Team

Charlotte Mangin is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the creator, executive producer, director, and writer of UNLADYLIKE2020, an innovative animated documentary series about unsung women who changed America at the turn of the 20th century, honoring the centennial of women’s suffrage. She started her career on the production staff of National Geographic Television & Film, reporting from the jungles of the Amazon to the Himalayan Mountains. As a story producer for PBS’s international affairs series Wide Angle, she won an International Documentary Award for her film about women’s rights in Morocco. Mangin was nominated for 4 Emmy Awards for a 6-hour series commemorating Thirteen/WNET’s 50th anniversary in 2012. She was the Series Producer for America By the Numbers, a PBS series telling underreported stories about America’s changing demographics, and for Humanizing America, a digital shorts series for NBCNews.com profiling the diversity of the American experience today. In 2016-2017, she served as Interim Executive Director of the non-profit journalism organization Futuro Media.

Sandra Rattley has been Executive Producer of seminal documentary projects including the Peabody award-winning series Wade in the Water on African American sacred music produced with the Smithsonian Institution, and Making the Music, hosted by Wynton Marsalis. She was also Executive Producer of the PBS Digital Studios series, Read Awakening and currently serves as Executive Producer for TV and Video at Futuro Media, where she launched the PBS series America By The Numbers and NBCNews’s Humanizing America. She is the former VP for Cultural Programming at NPR where she launched the weekly show, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, as well as NPR’s office of civic engagement. Rattley also serves as Creative Consultant for Black Public Media’s 360 Incubator, a mentorship program for African American media makers. She has been a consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Howard University Center for Urban Progress, and Brandeis University. She was a press spokesperson and a member of the communications team for Nelson Mandela on his first U.S. tour.

Amelie Chabannes is an artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation, drawing and animation. She studied Architecture and Fine Arts in a leading French Art School, ENSAD, and worked for many years with architects and designers on major projects, such as the Cultural Center in Riga, Latvia. Her work has been exhibited in international venues including: The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), The Gasthuismuseum (Geel, Belgium), the critically acclaimed art festival Crossing the Line in 2009 and 2011 (New York, NY), Kunsthalle am Hamburger Plaz (Berlin, Germany), Galerie Hussenot (Paris, France), Stephan Stoyanov Gallery (New York, NY), NADA Sculpture exhibition (Miami, Florida), Syracuse University Art Center/The Red House (Syracuse, New York), Galeria Fernando Zubillaga (Caracas, Venezuela) S.E gallery (Bergen, Norway), White Box (New York, NY), Galerie of Marseille (Marseille, France), Museo Frantz Mayer (Mexico City, Mexico) and Drawing Now 2012 (Louvre, Paris). Chabannes has been awarded the International Center Award of Excellence for Fine Arts (New York, NY), and is a grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the NYFA Foundation.

Artesia Balthrop is a line producer and production professional with more than 13 years of experience on linear, digital, film and advertising projects. She has worked for a variety of flagship cable media brands like VH1, Bravo, TLC and E!; on Essence magazine’s award-winning website, ESSENCE.com; and with JAY Z on his award-nominated YouTube channel, Life + Times. She executive produced the independent short African Booty Scratcher (2008, dir. Nikyatu Jusu) which premiered at the American Black Film Festival and was licensed by HBO for their Black History Month collection. She also produced the viral documentary on JAY Z’s inaugural concert series to open the Barclays Arena, Where I’m From. She attended Duke University and learned to embrace key Quaker values like simplicity, equality and community by attending The Brooklyn Friends School. She now imbues her visual projects with similar ideals and is a staunch proponent of using film and television as a storytelling tool.

Kathy Leichter is an award-winning documentary producer, director, and impact producer with over twenty-five years of experience. She has extensive experience designing and implementing successful outreach and engagement campaigns for documentaries, and has produced over 300 impact events across the country on issues including racial and economic justice, climate change, mental health, women, civil discourse, juvenile justice, and Jewish identity. Leichter directed and produced A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay, in association with ITVS, which follows three welfare recipients in New York City, and designed and directed the film’s 5-year audience engagement campaign. Her most recent film, Here One Day, about mental illness and suicide, premiered at IDFA, won Best Documentary and the Jury Prize at the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, and is now the centerpiece of a national screening initiative that Leichter designed and currently directs.

