2018 Panelist Biographies Words to “Action”! As of 9/4/2018 Marilyn R. Atlas is a Talent/Literary Manager and Producer. Among her credits as film producer are REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES for HBO, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, A CERTAIN DESIRE starring Sam Waterston, and ECHOES, which won the Gold Award at the Texas International Film Festival. She produced THE CHOKING GAME for Lifetime, based on a YA book. She was involved in several writers' debut books for HarperCollins, Grand Central Publishing, and Source Books. Marilyn is a member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She has long been committed to projects that celebrate diversity. She speaks at colleges, film festivals, and industry events on creating three-dimensional, non-stereotypical characters. She is the co-author of a relationship-based, screenwriting guide called Dating Your Character, about an organic approach to character creation for Stairway Press. She is also featured in the book Write Now! from Penguin/Tarcher. Joan Darling was the first woman nominated for an Emmy® for television direction. She was nominated four times winning both the Emmy® and the DGA Award. She is considered the first woman director of the modern age. She is widely recognized for her talents as a director and actress. In the early 1970s, Joan had a recurring character role in the television series OWEN MARSHALL, COUNSELOR AT LAW. In her early directorial career, Joan directed the pilot and many other episodes in the first season of the hit TV series MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN. She also directed episodes of M*A*S*H*, RICH MAN, POOR MAN, and MAGNUM P.I., among others. She directed the Chuckles Bites the Dust episode of THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, which was named “the number one TV episode of all time” by TV Guide. The New York Times named it “the funniest episode ever on TV”. Her first film, FIRST LOVE, was released in 1977, and was named one of the year’s ten best by CBS. Joan created the Directing the Actor workshop for the Sundance institute and has taught directing at the Sundance Lab for 20+ years. Dana Flor is a documentary director and producer based in Washington DC. Her latest film is a feature length documentary, CHECK IT about a black gay gang in DC premiered at Tribeca. The film is executive produced by Steve Buscemi and Stanley Tucci and is being adapted for a television series. She also co-directed and produced THE NINE LIVES OF MARION BARRY – a feature length documentary about the infamous politician that appeared on HBO and played Closing Night at the 2009 Silverdocs Film Festival. Flor wrote and directed the Emmy award-winning documentary LATINOS IN BEISBOL and the Emmy- nominated documentary CESAR CHAVEZ for NBC. She also works on a wide-range of stories for Reuters Television, CNN, BBC, National Geographic, and others - covering breaking news throughout Latin America and around the world. Flor is a recipient of a Tribeca Film Institute Documentary Fund Grant, a DC Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship, a Pare Lorenz Fund Grant and as a AFI Docs/NBC Universal Impact Grant. She also won an Influence Film Award from the Tribeca Documentary Fund. Emma Mankey Hidem has been producing media for over a decade, specializing in non- fiction media of all kinds, including documentary, news, corporate, and interactive media. She has had the privilege to work with and learn from talented documentarians such as Ross Kauffman (BORN INTO BROTHELS) and Joe Fab (PAPER CLIPS). Through her work in interactive media for museums, she learned to film 360° video in 2013, before virtual reality was even a glimmer on the mainstream radar, and immediately fell in love with the medium's ability to transport audiences so in 2015 Emma launched SunnysideVR, a full service VR video production company where she creates virtual reality content for brands, as well as immersive journalism. Since launching her company she has worked with brands such as Mercedes, Estee Lauder, and Twitter, and is also working on several interactive multimedia journalism projects such as Caste Out, a doc about the lingering effects of the now-outlawed caste system in Nepal. Bob Hone has had award-winning careers as documentary filmmaker (Peabody, Emmy®) as well as an interactive/game designer (Codie, Prix Mobius). Currently Bob runs the Game Studio, part of American University's Game Lab, where he designs and manages collaborations with external organizations such as the NIH, ETS, WGBH, and the World Bank. Prior to AU, Bob was the Creative Director of Red Hill Studios, a boutique developer of innovative educational and health software and games. An accomplished grant-writer, Bob has received grants totaling $8M for a wide range of interactive and video projects. Helen Krieger grew up with her ultra-conservative family on Highway 0 in Wisconsin. For fun they would stock the bomb shelter and prepare for the world to end. When it didn’t, Helen happily left home to try something new. She was a journalist in Boston, a stripper in Dallas, and a real estate agent in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. She sold her house to make a feature film about that experience, FLOOD STREETS, then she wrote and produced two seasons of a Webby’s honored digital series, Least Favorite Love Songs. She got her MFA in screenwriting from USC, worked as an assistant for Kenya Barris, had a project she co-created optioned by New Form Digital, and most recently wrote on season one of grown-ish. When not writing, Helen does improv and stand up in LA and New Orleans. Dara Marks, Ph.D. is a leading international script consultant, seminar leader, and author of one of the top selling books on creative writing, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc. She has specialized in the analysis of the modern screenplay for the past three decades, and Creative Screenwriting Magazine has consistently rated her one of the top script consultants in Hollywood. Dara has worked for most major Hollywood studios and her advice has been sought on a variety of films and television projects. Her groundbreaking work in this field continues to help writers engage more deeply and effectively in the creative writing process. Currently, Dara leads seminars world-wide and is an adjunct professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. For more than two decades, Joseph Martin has worked as a producer, location manager and location scout primarily in the Washington-Baltimore region. He left six years of work on Capitol Hill as a policy staffer for Congressman Barney Frank to pursue his other passions in life – film, television and still photography. Martin worked as a producer on the road in Europe and throughout the U.S. on some 225 episodes of cooking and travel shows that screened on PBS and Discovery. From there, Martin moved into location scouting and location managing for Hollywood features, network television series, commercials, documentaries and photo shoots. Recent projects include 3 ½ MINUTES TEN BULLETS, an HBO documentary directed by Marc Silver that examines racial implications of Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws, I.T., a crime thriller starring Pierce Brosnan and EERO SAARINEN, THE ARCHITECT WHO SAW THE FUTURE, a PBS/WNET American Masters documentary produced by Peter Rosen. Shelly Mellott took over Script magazine in 1995 from her father, who founded the business in 1985. She secured a newsstand presence for the publication and grew Script into a well-respected industry magazine. From 1995 to 2006, she created additional services for scriptwriters including script coverage, pitching events, and quarterly screenwriting contests sponsored by major production companies. In 2006, she became a vice president at Final Draft overseeing the Big Break Contest, social media, events, and customer relations for the company. In 2015, she became Vice President of Sales & Marketing where she manages the professional and educational sales divisions, develops initiatives that drive sales across all retail channels, and manages marketing, events and customer relations. Beth Mendelson is the Senior Executive Producer of Special Programming and Documentaries at Voice of America. Focused on issue oriented programming, her projects include; AIDS: Living in the Shadows, hosted by Sir Elton John; JOHN F. KENNEDY: A Legacy Remembered; IMMIGRATION THE NEW FACE OF AMERICA; and A FATEFUL HARVEST. Prior to her documentary work at Voice of America, Beth Mendelson was the Chief of the Afghanistan Service for 6 years, overseeing Television, Radio, and Web Programming. She supervised a staff of 100 people between DC and Afghanistan. Beth’s communication career spans 30 years across U.S. Government, including the White House, Non-Profit Organizations and Broadcast Media. She has been an Executive Producer for major American and European networks, including PBS, CNN, ITN, ARD, and MSNBC. Her work producing documentaries and television specials has taken her to Russia, China, France, England, and numerous other countries. Michelle Mower burst onto the global filmmaking scene with her 2016 acquisition of Imagination Worldwide. IWW is a Los Angeles based international sales and distribution company. Mower will be refocusing the company’s efforts by producing and distributing motion pictures directed by women and/or targeted to female audiences – thereby bringing more gender parity to the entertainment industry. Prior to heading up Imagination Worldwide, Mower was an acclaimed writer, producer and director whose work has been featured on Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network (LMN) and Nuvo Television. Her debut feature film, THE PREACHER’S DAUGHTER starring Andrea Bowen (DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES) garnered the highest ratings for LMN that year. After that success, Mower wrote, co-produced and directed two more telefilms for the network, THE PREACHER’S MISTRESS and THE PREACHER’S SIN.