Sonita, Tabitha Jackson, Lynette Wallworth, Paul Farmer | Empathetic Storytelling SkollWF
Speakers
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Gary Gottlieb is CEO of Partners In Health, a global NGO providing a preferential option for the poor in health care in severely resource constrained settings. He assumed this role after serving on the PIH Board of Directors for a decade. He is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 2012-2016 and as its chair from 2016-2018.
From 2010 until February of 2015, Dr. Gottlieb served as CEO of Partners HealthCare, the parent of the Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals, the largest health care delivery organization in New England and among the largest biomedical research and training enterprises in the US. From 2002-2009, he was president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also served as President of North Shore Medical Center and as Chair of Partners Psychiatry and Mental Health System.
Prior to coming to Boston, Dr. Gottlieb spent 15 years in positions of increasing leadership in health care in Philadelphia. He established the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center’s first program in geriatric psychiatry and developed it into a nationally recognized research, training, and clinical program. He served as executive vice-chair of psychiatry and associate dean for managed care at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, and as director and CEO of Friends Hospital, the nation’s first freestanding psychiatric hospital.
Dr. Gottlieb received a B.Sc. cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.D. from Albany Medical College in a six-year accelerated program and he completed a psychiatry residency at New York University/Bellevue Medical Center. As a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Penn, he earned an M.B.A. with distinction from Wharton.
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Artist & Activist, The Strongheart Group
With a poet's soul and activist's passion, Sonita Alizadeh uses her rap lyrics and powerful voice to fight child marriage. At the age of 16, Sonita was a refugee in Iran and distraught over her own impending forced marriage, set to happen in her native Afghanistan. In an effort to express her pain and share the experience of so many of her friends, she wrote “Daughters for Sale” and created a homemade music video. With a posting on YouTube, the song instantly caught fire and was shared around the world. Through the Strongheart Group, Sonita came to the U.S. where she is now a high school student at Wasatch Academy. With the support of Strongheart, Sonita is now an international spokesperson for the rights of girls to choose their own destiny. She believes that together we can end forced marriage in one generation and is working to make that a reality. Her story is told in the award winning documentary “Sonita,” which premiered in the US at Sundance 2016. Sonita was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers of 2015, one of BBC's 100 Women of 2015, and has been featured by CNN, NPR, BBC, Buzzfeed News, and over 150 publications in 20 countries. You can learn more about her campaign to end child marriage at www.sonita.org.
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Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. He is Co-founder and Chief Strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer and his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings.
Dr. Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; he is also Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Additionally, Dr. Farmer serves as the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti.
Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Tabitha Jackson was appointed Director of the Documentary Film Program (DFP) at Sundance Institute in late 2013. The DFP is dedicated to supporting nonfiction filmmakers worldwide in the production of cinematic documentaries that tell compelling stories, push the boundaries of the form, or address contemporary issues including social justice and human rights. In supporting such work, the DFP encourages the diverse exchange of ideas by artists as a critical pathway to developing an open society. Recently supported films have included Cameraperson, Hooligan Sparrow, Whose Streets?, The Look of Silence, I Am Not Your Negro, and CITIZENFOUR.
With almost 25 years experience in the field, Jackson is an award-winning Commissioning Editor, director, and producer of non-fiction work. Prior to joining Sundance she most recently served as Head of Arts and Performance at Channel 4 Television in London, where she supported and championed the independent and alternative voice and sought to find fresh and innovative ways of storytelling. She also executive produced a number of projects for Film 4 including Mark Cousins’ cinematic odyssey The Story of Film, Clio Barnard’s hybrid The Arbor, Sophie Fiennes’ essay The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Bart Layton’s thriller The Imposter, and Iain and Jane’s recent Sundance-winning Nick Cave biography 20,000 Days on Earth.
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Filmmaker, Coco Films
Nicole Newnham has been a documentary filmmaker for over twenty years. Most recently she produced “Collisions”. Previously, Nicole co-directed & produced the Emmy-nominated documentary The Revolutionary Optimists, which screened globally and was selected by the Emmy-award winning PBS series Independent Lens. The film, which followed an extraordinary group of young activists in the slums of Kolkata, inspired her to develop Map Your World, an online community and storytelling platform for young changemakers that enables youth to leverage mobile technology to map data on public health issues as the centerpiece of a campaign for change in their communities.
Nicole initiated, co-produced and directed The Rape of Europa, about the fate of Europe’s art treasures during WWII. The Rape of Europa enjoyed a successful theatrical release, has been a much-broadcast PBS primetime special, was nominated for two national Emmys and a WGA award, and was shortlisted for the documentary Oscar.
She was nominated for an Emmy for directing and co-producing the documentary Sentenced Home, also broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, which follows three Cambodian refugees in Seattle who are deported back to Cambodia after 9/11. She co-produced They Drew Fire, a widely acclaimed special for PBS about the combat artists of World War II, and wrote the companion book distributed by Harper Collins.
Films she has directed have played at many prestigious venues, including the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Lincoln Center and the Walker Art Museum. Nicole earned a Master’s degree in Documentary Film from Stanford University in 1994.
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Artist/Filmmaker, Studio Wallworth
Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist/filmmaker who has consistently worked with emerging media technologies. Wallworth’s work has shown at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian, Royal Observatory Greenwich for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad; Auckland Triennial; Adelaide Biennial; Brighton Festival and the Vienna Festival among many others as well as film festivals including-Sundance Film Festival, London Film Festival, Tibeca Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Adelaide Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival and the Margaret Mead Film Festival. She has been awarded an International Fellowship from Arts Council England, a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, the inaugural Australian Film, Television and Radio School Creative Fellowship and the Joan and Kim Williams Documentary Fellowship. She has had artist residencies in many parts of the world including Southern Italy, Iran, Northern England and New Mexico.
Her works include the interactive video Evolution of Fearlessness; the full dome feature Coral, with accompanying augmented reality work; and virtual reality narrative Collisions, developed through the inaugural Sundance Institute New Frontier - Jaunt VR Residency. In 2014, Wallworth’s feature documentary Tender won the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award for best televised documentary. In 2016, Wallworth was awarded a UNESCO City of Film Award, the Byron Kennedy Award for Innovation and Excellence and Foreign Policy magazine named Wallworth as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers’ of the year. Wallworth lives in Sydney and mentors regularly at Sundance Labs.
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Producer, Strongheart Group
CORI SHEPHERD STERN is an Academy Award nominated producer focused on both documentary and fiction film projects. Her most recent film, which she wrote and produced, is BENDING THE ARC - a feature documentary about the epic arc of the global health rights movement through the intimate story of the extraordinary team who led the fight. The film, which premiered at Sundance 2017, was called by The Hollywood Reporter "a stunning documentary...a glorious and uplifting film."
Cori's past projects include WARM BODIES, a box office smash for Summit/Lionsgate and OPEN HEART, a 2013 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Short Subject. She has a first-look producing deal with Rocklin|Faust, producers of Oscar-winning Best Picture SPOTLIGHT. Current projects include THE ARIZONA PROJECT with Miramax and Adaptive Entertainment, a narrative feature. Cori has also executive produced two virtual reality films: COLLISIONS, which premiered at Davos and Sundance 2016, and FRANCIS, which premiered at the World Bank and WHO in support of world body policy change for global mental health.
In addition to film, her experience includes hands-on work as a social change strategist and social entrepreneur. She appeared in the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winning documentary SONITA, working to help the young woman/rapper escape child marriage in Afghanistan and pursue her art. Cori's social justice projects have been featured on BBC, NPR, The Today Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