Okema T. Moore is an actress, singer, EMMY nominated producer and a writer who also directs. Starting as an actress as a child on Sesame Street; now a producer, Okema has done a plethora of branded work for various household names, including Nickelodeon, FOX and Dreamworks. She is the former Creative Producer and Production Manager for Netflix Is A Joke and was the main producer for BRIC TV’s scripted show The Future is Then, which premiered as a 2019 Tribeca N.O.W. selection. She is also a producer on the ABFF 2019 Best Web Series, Little Apple and functioned as the coordinator for both the Food Network’s Chopped and OWN’s “Oprah’s Master Class.” Most recently Okema was a producer/writer on the Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flayand is a principal member of the touring cast of the acclaimed musical Henry Box Brown. 

Virginie Danglades is a film and TV editor who works on strong story- and character-driven films, immersive and verité-style documentaries and intimate narrative features and shorts. One of her recent projects, “No Farewells,” (“Sans Adieu”), a documentary feature by French photographer-turned-filmmaker Christopher Agou, opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Along with working on independent films, Virginie edited the last hour of the four-part documentary series which aired on PBS: “Reconstruction, America after the Civil War.” Virginie has also been a regular editor on the ongoing investigative series “This is Life with Lisa Ling” for CNN and, prior to that, “Our America with Lisa Ling” for OWN. Overall, Virginie is committed to editing content and film projects that will help further the understanding of our complicated world.

Adam Lingo is an independent editor with experience in the short & long form documentary worlds. He is excited to work on projects that challenge and explore our shared humanity. His significant credits include the PBS verité documentary series 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School (2014 Peabody award), numerous large and small format videos for the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), the PBS Frontline: Blackout in Puerto Rico (2019 Loeb Award), Robert Rauschenberg: Inventive Genius for the PBS American Masters Series (1999), and Great Books: The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the Learning Channel (1999 national Emmy nomination).

Xuan Vu is a documentary editor whose independent documentary work spans the globe, from films about orphaned children in Colombia to non-profit sustainability efforts in Haiti to female migrant workers in Nepal. She has garnered international recognition at numerous festivals and won several distinguished awards, including the “Audience Award for Best Feature Doc” at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival for her work on While I Breathe, I Hope, the “Audience Choice Award for Best Feature” at the 2015 Viet Film Fest for her work on Can, and the “CHOICE Award for Best Documentary Feature” from the Broadcast Critics of America for her work on Stealing America: Vote by Vote. Vu’s editorial contributions to network television series such as America By The Numbers, Dark Net, The Story of Cool, and This is Life with Lisa Ling, have been broadcast on CNN, Showtime, PBS, MSNBC, and Animal Planet, among others.

Josie Hirsch is an Associate Producer and Researcher who has worked with UNLADYLIKE2020 since 2017, when she began as a Research Intern. Hirsch has seen this series in its early R&D stages and watched it bloom into a major national project in production. She looks forward to working on the project through the post-production and Impact phases in the coming months. Hirsch is a graduate of Barnard College of Columbia University, where she studied American History.

Before joining UNLADYLIKE2020, Willa Jones assisted documentary projects at The Documentary Group, where she conducted research for series, shorts and impact campaigns, promoted the company’s film and TV programs, and supported festival runs. Jones also conducted research and managed international grants, working with seven NGOs around the world, for Girl Rising, a film that became a global movement. Jones has worked with a range of organizations and communities to develop engaging programs, and help tell their stories. At the firm Project for Public Spaces, Jones managed a National Endowment for the Arts initiative that organizes design workshops in rural communities across the country to help revitalize them- creating plans for arts venues, parks, and hurricane recovery. Jones also developed and led workshops for girls in middle and high school at the organization ROW New York. Jones graduated from Skidmore College with a bachelor of arts in sociology, and a minor in dance.

Mariana Surillo is an Associate Producer and Researcher, who started working with UNLADYLIKE2020 as an intern in 2018. Before joining the project, she worked in the field of public health communications, and her work was published in the National Institute of Environmental Health and Sciences Global Health Newsletter, Nexus Media News, and HuffPost. Surillo’s passion for journalism and multimedia communications sparked her interest in a career in documentary filmmaking to enact social and environmental change. She holds an MPH in Global Environmental Health from Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, and graduated from Saint Joseph’s University with a Bachelors degree in Environmental Science and a minor in Economics.

Joel Orloff is an animator and cartoonist based in Providence, RI. His work as lead animator on two recent films — Witness Theater, Oren Rudavsky’s documentary on remembering the holocaust, and When Planets Mate, a short animated film set to the music of Chakram — is currently showing at festivals worldwide. He considers himself lucky to have grown up during a golden age of hand-drawn animation, and strives to keep that artistic tradition alive as the world lurches towards CGI. He is thrilled to be working on the UNLADYLIKE2020 team, and feels honored to be working closely with the immensely talented Amelie Chabannes to bring the stories of these trail-blazing women to life.

