Director Lisa Leeman writes, produces, directs and edits documentary films. She has served as a judge at the Sundance Film Festival, the president of the International Documentary Association, and on the boards of the IDA and the National Coalition of Independent Public Broadcasting Producers. She writes articles specializing in the ethics of documentary filmmaking for the International Documentary Association. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinema - Television. Honors include the once-in-a-lifetime American Film Institute’s Independent Filmmaker Grant, the Western States Media Arts Fellowship, and the ITVS/PMN Station-Independent Partnership Program Grant, as well as numerous awards her films have received.
Lisa directed the feature-length documentary OUT OF FAITH over the course of three years. OUT OF FAITH explores conflicts over intermarriage and assimilation as seen through three generations of a family headed by Holocaust survivors. The film is close to her heart, as she herself is the product of an interfaith marriage.
Leeman most recently co-directed and edited the feature-length documentary WHO NEEDS SLEEP with renowned cinematographer & director Haskell Wexler, which will premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. WHO NEEDS SLEEP investigates the perils of sleep deprivation and long work hours in the movie business and in our culture at large. It asks who is really protecting American workers?
Lisa’s first film, METAMORPHOSIS: Man Into Woman, won the Filmmakers’ Trophy upon its premiere at Sundance in 1990. METAMORPHOSIS was the first documentary film to intimately follow one person’s transformation from man to woman. Sheila Benson of the LA Times wrote:
“The power and intimacy in Leeman’s unsentimental portrait of animator Gary/Gabi and his/her four-year quest for a sexual identity change is equaled only by the honesty and bravery of the film’s subject.”
PBS broadcast METAMORPHOSIS on its celebrated series POV, where it earned the highest audience rating of any POV broadcast. It has won many awards, screened in festivals around the world, been broadcast in a dozen countries, and is screened frequently in university classes on psychology, sociology, sexuality, and women’s studies.
In 1997, Lisa received an Emmy nomination for FENDER PHILOSOPHERS, a portrait of Americans as seen through our bumper stickers. That program, funded by an ITVS Station-Independent Partnership Program grant (co-produced with KPBS, San Diego), was presented by PBS’s National Programming Service. Two years later, Lisa’s comedic video diary BREAKING UP, which explores the heartbreak and humor at the end of romance, premiered on ARTE, Europe’s noted arts & culture station.
Lisa wrote, produced and directed for the 2000 & 2001 seasons of the highly-rated series Medical Diary for the Discovery Health Network. Prior to that, she was commissioned to produce a short documentary for the World Festival of Sacred Music, a multi-cultural, multi-venue nine day event in Los Angeles, initiated by the Dalai Lama and attended by over 60,000 people across L.A. Other commissions include work for KCET’s Independent Eye; FNN’s Appreciating Art; and Rosen Motors.
She spent a decade editing award-winning social issue documentaries, including Renee Tajima-Pena’s The Journey Home (PBS Special); Michelle LeBrun’s Death: A Love Story (Sundance ‘99); Laura’s Simon’s Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary (POV; Winner, Freedom of Expression Award, Sundance ‘97); Marco Williams’ In Search of Our Fathers, on women-headed African-American families (FRONTLINE, PBS); Will My Mother Go to Berlin?, Micha Peled’s personal essay on Jewish-German relations (ARD, PBS); Stanley Nelson’s Methadone: Curse or Cure? (PBS); It Was A Wonderful Life, Michele Ohayon’s film on middle-class homeless women (PBS); and the TBS series THE NATIVE AMERICANS and AMERICA’S MUSIC: THE ROOTS OF COUNTRY.
Lisa frequently consults on documentaries for broadcasters (editorial and script consultant for the PBS series POV), and for documentaries such as Big Mama (Academy Award, Best Short Documentary, 2001 /HBO), Lost in La Mancha (Berlin Film Festival; Quixote Films); Home of the Brave (Paola Di Florio, Sundance, 2004); Homeland (Audience Award AFI Fest 2000); Good Kurds,Bad Kurds: No Friends But the Mountains (Best Documentary, Atlanta Film Festival); Who is Bernard Tapie? (LAIFF, 2001), Sonic Convergence, (Courtney Ross, Ross School); and A Place at the Table (Teaching Tolerance & the Southern Poverty Law Center).
