  |
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
Jennifer Baichwal was born in Montréal, QC and grew up in Victoria, BC. She has been directing and producing documentaries for 14 years. Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, her first feature documentary, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1998 and won a 1999 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary. The True Meaning of Pictures, a feature length film on the work of Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, and won a Gemini award for Best Arts Documentary in 2003. Manufactured Landscapes, a feature documentary about the work of artist Edward Burtynsky, was a co-production between Mercury Films, Foundry Films and the National Film Board, and was directed by Baichwal. It premiered at TIFF in September 2006, winning Best Canadian Feature Film, and has since received a number of other awards internationally. Act of God, a feature documentary on the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning, opened the Hot Docs Film Festival in 2009, and was subsequently released in Canada and the U.S. Baichwal is currently in development on Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth with the NFB and Ravida Din (Executive Producer, Quebec Production Centre). She is co-founder of Mercury Films Inc., and lives in Toronto with her husband, Nick de Pencier, and their two children.
www.mercuryfilms.ca
Judy Gladstone was born in Montréal, QC. She has been the Executive Director of CTV’s Bravo!FACT (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent) since 1997. Bravo!FACT (www.bravofact.com) was established in 1995 by the national cable arts channel Bravo!. The foundation is the largest funder of shorts and videos in Canada. Over 20 million dollars have been awarded in grants for the production of over 1,400 shorts across the country. The shorts are broadcast in Canada in a half-hour show in prime-time on Bravo! and A-Channels, and are often honoured at local, national and international film festivals. Ms. Gladstone curates screenings across Canada and abroad, and is often invited to speak at film, television and new media events. From 1993 to 1995, Ms. Gladstone was Coordinator of the CIDA-funded Canada Fund for Dialogue and Development, providing grants enabling Israelis and Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians, to work together on cultural and other projects. As Cultural Attaché at the Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1991-1993, Ms. Gladstone presented the best of the Canadian cultural scene to a foreign audience. Born in Montréal, Ms. Gladstone’s university education includes a B.A. (from Laval Université, Québec City, Québec), and two graduate degrees (from the Sorbonne, France and the University of Haifa, Israel). She lives in Toronto with her two children.
Sharon Switzer was born in Lethbridge, AB. An artist and curator, she has been exhibiting her media art in Canada and the U.S. since the early 1990’s. The first curatorial collective that she formed, Clamorous Intentions, was active in Toronto during the early 1990’s, producing three large-scale, multi-media public events in two years. She founded Art for Commuters in 2007 in response to an opportunity to showcase the work of artists and filmmakers on the Onestop Network of TTC screens. As Executive Director of Art for Commuters, she co-produces and is the Director of the Toronto Urban Film Festival, curates the photography exhibition Contacting Toronto, and a yearly program for Nuit Blanche, among other projects. She is also actively involved in the Toronto arts community, presently serving as President of Gallery TPW’s Board of Directors. Switzer’s own video art recently travelled to museums across Canada as part of ‘18 Illuminations,’ and a catalogue of her work was produced by McMaster Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from the University of Western Ontario, and also taught new media there for many years. She is represented by Corkin Gallery in Toronto, where she recently exhibited a new six-channel video installation.
Keith Treffry, Director of Communications for Earth Day Canada since 2007, is an unabashed movie enthusiast and closet film critic. In the early 90s, Keith helped start and manage an international travel magazine while juggling work as a communications consultant to the Government of Ontario. Soon after, he created Delphic Communications, a company that provided corporations and government with strategic planning, media outreach and marketing support. In the late 1990’s, Keith switched gears to the not-for-profit sector, first as a marketing strategist with a focus on community economic development (where he was the lead in securing two national and four regional awards for communication excellence) and later as the Marketing and Communications Manager for Evergreen, a national environmental organization with a focus on urban greening.