Emily Harrold is a documentary filmmaker from Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her films have screened at such festivals as the Tribeca Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and the Telluride Film Festival. She has collaborated on programs for PBS, HBO, Discovery, National Geographic, CNN, Amazon, and CuriosityStream. Harrold is a member of Film Fatales and The Filmshop. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Amory Davis is a documentary filmmaker with a passion for sharing people’s stories and promoting understanding and empathy through film. She has worked on documentary films and series in a variety of capacities for PBS, Netflix, CNN Films, History, Travel Channel, and more. She graduated from Elon University where she studied cinema and documentary film as well as psychology.

Hina Ali is a documentary filmmaker with expertise in film editing. Ali’s work includes feature documentaries such as Among the Believers and Insha’Allah Democracy. Ali has edited and produced content for Vice, PBS, BBC, Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Spotify, Starz, Today Show, and Cheddar. Her films have garnered critical acclaim at various film festivals including Tribeca Film Festival, Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, and Documentary Edge Festival. In 2012, Ali wrote the concept and story of “3 Bahadur” or The Brave 3 in English, Pakistan’s first computer 3D animated feature movie. Ali is a former Fulbright Scholar/Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow and a Chevening South Asia Journalism Fellow.

Jasmine Cannon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, editor and photographer. She began diving into documentary filmmaking in 2015 when she completed her first documentary, Through Our Eyes. Jasmine went on to the Medill School at Northwestern University where she studied documentary storytelling, focusing on social justice and sports content. Jasmine served as co-director, co-producer and lead editor on the award-winning short doc, FEARLESS. Jasmine has a history of editing for film, news and the digital space. An Alabama native, Jasmine currently resides in New York City where she’s grateful for the opportunity to make film magic everyday.

Suzette Burton is an award winning filmmaker, producer and editor. Since graduating from Pratt Institutes film school, Suzette has co – produced the documentary Daddy Don’t Go directed by Emily Abt and executive produced by Omar Epps and Malik Yoba. Daddy Don’t Go aired on the Starz network, screened at over 30 film festivals, and won 8 best documentary awards. She has also worked as an assistant editor on the documentary Little White Lie directed by Lacey Schwartz and was a producer and editor for a variety of companies such as WEtv/AMC Networks (Mary Mary and Kendra On Top), One Kreate, MRT Creative, Mr.Youth (Biggest Loser, Neutrogena, and Microsoft), and Stick Figure Productions (Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane). Aside from working on Unladylike2020, Suzette currently works at The Moth as a camera operator and editor and City Lore as a documentary teaching artist. 

Mithin is a self-taught Director, Cinematographer and Colorist. Born in Saudi Arabia and having spent the better part of his childhood in three different countries including Canada and the United States, Mithin is no stranger to the concept of a ‘global citizen’. Mithin received his Bachelor’s in Anthropology and Asian American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, eventually moved to New York City to work with an ambitious startup and then began working as a freelancer in film, TV and commercial production. In his spare time, Mithin dances with a competitive Bhangra team based out of New York City called Bhangra Theory.

LaVarro, a Detroit, MI native, began filmmaking at an early age. He’s loves to tell stories, and to empower others to tell stories, and filmmaking, and combines his technical and people skills in a way to create a piece of work that involves multiple art forms.

LaVarro has worked as an editor for networks including VH1, Bravo, HGTV, History Channel, and Viceland. Currently, through his production company, LaVarro Productions, he writes, directs and edits web series, short films, music and promotional videos.

LaVarro’s passion is telling stories that entertain, educate and inspire.  He has a great love for his creative community and is always looking to collaborate with or empower others to tell the necessary stories we all want to hear.

Kara is an interdisciplinary content creator, award-winning composer, music producer, songwriter, and recording artist hailing from ATL. Her work as an independent, self-produced artist under the moniker Seersha has caught the attention of underground tastemakers such as yvynyl, Wonky Sensitive, Audiofemme, Popmuzik, Discobelle, and more. With a diverse musical background spanning from classical piano to time spent writing primarily country music in Nashville, as well a business degree from Emory University and experience in the corporate world, she has had a hand in a broad range of creative projects, including remixes, short film scoring, video game audio, music video production, and PR. She is also an active contributor to the Twitch music community, livestreaming her production process and live performance.

