The Flaherty Team
Samara Grace Chadwick, Executive Director
Samara is a mother, curator, scholar, and filmmaker from Acadie / Mi’kma’ki. Her ancestors are Canadian settlers with Scottish, Irish and British roots. She was born in Newfoundland to marine biologist parents and her childhood in rural New Brunswick was shaped by farm life and her mother’s fervent environmental activism. She was fortunate to attend public schools throughout her life, notably Concordia University in Montreal the early 2000s, where she became a student organizer, culture jammer, and documentary filmmaker.
Samara has been programming nonfiction films, conferences, and interdisciplinary programs for over fifteen years, with a fierce dedication to forging new creative spaces across geographies, cultures, and technologies. Samara was Lead Curator of New Nature (2020) and VR:RV (2018), Senior Programmer at the Points North Institute and Camden International Film Festival (2017-2020), and a Programmer for Hot Docs (2011-2012) and RIDM (2015-16). She has organized conferences at re:publica Berlin (2018), MUTEK – Montreal (2018), MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2012), and the Berlin Biennale (2012). She is a founding member of Cinema Politica (2003) and of Independent Documentary Directors (2020).
Samara has a PhD in Communications and Cultural Studies from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil), the Universitá degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy), and Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle (France), a M.A. in Cultural Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin, and a B.A. in Communication Studies and Liberal Arts from Concordia University in Montreal.
Her critically acclaimed debut feature 1999 about community healing, grief, and adolescence, premiered in 2018 at Visions du réel and Hot Docs and has since played 50+ festivals and educational institutions worldwide.
Sheetal Prajapati, Interim Executive Director
Photograph by Luvia Lazio
Sheetal comes to The Flaherty with two decades of experience as an arts administrator, educator, artist, and advisor working across the fields of art and public engagement. Through her agency Lohar Projects, she offers advising and consulting services for artists, arts professionals, and cultural organizations to grow, change, and most importantly, thrive in communities. Concurrent with her consulting practice, Sheetal served as the Executive Director of Common Field from 2020-2022, overseeing its final two national artist convenings and stewarding an intentional sunsetting process as it closed. Previous to founding Lohar Projects in 2019, Sheetal served in leadership and engagement roles at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, The Museum of Modern Art, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Juan Pedro Agurcia, Production & Programs Manager
Juan Pedro Agurcia works in cinema production, programming, promotion and distribution. At The Flaherty, he was Online Producer of the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar: Continents of Drifting Clouds. He has been the Producer of the Cinema Tropical Awards since 2019, and has been Producer of several events for UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, including their 2021 UnionDocs Breakout Symposium. His credits as Producer also include the event New Nature: An Immersive Media and Climate Science Exchange, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut. He is co-founder and programmer of Tercer Cine, the only independent exhibition project in Honduras, for whom he recently served as Lead Producer and Curator of Fragments and Memories: Human Rights Film Festival. He is also the co-founder and editor of Corrientes, a trilingual digital platform dedicated to expanding access and opening conversation with and through experimental Latin American cinema.
Anne de Mare, Grant Writer & Special Projects
Anne is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and recipient of both a MacArthur Foundation Media and Journalism Grant and a Carnegie Corporation Democracy Program Grant. Her film The Homestretch (2015) received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Long Form Reporting (Independent Lens). More recently, Anne produced and directed the critically acclaimed animated documentary short The Girl With the Rivet Gun (2020), the documentary feature Capturing The Flag (2018), and co-produced the PBS documentary Deej (2017), winner of the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. She has been a Sundance Institute Fellow, part of the U.S. State Department’s American Film Showcase program, and an Associate Artist with Chicago’s legendary Kartemquin Films. Anne’s first feature, Asparagus! Stalking the American Life (2006) was the winner of the W.K. Kellogg Good Food Film Award as well as Audience Choice and Best Documentary awards at festivals across the country. In 2010 and 2011, she worked closely with the late, great historian Michael Nash and NYU Bobst Libraries to create an extensive filmed archive of women who worked in munitions factories during WWII, accessible online as The Real Rosie The Riveter Project.
Anisa Hosseinnezhad, Fellowships & Outreach Lead
Anisa Hosseinnezhad is an Iranian Artist and Filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. Her film and video work focus on issues of displacement, immigration, and the orientalist imaginary. Her writing and research are centered on representations of West Asia in militaristic western media. Anisa is a current MFA candidate at Temple University’s Film and Media Arts department and holds her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been shown in screenings and local festivals in Boston and Providence including Yoni Fest and Todo Bajo Control and online exhibitions. Her writing on flawed representations of Iran an Israeli Spy thriller was presented at the University of Pittsburg Film & Media Studies Conference and is slated to be published in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Anisa was a 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar fellow and a 2022 Oberhausen Seminar fellow.
Zile Liepins, Communications & Design
Zile Liepins is a graphic designer, artist, arts administrator, and museum professional currently living in Toronto – the Treaty Lands of the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee, and Dish with One Spoon Wampum. Zile was born to Latvian refugees who settled in Canada in the late 1940s. She has lived and worked in Canada, Latvia, and France.
She brings 15+ years of communications & design experience to The Flaherty. She holds an MFA with distinction from Toronto Metropolitan University in Documentary Media, a BA Hon. in French & Visual Studies from University of Toronto, and a diploma in Graphic Arts from LISAA in Paris, France. She is on the Board of Directors at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and on the exhibitions committee at Le Labo in Toronto.
As an artist, Zile works in documentary photography, archives, writing, painting & drawing, and craft. She incorporates her fine arts background into her design work, incorporating original art and handmade practices into design.
Yasmin Desouki, Archivist
Yasmin Desouki is an audiovisual archivist, writer and curator. She graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts where she focused on cinema studies and moving image archiving and preservation, and furthered her studies on film restoration practices through the International Federation of Film Archives' (FIAF) summer School. She previously worked as the Artistic Director of Cimatheque-Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Egypt, and prior to that worked as the Archive Manager at Misr International Films. In 2019 she moved back to the US, and served as the Collections Manager at Chicago Film Archives for three years, and is now the Collection Manager at The New York Public Library's Library Services Center. Her most recent writing on documentary film history can be found in Feminist Media Histories' Speculative Approaches to Media Histories I (Volume 8, Issue 2), and Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Viola Shafik.
Past Interns
NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) Intern Julita Pratiwi, or Juju, (she/her) is a film scholar and researcher who is interested in broadening her knowledge in the archive field. Based on that, she enrolled in the Moving Images Archiving and Preservation Master’s Program at New York University Tisch School of Arts. In 2021, she co-created Kelas Liarsip, a collective focused on tracing the involvement of women and their work in Indonesian film history. Recently, the collective worked to reactivate the memory of Indonesia’s first first female director, Ratna Asmara. Julita taught World and Indonesian Film History in Jakarta Institute of Arts 2018–2021.
Shu Wang (she/her) has a master degree in Cinema Studies at New York University and currently resides in New York City. During her graduate years, she studied film history/theory, queer theories, film curating, etc. Since 2019, she has been working for non-profit organizations like the Flaherty Seminar, Women Make Movies, Third World Newsreel, etc. At the Flaherty, she uses social media platforms like Instagram to attract more participants. At Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel, she helps distribute films related to activism and minority groups to the educational market, such as public libraries, universities, colleges, etc. Her areas of interest include activism and LGBTQ films. In 2017, she volunteered for Shanghai Queer Film Festival. In 2020, she was an intern at CineCina Film Festival and acted as a screener for the Project Horizon department.
Katarina Docalovich is a film writer and programmer living in Brooklyn. She recently received her Bachelor’s degree in Cinema from VCUarts in Richmond, Virginia, where she programmed the film series “For a Dollar Name a Woman” dedicated to queer women directors and women directors of color. She has volunteered at the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance, and the Brooklyn Film Festival. She produced the short film “Here Lies Beatrice” (2019), which was officially selected to Shortie Film Festival, James River Short Film Showcase, and Queens World Film Festival. You can find her writing in the online film journals Much Ado About Cinema, Screen Queens, and Flip Screen.
Krystalle MacQueen is an academic and artist currently focused on the preservation and distribution of experimental cinema. Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, Krystalle is currently based in Brooklyn, New York and will be graduating with a BA in Screen Studies from Eugene Lang College in 2020. Having made experimental work herself, Krystalle's main area of study and practice revolves around the usage and understanding of motion picture moving image, specifically through 16 and 8mm film as the chosen medium of viewership. Krystalle's interests lay in the groundworks of preserving, archiving, and projecting all non digital forms of media as well as understanding the importance of its place amongst experimental and ethnographic forms of cinema.
Aidan Kaye is a New York City-based artist, photographer, and experimental filmmaker with a focus on documentary. Graduating with a BFA in Film from SUNY Purchase in 2020, he has worked on several award-winning documentaries, including Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise Fall of James Brown and won an award for best experimental film at the SUNY Wide Film Festival in 2019 for his film Read @ 12:35AM. While freelancing in several creative industries he continues to make experimental films that deal with themes of youth, fatherhood, and masculinity.
