residencies, restoration and color grading. Previously, she has worked in Bollywood, South Korea, the UK and the USA. She holds a Masters degree in English Language and Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and has a certificate in Asian Film from the Korean Film Council, where she specializes in Asian film policies and industries of various Asian countries. She is a recipient of several grants and fellowships, including the prestigious American Film Institute’s Emerging Film Fellowship.

Sebastian Diaz Aguirre

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Toñita’s
» Como Preparar Patica de Chancho

Sebastian Diaz is a Mexican filmmaker and artist based in New York. He directed Toñita’s while a fellow at UnionDocs, which premiered at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight in 2014. He was co-director of Brilliant Soil (2011), which was awarded Material Culture & Archeology Film Prize at 13th RAI Ethnographic Film Festival. Diaz photographed and edited Tijuaneados Anonymous, which premiered at the Ambulante Festival in 2010, and was awarded best local film at the San Diego Latino Film Festival. Diaz co-founded the Bulbo Art Collective, which produced a documentary show broadcast internationally about life in the Mexico-US border. His work has been exhibited at ARCO (Madrid), MAK (Vienna), InSite_05 (Tijuana-San Diego). He is currently working on the a feature-length documentary, The Caribbean.

Shannon Carroll

Collaborative Projects
» Southside Stories

Shannon Carroll is an artist and media producer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Creative Director of Vivid Story, a creative studio specializing in video, interactive design and photography for causes that matter. Previously, she’s worked at POV, an award-winning series on PBS, Documentary Educational Resources and WGBH. She was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and is a graduate of Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Tamer Hassan

Collaborative Studio Projects
» Como Preparar Patica de Chancho
» Rosemary’s Street
» Third Shift
» The Other

With an appreciation for the intimacy necessary to produce compelling documentary work, Tamer Hassan has spent the last five years integrating himself into the countercultures of rural autonomous communities throughout the United States. His work from this practice has screened internationally at venues ranging from the Princeton Environmental Film Festival to the Tinai EcoFilm Festival in Goa, India. He has received grants and awards from The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, The Davis Foundation, and the Goldfarb Center for Civic Engagement. Hassan was a 2012-13 UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow, where he worked as an editor and cinematographer on several documentaries, screening at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight and winning best short documentary at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival.