Speaker Bios
2022 Festival
Rodney Evans
Rodney Evans (Guest Speaker & Director of Feature Documentary Vision Portraits) is an award-winning fiction and documentary film writer, director and producer. His debut fiction feature Brother To Brother won the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize in Drama. The film garnered four Independent Spirit Award nominations including Best First Film, Best First Screenplay, Best Debut Performance for Anthony Mackie and Best Supporting Actor for Roger Robinson. His latest feature documentary, Vision Portraits, celebrated its World Premiere at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival and won the Award for Best Documentary at Frameline-The San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. It played theatrically in major U.S. cities in Fall 2019. It aired nationally on America ReFramed and screened at the Whitney Museum in July 2020. Other directing credits include The Happy Sad, Billy and Aaron, Close To Home and the upcoming documentary short Portal. Rodney was a 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow and a Ford/Mellon Disability Futures Fellow for 2021. https://www.rodneyevansfilm.com/
Kayla Hamilton
Kayla Hamilton (Guest Speaker & Dancer in Feature Documentary Vision Portraits) is an artist, producer, and educator originally from Texarkana, Texas and now reside in Bronx, NY. Kayla earned a BA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and an MS Ed in Special Education from Hunter College. She is a member of the 2017 Bessie-award winning cast of the Skeleton Architecture, the future of our world's curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In addition to Skeleton Architecture, Kayla dance with Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and Gesel Mason Performance Projects, teach master classes around the United States, and the recipient of Angela’s Pulses’ Dancing While Black 2017 Fellowship. Under the name K. Hamilton Projects, Kayla self-produced numerous projects, organizes community events, and write arts integrated curriculum throughout NYC. When Kayla is not dancing, she's a special education teacher at the Highbridge Green School who loves to watch Law and Order on Hulu while sipping on peppermint tea. https://www.khamiltonprojects.com/
2020 Festival
Karen Williams
Karen Williams (Conversation Facilitator, Speaker) is a content producer and integrative wellness practitioner who is equally at home working in front of and behind a camera. With an extensive background in film production, acting, social advocacy, healthcare administration, and advanced integrative healing therapies, Karen lends her multi-platform expertise to re-branding aging. Through public conversations, Karen illuminates the ways in which people over 40 are living, thriving, and disrupting fear-based associations with life’s most natural process. She seeks to highlight how society can best facilitate what she calls “Empowered Aging.” Returning to modeling after an almost three-decade hiatus, Karen has worked for such clients as Estée Lauder, Eileen Fisher, J. Crew, H&M, and Macy’s. Her acting career encompasses numerous daytime and primetime TV shows in the U.S. and TV ad campaigns around the world. Karen holds a B.A. degree from Brown University and an M.A. degree from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Deborah Jowitt
Deborah Jowitt (Speaker and Performer) wrote about dance for The Village Voice from 1967 to 2011 and currently writes for artsjournal.com. She has published two collections, DanceBeat (1977) and The Dance in Mind (1985), as well as Time and the Dancing Image (1988) and Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (2004). She taught at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for about 40 years. www.deborahjowitt.com
Sheila Rohan
Sheila Rohan (Speaker, Jury Member, Performer) is a founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Sheila toured extensively in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, performing as a soloist in several works in the repertoire, including Dougla, Biofera, Tones, and Rhythmetron. Sheila performed with dance companies, both ballet and modern. Sheila also danced the role of Rosa Parks in Gordon Parks' television movie, Martin: A Ballet, and performed in the 1991 production of Porgy and Bess, choreographed by Carmen De Lavallade, at the Metropolitan Opera House. Sheila is a choreographer and ballet teacher. She was an assistant to renowned choreographers Louis Johnson, John Jones, Talley Beatty, Walter Nicks, and Walter Rutledge and choreographed pieces of her own for schools, theater groups, and cultural organizations. Sheila is currently on the Board of Directors of the Romare Bearden Foundation, a Founding Member of Clark Center NYC, and a performer with 5 Plus Ensemble, a theater group for dancers over 50.
Anna Sang Park
Anna Sang Park (Speaker) is an award-winning South Korea-born and Philadelphia-raised filmmaker. She is the writer and director of Mrs. Cho – a short about an immigrant mother’s gambling addiction – which was an Official Selection at numerous national and international film festivals. She has produced and directed for the BBC, PBS, ABC, NBC, National Geographic, Discovery, The History Channel, A&E, Lifetime Movie Network, HBO (the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary The Loving Story), TLC/Discovery (five seasons of the hit show Say Yes to the Dress and two of its spin-off series), TED Conferences, and TCG (Theatre Communications Group), among others. She produced the award-winning narrative feature Wallabout. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America, BGDM Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and the FilmmakeHers. www.annasangpark.com
Susanna Sloat
Susanna Sloat (Speaker and Jury Member), Barnard College Class of 1965, is a writer and editor in New York City who has written about many kinds of dance – recently, mostly for Ballet Review and DanceTabs. She is the editor of two books: Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures (2010) and Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity (2002), both available from University Press of Florida. Susanna is 76 and regularly takes Congolese dance classes with Andoche Loubaki and Thelma Loubaki.
Dr. Sheril Antonio
Dr. Sheril Antonio (Speaker) is an Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University as well as Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives. Her courses include Anatomy of Difference: The Other in Film, The World Through Art, and Language of Film. She received Curricular Development Challenge Grants for two courses: Issues in Contemporary African-American Cinema and The Summer Film & Video Program for High School Students. She is an advisor, mentor, and frequent lecturer whose presentations include: a live online debate about the movie Precious with Stanley Crouch; Keynote for Lincoln Center Education Forum and Future Filmmakers Workshop. She serves on the Board of the Ghetto Film School and has worked on several projects with the NAACP. Dr. Antonio is the author of the book Contemporary African American Cinema, 2001. Her other works include: Do Hollywood Films Truly Reflect Life in America?; a feature essay for the inaugural issue of Black Camera: The Urban-Rural Binary in Black American Film and Culture (Indiana University Press 2009); New Black Cinema: When Self-Empowerment Becomes Assimilation (Bertz Verlang, 2006); and Matriarchs, Rebels, Adventurers, and Survivors: Renditions of Black Womanhood in Contemporary African American Cinema (Sight & Sound, Supplement, July 2005). She also blogs for The Huffington Post.