Ben Titera is an academic, artist, and writer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is currently based in Ridgewood, Queens. Ben is a student of media, taking interest in queer theory and philosophy, and holds a passion for the avant-garde as it manifests across music, image, and text. He recently earned his BA from Eugene Lang College with a focus in culture and media studies. He is currently working on his master’s thesis, which is exploring the output of aesthetic experimentation in the wake and in the break of climate change. Ben seeks spaces that facilitate the collective exchange of ideas, especially within the contexts of moving image media.
YueYing Feng is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. Originally from Shenzhen, China, she received an M.F.A. in Film from Syracuse University, NY. As part of her master's thesis on sexual violence against women in contemporary China, she completed the short documentary What I haven’t Known About Her. The film deals with a public topic from an intimate perspective, featuring two important female members of her family. During her undergraduate studies in China, she volunteered for three years at one of the largest student film festivals; International Student Film Festival. Along with her teaching assistantship in grad school, she is interested in making documentaries that convey universal emotions from an autobiographical and intimate perspective.
Alec Lane is an archivist, filmmaker, and academic raised in Cold Spring, NY and living in Brooklyn. His interests are primarily in film preservation, philosophy, and formalist avant-garde and underground art, especially minimalist and queer cinemas. He has assisted with several film digitization projects at his university’s archive and produced writing on film in academic and critical contexts. He is finishing his senior year as a Cinema Studies major at New York University
Anthony Chassi is an academic, video editor, and occasional photographer born in Queens, NY and raised in Newburgh, NY. His interests include Latin American cinema (particularly Colombian) and radical political documentary cinema. He has produced videos for organizations such as History UnErased and has assisted in teaching classes on photography for The Josephine Herrick Project. He holds a BA in Film Studies and Anthropology from CUNY Queens College and is currently pursuing his MA in Film Studies at Columbia University.
Andrea Nappi is a filmmaker born and raised in New York City. She works with both analog and digital filmmaking techniques, and has a passion for experimental and independent cinema. Andrea also has a background in music, and has played the flute for over ten years. The experiences she's had with music heavily influence her filmmaking practice, and she takes delight in directing music videos. Andrea currently attends The New School, and is pursuing both a Bachelor’s degree in Screen Studies with a minor in Gender Studies, and a Master’s degree in Media Studies.
Bedatri Datta Choudhury has assisted in commissioning, researching for, and disseminating independent documentary films made under grants from the Government of India. She has also helped program and organize India's largest documentary film festival and workshops. Her interest in films stems from her study of literature and largely focuses on South Asian studies, Gender and Post Colonialism. Born and raised in India, she is now pursuing her post-graduate degree in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of Arts, NYU.
Patrick Offenheiser is a filmmaker, editor and multimedia artist. Originally from Boston by way of Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lima, Peru, he graduated with a BA in Film & Electronic Arts and History from Bard College and went on to produce documentary work for non-profit organizations and television, focusing on marginalized and displaced communities, particularly in Latin America and the United States. In his work he pursues questions of memory, homeland and diaspora as well as cultural erasure and globalization and recently completed the 2016 Collaborative Fellowship with UnionDocs. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Patricia Arellano is from Mexico and relocated to NYC while she interns for The Flaherty and UnionDocs. She has worked and volunteered for various film and music festivals in NYC and Mexico, including the Brooklyn Film Festival and AMBULANTE the documentaries tour (Mexico), the Morelia International Film Festival as a Print Traffic Assistant and the Morelia Music Festival as a Venue Coordinator. She holds a BA in Humanities and Social Sciences with a focus on arts management by the Tecnologico de Monterrey.
Nina Jerslev Svendsen is from Denmark and is interning at The Flaherty during July and August, after she will return to Copenhagen where she resides. She is studying Political Science at Copenhagen University and will begin her third year of undergraduate school in the fall. Following completion of her Bachelors degree, she wants to study American Politics and Culture or Film and Media Studies. Between her studies she is a Student Assistant at the PhD courses held at the Department of Political Science in Copenhagen. While living in New York she has also volunteered for Rooftop Films.
Rahmah Pauzi grew up in Kajang, outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She recently graduated from Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, where she completed a short documentary "Welcome to Malaysia” as part of her master’s thesis on modern Malaysia’s immigrants. Her past works include virtual reality piece “Return to Chernobyl” (PBS Frontline), “Not my heaven: 5 Years in America” (Five College Film Festival 2014), radio documentary series “Far From Home” (BFM Radio Kuala Lumpur), and Malay-Muslim millenial web-show “Sekilas” (BFM Radio Kuala Lumpur). Rahmah is a proud bilingual, migrant, and Malaysian citizen.