Samara Rosenbaum
Director / Producer
Samara Rosenbaum is a documentary filmmaker.. She has worked for the Los Angeles-based production company Wondros with director Jesse Dylan and producer Priscilla Cohen.Most recently, she worked with Academy Award Winning producer and director Deborah Oppenheimer and Mark Jonathan Harris on their latest documentary that takes unprecedented look into the intricacies of the foster care system, and with Emmy and Sundance award-winning director Tracy Droz Tragos on ABORTION: STORIES WOMEN TELL on HBO.. She is a 2017 graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she focused on the intersection of her two passions: arts and education.
Brian George
Director / Producer
Brian George is a Los Angeles-based director, editor, and UC Berkeley graduate. He has worked on documentary, narrative, and commercial projects all over the country. The feature documentary George edited, GETTING TO THE NUTCRACKER, recently aired on PBS.. As a filmmaker, George is drawn to capturing human portraits of individuals, out of the belief that empathy — the engine of societal change — increases with intimacy.
Brent Palmer
Producer
Brent Palmer is a multifaceted filmmaker based in Los Angeles who proudly represents his hometown of Detroit wherever he goes. Within the documentary space, he recently worked alongside Academy Award Nominated director Lucy Walker, and during his time in development at Amazon Studios, he also worked with more top documentary directors including Jim Jarmusch, Lauren Greenfield, and Jeff Feuerzeig.
Asil Yassine
Producer / Lead Researcher
Asil Yassine is a former Detroit teacher and daughter of Lebanese immigrants who first settled in Detroit. She is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned a Masters in Language and Literacy. In Detroit, she taught middle school and high school math at a school unfortunately too similar to what this film presents. She currently serves as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard as well as a high school educator in the Boston area. She gave a 2017 TEDx talk titled “Literacy: The Great American Theft”.
Andrea Jackson
Consulting Producer
Andrea Jackson is an alum of Detroit Public Schools and an educator of 19 years. She works as a College Transition Advisor in DPS and leads a long history of supporting a number of community organizing efforts. She has been honored as a 2015 Detroit Public Schools Outstanding Educator and her efforts have been featured in The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Guardian, and local press. She recently spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on a panel titled “Literacy is a Fundamental Right: Lessons from Detroit.” Ms. Jackson is a proud mother of three Detroit Public School graduates.
Tali Gumbiner
Tali Gumbiner is a writer and a creative director. As the co-creator of Wall Street’s Fearless Girl statue, she has been recognized as one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People, Entrepreneur Magazine’s 50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs, AdAge 2018’s Creative of the Year and a number of other lists which she is continually humbled by. Among other accolades, her work as been awarded Time Magazine’s Ad of the Year, the Cannes Glass Lion for Change, and was recently cited the most awarded campaign in D&AD history.
Most recently, she completed her MFA at NYU and her novel, What Home Is — an exploration of motherlessness, belonging, race and family cycles.
Pia Faxon
Pia Faxon is an education and technology strategist, dedicated to helping mission-driven organizations amplify their impact. Her experience spans the public and private sectors, having worked for non-profit organizations supporting high school students in their pursuit of higher education, as well as for technology companies helping organizations make large-scale changes to the way they work. Through her studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she collaborated with students and teachers from Detroit and legal experts to host a panel Literacy is a Fundamental Right: Lessons from Detroit.