Sophie Constantinou has earned international acclaim for tackling difficult topics with artistry and sensitivity. With over 20 years of cinematography experience, her work is guided by the belief that participatory documentary storytelling is a powerful tool for catalyzing place-based change and creating healthy, sustainable communities. For the past five years, she has partnered with Green Streets, a San Francisco-based social enterprise, on an ongoing series of documentary films about waste management, job creation and violence prevention in low-income housing. This ongoing collaboration was the first new media project to receive a prestigious ArtPlace America grant for creative placemaking. In the same vein, Constantinou co-created “Lunch Love Community” with director Helen De Michiel, a mosaic of sharable web-based short films that support the movement to change the way our children eat. In addition to her current work in new media, Constantinou continues to shoot high-profile, visually stunning documentaries for PBS and HBO, including the recent The Royal Road, Regarding Susan Sontag and Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.

Aurora Jiminez coordinates workflows between the production team, participants and partners across the board. She recently coordinated a national program of more than 150 community screenings accompanied by scholar-facilitated conversations for Citizen Film’s National Endowment of the Humanities and Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded public engagement campaign centered around Citizen Film’s documentary American Creed. Aurora has a joint B.A. in Film & Media and English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Garland McLaurin co-directed the recent PBS-NC mini-series Family Pictures USA combining family storytelling with innovative audience engagement. Garland won a Peabody Award for the PBS program 180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School; and his groundbreaking PBS Digital series Pops, about African American men and fatherhood, is supported by Black Public Media, CPB and ITVS. Garland’s cinematography work exploring how to bridge divides includes American Creed, directed by Sam Ball; The New Black (about Black / LGBT+ relationships), directed by Yoruba Richen; and Coming Back (addressing civilian-military divides) with Wes Moore. Garland is a 2018 PBS/ITVS Wyncote Fellowship recipient. He’s currently co-directing a documentary on structural racism in America’s courts, for the BBC.

Sarah Scannell coordinates communications for the entire Citizen Film production pipeline, from Development to Marketing. In addition to managing Citizen Film’s website and social media accounts, she oversees outreach to partners and audiences for all our documentary and creative placemaking projects including Buchanan Mall / Buchanan Change. Sarah has a B.A. in Cognitive Science from University of California, Berkeley.

Editor and Motion Graphics Designer Mike Shen has been nominated for two national Emmy Awards. He is Citizen Film’s senior editor (full-time since 2012, after freelancing at Citizen Film since 2004) and his work has shown on PBS, National Geographic, and the Smithsonian Channel, and in site-specific multimedia installations in public space. His documentary work is informed by his background in Public Policy (MPP 2010, University of California, Berkeley) and journalism. His editing helped win a duPont-Columbia Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious prizes, for Current TV in 2007, and an Overseas Press Club Award in 2012. He has served as editing and story advisor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism since 2012.

Kate Stilley Steiner heads the editorial arm of Citizen Film. An editor for 17 years, her credits include the feature-length documentaries Wired for What for PBS, End of a Legend for The Learning Channel; Throwing Curves, about industrial designer Eva Zeisel, the first artist honored with a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; That’s a Family! and Let’s Get Real for Groundspark – a pair of acclaimed documentaries shown to hundreds of thousands of teens across the country to spark straight-talking classroom discussions about bullying. Kate’s editing work on other award-winning documentaries includes The Story of Mother’s and Daughters for ABC Television; Fox Television’s Emmy-winning Loyalty and Betrayal: The Story Of The American Mob; and the Academy Award nominated Freedom on my Mind. Kate has co-produced and edited many documentaries designed to engage communities and mobilize change, including One Wedding and a Revolution, about the first gay wedding at San Francisco’s City Hall.

An experienced and creative impact producer and community engagement specialist, Tamara Walker learned her vocation from her grandfather who brought diverse communities together for the betterment of San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, where Tamara was born and raised. His diligence and devotion to community taught Tamara the value of planning, preparation and deep investment in relationships to build consensus and effect change. Tamara honed her organizing skills when she faced her own tragedy. In 2000, she co-founded the organization “Mothers Against Guns” alongside other survivors of gun violence. Tamara has been full-time at Citizen Film since 2015 as a producer of short films about community organizers, and as an organizer of community engagement partnerships and activities.