Aviva Kempner

Director  |  Producer

A Washington, D.C.-based filmmaker, creates successful and critically acclaimed documentaries about under-known Jewish heroes and social justice. In 2019, she premiered her fifth commercially-released film, The Spy Behind Home Plate. Her other films include Rosenwald, a documentary about how Chicago businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington in establishing over 5,000 schools for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, which she dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement; Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, about Gertrude Berg, who created the first television sitcom; and the Emmy-nominated and Peabody-awarded The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, about the Hall of Famer who faced anti-Semitism during the ’30s.  Both Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, and Hank Greenberg grossed over a million dollars at the box office and are highly ranked, along with Rosenwald, on Rotten Tomatoes.  She also produced the award-winning documentary Partisans of Vilna, about Jews fighting the Nazis.

Kempner also co-wrote and is co-producing the dramatic script Casuse with fellow Imagining the Indian director and producer Ben West. The film is about the Navajo activist Larry Casuse, who Kempner knew while a VISTA volunteer in New Mexico in the early ’70s. While attending the Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C., Kempner interned at the Office of the Solicitor at the Department of Interior’s Indian Affairs. Upon graduation, she worked at the National Tribal Chairman’s Association and the National Conference of American Indians.

Kempner is an activist and advocate for statehood for Washington, D.C.as a board member of DC Vote.

Ben West (Cheyenne)

Director  |  Producer

Ben West (Cheyenne) is a filmmaker who has worked with companies such as Carsey-Werner Mandabach, Telenova Productions, Mandalay Pictures, and outlets such as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. West was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and Albuquerque, NM, and is an alumnus of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. His last film, Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film Finalist and one of The Washington Post’s Best Films of 2023, Imagining The Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting, is available on Amazon Prime and AppleTV. He is currently co-directing and producing Loyal To The Soil, a film about Native American Military Service. West serves as Executive Director/CEO of Rena Flying Coyote Collective. RFCC, named after his paternal great-grandmother, is a non-profit organization dedicated to telling the stories of Indigenous Peoples through Film, Television, and the Arts. Most recently, he has been invited to join The Pacific Council on International Policy, and was awarded a Fellowship to the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival by the Aspen Institute. Ben is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, and has chosen to focus much of his life’s work on Native Peoples.

Sam Bardley

Producer

A documentary filmmaker with a passionate interest in telling stories rooted in his home of Washington, D.C. He was a writer and producer for the Emmy-nominated film Without Bias, which was included in ESPN’s inaugural 30 for 30 documentary series. He has assisted the development of projects for TV One and BET, including the true-crime documentary series American Gangster, as well as written, produced, and directed several short films and college-level educational videos. Bardley is a graduate of Howard University and Boston University’s Center for Digital Arts.

Kevin Blackistone

Producer

A longtime national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, a panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn, a contributor to National Public Radio and co-author of A Gift for Ron, a memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls published in November 2009 about his kidney donation to one-time teammate Ron Springs. 

Blackistone has covered the Olympics, Super Bowl, Wimbledon, the World Cup, the Tour de France, the British Open, the NBA Finals, Final Four, national college football championship, NFL playoffs, Major League Baseball playoffs, world championship boxing matches and other events on multiple occasions.

Prior to its last issue in 2000, Blackistone also wrote the sports column at Emerge, a monthly review of politics and culture that Time magazine hailed as an “uncompromising voice that made [it] the nation’s best Black news magazine.”

Blackistone is a recipient of numerous awards, including awards for sports column writing from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, for investigative reporting from the Chicago Newspaper Guild, and for enterprise reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists. He was a Martin Luther King Fellow at Boston University as a graduate student.

He has authored academic journal articles on diversity in sports media and hagiography in sports film documentary. He was a visiting lecturer at Beijing Sport University in the summer of 2014.

Blackistone is currently a Professor of Practice at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.

Barbara Ballow

Editor

An Emmy award-winning editor who has been telling compelling stories for over thirty years. She has edited films and videos on topics as diverse as tango dancing to PTSD. Her films have appeared in movie theatres, on network television, cable television, streaming platforms, and in film festivals around the world. Her current films explored the life of baseball player and spy Moe Berg, the legacy of Justice John Marshall, the Right to Die Movement, oil spills, and autism.

Yancey Burns

Producer

A product of the George Washington University Documentary Film Center, he wrote and directed the award-winning documentary short One Fall, which explores the return of independent professional wrestling to the District of Columbia. Prior to filmmaking, he was a practicing attorney, most recently with the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability, where he prosecuted ethical misconduct in the DC government. He also owns and manages his family farm in Lincoln County, West Virginia, which produces 100% grass-fed Hereford beef. Burns holds a BS in Journalism from West Virginia University, a JD from the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, and an MA in Strategic Communication from the GWU School of Media and Public Affairs. His last film, Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film Finalist and one of The Washington Post’s Best Films of 2023, Imagining The Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting, is available on Amazon Prime and AppleTV. He is currently producing Loyal To The Soil, a film about Native American Military Service. Burns serves as Chief Operating Officer of Rena Flying Coyote Collective, a non-profit organization dedicated to telling the stories of Indigenous Peoples through Film, Television, and the Arts.