Patricia has been producing award-winning programs for the public broadcasting system for almost twenty years. After a distinguished career in public radio, in the early 1990s Patricia left Washington D.C. to pursue her dream of making documentary films. Since then she has worked on a number of PBS programs, including the acclaimed documentary series, In Search of Law and Order, about troubled youth caught in the juvenile justice system. She was a staff producer for the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly about the intersection of politics, faith and social issues. She was also Senior Producer for New California Media’s weekly public affairs TV program, and has been a contributing producer to the Emmy-award winning program, California Connected. In 2001, she began production on Discovering Dominga—a story that combined her long-time interest in Latin America and her passion for giving voice to people and issues too often ignored by mainstream media.

Patricia began her career in public broadcasting as a producer, editor and reporter for National Public Radio, where as Foreign Editor she helped to shape foreign coverage for the network’s flagship news programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. She also helped start the Latin American News Service on NPR—a pioneering program that brought the news and views of Latin America to public radio audiences. She also worked on a number of award-winning radio documentaries, including the NPR/National Geographic series, Geographic Expeditions, and Vanishing Homelands, a series documenting the loss of land and culture among indigenous people and others across Latin America and the Caribbean.

A San Francisco native, Patricia currently lives and works in the Bay Area, where she divides her time between documentary, public television and radio. She has co-authored two books about Latin America, and is fluent in Spanish and French. She received her B.A. in government from Smith College, and her M.A. in international relations from San Francisco State University. Her work has been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award, the Peter J. Owens Independent Spirit Award, the Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence, the Ohio State award, National Association of Community Broadcasters Golden Reel, and the Harry Chapin World Hunger Year Award. She is a recent recipient of the Knight International Press Fellowship.

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Mary Jo McConahay has been writing about Latin America for more than 20 years. She lived in Guatemala for a decade, and reported from there for numerous newspapers and magazines in the United States. She has also worked for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Middle East Economic Digest in London, The Arab News in Jeddah, and for Time and Newsweek in El Salvador and Guatemala. Her prize-winning feature articles have appeared widely, including in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Ms. and Sierra magazines. Mary Jo frequently appears on radio and television as a commentator; her work on Central America and AIDS has been anthologized, and her extended essay on Mexican Mixtec Indians immigrants to the U.S. is the text of the photo book, To the Promised Land (Aperture Press).

Mary Jo has been honored for her work by the World Affairs Council, and received a Hibakusha Peace Fellowship in Japan. She lives and works in San Francisco, and is an editor for the Pacific News Service. She is also completing a memoir of her travels through the rainforest of Gran Peten in Guatemala, and is producing a film on the inspiring story of activist priest Father Bill O’Donnell, who dedicated his life to civil disobedience: www.fatherbillfilm.org. She is co-producer and co-director of an upcoming documentary on the life of Judge Louis B. Dematteis and California Italian Americans, in partnership with PBS affiliate KCSM, San Mateo, CA.

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Vicente Franco has served as Director of Photography on over 25 documentaries and video productions. He was the cinematographer and co-director of Daughter From Danang, which won the Grand Jury award for best documentary film at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He has also been a member of the production team for numerous other nationally broadcast PBS programs, including The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle and the series In Search of Law and Order. Vicente has been recognized with the prestigious Peabody award for coverage of the Mexican earthquake in 1985, along with other awards for his outstanding cinematography.

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Todd Boekelheide started working in film in 1974 as a member of the staff at American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s production company in San Francisco. In 1976 he left to work as an assistant editor on Star Wars, and went on to edit picture and sound on The Black Stallion two years later. This film kindled an interest in film music, so he began music studies at Mills College in Oakland. As he began to develop his film scoring career, he also specialized as a rerecording mixer, and won an Oscar for mixing the music on Amadeus in 1984. He has scored several feature films, including Dim Sum and Nina Takes a Lover, and numerous documentaries, notably Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. In 1999 he won an Emmy for his score for the documentary Kids of Survival: The Life and Art of Tim Rollins and the KOS. Up-to-date credits information can be found at www.tobomusic.com.

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Jennifer Chinlund has been editing documentary films in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty-five years. Her work includes three films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival: Contrary Warriors, Baby It’s You, and Coming To Light; Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians. She also edited the Academy Award Nominee, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, and numerous other award-winning films, among them Ishi, The Last Yahi (Best of Festival, National Educational Film and Video Festival), Round Eyes in the Middle
Kingdom (Gold Apple, National Educational Film and Video Festival), and Hearts and Hands (Best of Category, San Francisco Film Festival; Cine Golden Eagle).