Collaborative Studio Directors

Christopher Allen

After graduating from Columbia University and studying at Trinity College Dublin, Christopher Allen worked as a social entrepreneur, documentary director, and new media artist. His individual works and collaborative projects have been exhibited at the MoMA, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the Volksbühne Theatre, DirektorenHaus in Berlin, Independent Film Week, Sonár, DIVA, and Conflux Festivals, among many other venues. He directed the interactive documentary Capitol of Punk, which was part of “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art. Christopher was founding-partner of Counts Media, and played a leading role in the invention and execution of many art & entertainment concepts there, such as The Ride NY, a live theatrical and cinematic experience on the streets of the city, and Yellow Arrow, a place-based storytelling project exhibited online and in galleries and museums internationally.

Lucila Moctezuma

Originally from Mexico City, Lucila has collaborated with New York’s independent film community since 1996. Previous to joining UnionDocs she was manager of the Production Assistance Program at Women Make Movies, a program that provides support to women filmmakers in the development of their media projects. Formerly, she was director of the Media Arts Fellowships for the Rockefeller Foundation, a highly prestigious program that supported media artists in the U.S. and Latin America, and she founded and was coordinator of the TFI Latin America Media Arts Fund for the Tribeca Film Institute. Lucila sits on the founding executive board of Cine Qua Non Lab, a residency for international filmmakers based in Michoacán, Mexico, and is vice-president of the board of trustees of The Flaherty. She has frequently collaborated with international film festivals including the Morelia Film Festival in Mexico and the Huesca Film Festival in Spain, and with media organizations such as Cinema Tropical. She has served on selection panels for the Jerome Foundation, the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, the International Emmy Awards, the Gucci Ambulante Fellowship (Mexico), and Cinergia Foundation (Costa Rica) among others. Her work as associate producer includes the documentary series “The New Americans” for Kartemquin Films, and “Shocking and Awful” for Deep Dish TV, which was part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial. She studied Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

Toby Lee

Toby Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, an MPhil in Modern Greek Literature from Oxford University, and a BA in Anthropology and Modern Greek Studies from Columbia University.

As an artist, she works across a variety of media including video, installation, performance and drawing. Her work has been been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. At Harvard, she was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Dan David Foundation, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Director of the Collaborative Studio program at UnionDocs.

Andre Almeida

Andre Valentim Almeida is a Portuguese award winning filmmaker, documentary editor, professor and PHD candidate currently finishing his dissertation on Interactive Documentary. Andre has been teaching media production at the University of Porto and was the scientific coordinator of a major video training program at the newsroom of the Portuguese news agency. He was part of the first yearlong collaborative documentary program at the UnionDocs (Brooklyn, NY) where he was then the Collaborative Studio Director. As a media maker his work has been screened at MoMA, Doclisboa, IndieLisboa, VIsions du Réel, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, TEDx Brooklyn among others.

Jesse Shapins

Jesse Shapins is a media artist, cultural theorist and entrepreneur. He is a Founding Member of UnionDocs and was Co-Director of the first years of the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio. Currently, he is Co-Founder/CEO of GoPop, the first public network for visual conversation where people speak about what’s happening in the world through photos, videos, GIFs and drawings. His artistic practice focuses on mapping the imagination and perception of place between physical, virtual and social space, and has been exhibited at MoMA, SFMoMA and internationally. He was Co-Founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research unit at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and served on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds a PhD in Architecture and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University where he wrote “Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Authorial Agency in Utopias of Kaleidoscopic Perception and Sensory Estrangement.”

Kara Oehler

Kara Oehler is a radio documentary maker, media artist and Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of GoPop, a new way to speak in GIFs, photos and videos. Inspired by montage and the origins of filmmaking, GoPop makes it easy to put any two pieces of media together. Her Peabody award-winning radio work has aired on shows like RadioLab, Marketplace and Morning Edition and her interactive storytelling projects have been exhibited at MoMA and SFMoMA. She co-founded the interactive platform Zeega, the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio, metaLAB at Harvard, Yellow Arrow: Capitol of Punk and Mapping Main Street. Previously, Kara was a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Rockefeller Fellow with United States Artists.