Alice is an impact and engagement consultant with more than eight years of experience using storytelling to drive social change. Recent projects and clients include UNLADYLIKE2020, forthcoming on PBS’ award-winning biography series American Masters, The Rescue List by Alyssa Fedele and Zachary Fink, Doc Society and POV, PBS’ flagship documentary showcase. Previously, as the Director of Community Engagement and Education at POV, Alice developed strategic national engagement campaigns for POV documentaries, produces resources around POV’s features, shorts and digital projects, and facilitated 700+ free screenings nationwide every year with her team. Prior to joining POV in 2014, she founded the KRTS Youth Media Project in Marfa, TX, a part of PBS Student Reporting Labs, and managed the American Graduate campaign at Marfa Public Radio, a project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her reporting work has appeared on Monocle Radio, Marfa Public Radio, PRX: ReMix with Roman Mars, Fronteras: The Changing America Desk and in Wherever Magazine and The Big Bend Sentinel. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in Philosophy in 2011.

Gabrielle Koehler received a degree in Broadcast Communications from Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas. Koehler previously worked with CBS News to help create the daily one-hour documentary show, Through the Decades, hosted by veteran journalist Bill Kurtis.

Celso White is a web developer who works with creatives, non-profits and e-commerce brands to tell their stories online. Over the past few years he’s had the privilege of working with the likes of Tribeca Film, Jimmy Chin, Ticketmaster and NPR’s Latino USA. With each project he puts a strong focus on unique visual experiences and engaging stories that help users connect with a brand. He’s excited to work with UNLADYLIKE2020 to help showcase these incredible stories in innovative ways.

Schessa Garbutt is an award-winning visual designer with a focus in UI/UX and brand identity. She first delved into the world of design for social good when she rebranded a beloved non-profit as an undergrad. Since then, she has built dozens of brand identities for emerging businesses, working on digital and print experiences that span industries such as entertainment, medical marijuana, and education. The resonant theme across her work is her passion for working with people who are changing the world for the better. Garbutt is a graduate of the Roski School at the University of Southern California, where she studied art and design.

For more than a decade, Lauren has worked across content production, strategy, and distribution for public media. As the digital managing editor for the PBS series American Experience, she oversaw the reimagining of the series’ digital content and presence across digital platforms. Also for American Experience, Lauren managed the theatrical distribution of and community engagement campaign for the Oscar-nominated film Last Days in Vietnam, and the film Command and Control. She managed all aspects of the multi-platform engagement campaigns for the landmark series We Shall Remain, and for the 2011 Emmy-winning documentary Freedom Riders. She also served as an associate producer for the Emmy Award- winning film JFK. In addition to her work for UNLADYLIKE2020, Lauren also serves as a producer for the Transparency Project at FRONTLINE, PBS’s news and current affairs series. Prior to her tenure in public television, she worked in public affairs in Washington, DC, specializing in public relations and grassroots organizing.

Riley Thompson is an animator and director based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her directorial debut, When Planets Mate, is currently making its way through the festival circuit around the world. She specializes in various forms of 2D animation including hand drawn animation, stop motion, and motion graphics. Her work spans a wide range of subjects including scientific and health-related educational shorts, commercial work, music videos, and documentaries. She draws inspiration through collaboration, especially with artists from different creative, cultural, and social backgrounds. Her goal is to promote new stories and new perspectives. 

After taking select animation courses at Harvard University, Audrey Dupupet joined the School of Visual Arts, where she now is a third year student. She studies Computer Art, Animation, and Visual Effects, and is currently developing a thesis short film centered around police brutality against people of color.

Dominic Lounds received her BA in Studio Art from Yale University and, upon graduating, moved to China to teach American history and critical writing classes to college sophomores. After two years she returned to New York to pursue filmmaking and research, assisting on several projects for PBS. She now lives in Boston, where she is enrolled in Emerson College’s Visual and Media Arts MFA program.

Liv Fidler is a freelance filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Her deep interest in visual documenting started with darkroom photography at age 13 and has grown ever since. She worked at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust for several summers, helping lead their documentary filmmaking programs and–among several photographic, audio doc. and film endeavors there–made short films about local Holocaust survivors. Last summer, she was a script coverage intern at Paul Feig’s (Bridesmaids, Freak and Geeks) production company. She studied American Studies and Media and Film Studies at Skidmore and was a student fellow for this year’s Storyteller’s Institute where she created her own short documentary. She is elated to have the opportunity to work with and learn from the incredible UNLADYLIKE2020 team!

Jasmine Sabadosa is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she studies sociology and women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She is a staff writer for the Columbia Daily Spectator in the arts and entertainment section and an interviewer for the undergraduate arts publication Ratrock Magazine.