Lisa has also served as editorial and script consultant for POV and for documentaries such as Big Mama (2001 Academy Award, Best Short Documentary; HBO), Lost in La Mancha (Berlin Film Festival; Quixote Films); Home of the Brave (2004 Sundance); Homeland (2000 Audience Award, AFI Fest); Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends But the Mountains (Best Documentary, Atlanta Film Festival); Who is Bernard Tapie? (2000 LAIFF); and A Place at the Table (Southern Poverty Law Center).
Editor Laura Murray is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor specializing in social issue projects. Her directorial debut, Slender Existence, a film about eating disorder recovery, screened on PBS from 1999 thru 2004 and has received national recognition and awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Independent Film Channel, the American Library Association, and numerous film festivals – including the Isabella Liddell Art Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The film is currently distributed educationally thru Filmakers Library in New York City.
Murray was chosen as one of ten “Emerging Filmmakers to Watch” by the IFP in 2000, and won the Laura Napor National Film Grant in 2001. She completed editing NEA funded feature length documentary People Say I’m Crazy in 2002. This film, produced by Katie Cadigan and Documentary Academy Award winner Ira Wohl, has garnered awards and praise from international film festivals throughout 2003 and had its national broadcast premiere on HBO/Cinemax in August, 2004. Amid the film’s many awards and accolades, critics from the New York Times to The Onion praised Murray’s editing.
Murray has also cut feature-length documentary films Best Sister (Ira Wohl, director, a follow-up to Best Boy and Best Man, premiering at the New York Jewish Film Festival in Jan. 2006), and Naked Fame (Chris Long, director - screened at 100 film festivals internationally in 2003 and 2004). Murray also worked on feature doc. Little Man (Nicole Conn, director), which has played in festivals internationally over the last year, and will premiere nationally on Showtime in 2006. She also cut an hour-long episode of MTV’s documentary series True Life for national broadcast in 2005.
Murray is among a select group of 100 people nationally to have ever been selected to attend the CPB/PBS Producer’s Academy. She is a member of the International Documentary Association, the Film Arts Foundation, and the Association for Independent Video and Film.
Murray graduated from Vassar College, and received her Master’s in Communication from Stanford University’s Documentary Film and Video Graduate Program.
Producer L. Mark DeAngelis entered filmmaking almost accidentally. When Holocaust Survivor and longtime friend Leah Welbel invited Mark to return to Auschwitz with her, he immediately agreed. Initially, Mark informed Leah that he would bring his camcorder on their trip and record her telling her story. However, Mark quickly realized that Leah’s story deserved more professional handling. In a few short weeks, Mark had hired a film crew from Warsaw and his production company was born—even if he did not quite know it yet.
After leaving his job as an attorney with one of Indonesia’s top law firms, Mark returned to the United States and established JAFAH, a not-for-profit organization, whose mission was to develop ways to increase dialogue between Jews and other groups, to create new means of educating people about the Holocaust, and to create programming to help people learn more about what it actually means to be Jewish. In furtherance of these goals, and to produce the film about Leah’s life, Mark established Eliezer Films.
With Eliezer Films in place, Mark planned a trip to Israel to conduct archival research for what was becoming a full-blown feature-length documentary about Leah’s life, which would later be entitled OUT OF FAITH. However, in preparation for his trip, Mark learned of a group Jews and Christians who were planning to travel to Israel to demonstrate their solidarity with the Israeli people who were in the midst of the second intifada. This chance encounter led to the production of Eliezer Film’s first film: SOLIDARITY: RALLY IN ISRAEL. Though impromptu interviews and intense vérité moments, SOLIDARITY captures the depth and sincerity these self-proclaimed Zionists possess in their support of the Jewish state. The film’s music track draws upon some of the biggest names in Jewish music, including the Zamir Chorale Group of Boston and Avraham Rosenblum and Diaspora.
With OUT OF FAITH, Mark hopes to inspire people to consider what significance their sense of “who they are” has on their own lives and on society at large. As with much art, the questions OUT OF FAITH presents parallels Mark’s own personal journey to discover what it means to be a Jew in this secular society.
Composer Miriam Cutler has been writing, producing, and performing music for over 20 years. Getting her start in bands, she performed as a singer/horn player with the popular Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and wrote for, recorded, produced and performed regularly with Swingstreet, Alice Stone, and Angel and the Reruns. With these bands, she performed all over the United States and Japan, and produced independent records.
As she developed her own recording studio, Miriam moved from live performance into composing full time. She has created music used in films like ARLINGTON ROAD, BACHELOR PARTY, GRANDVIEW USA, and THE BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB. She has underscored more than 20 feature films, numerous documentaries, cartoons, and even a circus. She is just finishing an ambitious score for the new Robert Wilson documentary. Recent highlights: CHINA BLUE (Toronto and Amsterdam Film Festivals; ITVS); THIN (2006 Sundance; HBO/Actual Reality Pictures), BEYOND THE DREAM (PBS), STOLEN CHILDHOODS (United Nations Film Festival); PEACE X PEACE - WOMEN ON THE FRONTLINES (United Nations); and PANDEMIC: FACING AIDS (MoxieFirecracker Films/HBO). Recent theatrical releases include LOST IN LA MANCHA, a documentary about director, Terry Gilliam (2002 Berlin, Toronto, Telluride Film Festivals); AMY’S ORGASM (Audience Award, Santa Barbara Film Festival); and GOD’S ARMY (soundtrack album). Other films include DOWNSIDE UP (PBS) and HEART OF THE SEA (Independent Lens Audience Award, PBS). Other recent projects: POSITIVELY NAKED (Best Short, Silverdocs; Juntos Films/HBO); INDIAN POINT: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE (MoxieFirecracker/HBO) and WAR ON THEIR MINDS: VOICES OF AMERICAN KIDS (Galago/Showtime). Other highlights include SCOUT’S HONOR (2001 Sundance, 2 awards); LICENSED TO KILL (1997 Sundance, 2 awards, Berlin Film Festival; POV/PBS); HIDDEN NEIGHBORHOODS OF SAN FRANCISCO: THE CASTRO (1997 Peabody Award, CineEagle Award, and 2 Emmys); DEATH: A LOVE STORY (1999 Sundance); THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ERNESTO GOMEZ (1999 Berlin Film Festival; POV/PBS); SHATTERED LULLABIES, hosted by Steven Spielberg, and TV specials including JONATHAN WINTERS AND HIS TRAVELINGROADSHOW (Showtime).
TV series include BEYOND THE DREAM (PBS); MOVIE SURFERS (Disney Channel); THINGS THAT GO BUMP (Discovery/ Health Network); THE HOWARD STERN INTERVIEW; LIFE AND TIMES; THE BOOK SHOW and SEARCHING FOR GOD IN AMERICA. She was a continuing contributor of special songs to SQUARE ONE an educational program produced by CTW, producers of Sesame Street, and she received a Cindy Award for her music from the educational series DIFFERENT AND THE SAME.
A longtime jazz fan, Miriam co-produced a series of live albums for Polygram/Verve, which include 2 Joe Williams’s albums, both nominated for a Grammy, Anita O’Day, Nina Simone, Shirley Horn, and Marlena Shaw. She also produced and engineered her own album, Miriam Cutler & Swingstreet. Her love of live performance has also led to a position as resident composer since 1988 for Circus Flora, a theatrical one-ring European-style circus featured at the Kennedy Center and the Spoletto Festival. Circus Flora released Miriam’s soundtrack album at its 2003 season premiere of Da Capo at the Spoletto Festival.
Miriam has served on documentary film festival juries for the Sundance Film Festival, American Film Institute, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the International Documentary Association, and has been a mentor for the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Composer Lab.
Director Lisa Leeman writes, produces, directs and edits documentary films. She has served as a judge at the Sundance Film Festival, the president of the International Documentary Association, and on the boards of the IDA and the National Coalition of Independent Public Broadcasting Producers. She writes articles specializing in the ethics of documentary filmmaking for the International Documentary Association. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinema - Television. Honors include the once-in-a-lifetime American Film Institute’s Independent Filmmaker Grant, the Western States Media Arts Fellowship, and the ITVS/PMN Station-Independent Partnership Program Grant, as well as numerous awards her films have received. 
Producer L. Mark DeAngelis entered filmmaking almost accidentally. When Holocaust Survivor and longtime friend Leah Welbel invited Mark to return to Auschwitz with her, he immediately agreed. Initially, Mark informed Leah that he would bring his camcorder on their trip and record her telling her story. However, Mark quickly realized that Leah’s story deserved more professional handling. In a few short weeks, Mark had hired a film crew from Warsaw and his production company was born—even if he did not quite know it yet.
Composer Miriam Cutler has been writing, producing, and performing music for over 20 years. Getting her start in bands, she performed as a singer/horn player with the popular Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and wrote for, recorded, produced and performed regularly with Swingstreet, Alice Stone, and Angel and the Reruns. With these bands, she performed all over the United States and Japan, and produced independent records. 
