Finding Yingying

Jiayan "Jenny" Shi is a documentary filmmaker and video journalist who is passionate about stories that find shared humanity and compassion. Her debut documentary "Finding Yingying" (MTV Documentary Films) has won numerous awards including the Special Jury Recognition for Breakthrough Voice at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival and a China Academy Award of Documentary Films, and was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy award. Jenny's work has appeared on Paramount +, MTV, BBC News, PBS NewsHour, Insider, and Bilibili. She has also contributed to projects on Netflix, Discovery Channel, Tencent, and Google, among others. Jenny is a graduate of Kartemquin's Diverse Voices In Docs program, a TFI Network alum, a Women at Sundance Adobe fellow, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and a DOC NYC "40 Under 40" filmmaker. Jenny is the co-founder and programming director of the Chicago chapter of the Video Consortium where she curates films and organizes community events for non-fiction storytellers.

Brent E. Huffman is an award-winning director, writer and cinematographer of documentaries and television programs. His work ranges from documentaries aired on The Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, NBC, CNN, PBS and Al Jazeera, to Sundance Film Festival premieres, to ethnographic films made for the China Exploration and Research Society. He has directed, produced, shot and edited short documentaries for online outlets like The New York Times, TIME, Salon, Huffington Post and PBS Arts. Most recently, Huffman completed the documentary Saving Mes Aynak about the fight to save Mes Aynak, a 5,000-year-old Buddhist site in Afghanistan, threatened by a Chinese copper mine. "Saving Mes Aynak" has won over thirty major awards, been translated in over twenty  languages and has been broadcast on television in over fifty countries. The film premiered on Netflix in January 2017.

Diane Quon is an Academy Award-nominated producer who worked as a marketing executive at NBC and at Paramount Pictures before moving back to her hometown of Chicago. Diane is producing the Kartemquin Films documentaries: Oscar and Emmy nominated, Peabody and Sundance award-winning film, Minding the Gap directed by Bing Liu; For the Left Hand along with Chicago Tribune arts critic Howard Reich, and co-directed by Leslie Simmer and Gordon Quinn; and  The Dilemma of Desire with Peabody Award-winning director Maria Finitzo (SXSW 2020). She is also producing the documentary, Untitled Sam Project, directed by Nadav Kurtz and executive produced by Public Record;  and Wuhan Wuhan directed by Yung Chang for Starlight Entertainment (Crazy Rich Asians). She is also developing a fiction film based on the New York Times best-selling book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  She is an AMPAS member, a recipient of the 2020 Cinereach Producer Award, and  is a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow,  an IFP Cannes Producer Fellow and a  Film Independent Fellow.

John Farbrother is an award-winning editor whose work has aired on Discovery, History Channel, National Geographic, and CNBC. John’s first feature documentary, Siskel/Jacobs’ Louder Than a Bomb, won the Humanitas Prize for Documentary was one of Roger Ebert’s top 10 docs of 2011. His most recent work includes No Small Matter, a film about about the power and potential impact of early childhood education, and the 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. Among his other editing credits are numerous documentary shorts and short films, including Steve James’ The Value of Work, part of the 2014 Cynopsis Social Good Award-winning web series, We The Economy.

Shilin Sun is a cinematographer and producer based in Los Angeles. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and joining the Film MFA program at the ArtCenter College of Design in 2018, Shilin worked as assistant editor on the PBS Documentary-series Veterans Coming Home. Shilin's most recent works also include an in-development documentary on the Women Airforce Service Pilots during WWII, directed by Oscar-nominated director Matia Karrell.

Gordon is the Artistic director and co-founder of Kartemquin Films, where over the past 50 years he has helped hundreds of documentary filmmakers advance their projects forward and been a leading champion of the rights of all documentary filmmakers. He is the 2015 recipient of the International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award and was a key leader in creating the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. His credits as director and producer include films as diverse and essential as Inquiring Nuns (1966), Golub (1988), and A Good Man (2011), and as executive producer include Academy-Award nominated Hoop Dreams (1994), and the Emmy Award-winning The Interrupters (2011), The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013), The Homestretch (2014), and Life Itself (2014), and the acclaimed limited series The New Americans (2003) and Hard Earned (2015).

Jolene Pinder is the Executive Director of Kartemquin Films. She is a documentary producer and arts administrator with 15 years of experience in the independent film space. Prior to joining Kartemquin, she helped launch and served as the inaugural executive director of #CreateLouisiana, a grantmaking and mentorship non-profit designed to champion Louisiana talent in film. Prior to this role, Jolene helmed the New Orleans Film Society (NOFS)—the producer of the Oscar-qualifying New Orleans Film Festival (NOFF)—for six years during a period of unprecedented growth. She recently produced the documentary short, All Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk (dir. Angela Tucker), which premiered at DOC NYC last fall. She currently serves on the board of Court 13 Arts, was a founding member of the Film Festival Alliance and the Alliance for Louisiana Filmmakers, an inaugural fellow in the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio, and has juried film festivals across the country (including Cleveland, Sidewalk, Ashland, and Dallas).

Mark Mitten is an Academy Award nominated and Emmy Award winning producer. Most recently he originated and produced the internationally acclaimed documentary Abacus: Small Enough To Jail. Abacus was nominated for the 2018 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. He was an executive producer and co-producer on the Roger Ebert documentary, Life Itself which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and was named as the best documentary of the year by over a dozen critics associations, Rotten Tomatoes, the National Board of Review and the Producers Guild of America. Mark also served as the chief brand officer for Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid after which he directed, co-wrote and produced the documentary, Making Big Plans: The Story of Chicago’s Olympic Dream for NBC. Mark was also a producer for Mark Burnett Productions. Prior to producing, Mark was a partner at McKinsey & Company, where he helped lead the global branding, marketing and sales practice. He is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University.

Ken Pelletier is an independent film producer/financier, technologist, musician and photographer. Ken's documentary film experience includes roles as grant-maker, Executive Producer, Producer and Cinematographer for dozens of films such as Icarus  (2018 Oscar Winner, Netflix); One Child Nation  (2019 Sundance Grand Jury Winner, Amazon Studios); The Apollo (HBO); Ringside; The Crooked Edge  and El Gran Fellove directed by Matt Dillon. Ken serves on the boards of Mother Jones Magazine, Chicago Media Project and City Winery International. He is an advisor and partner in technology start-up companies such as Reverb.com, Deskpass.com and JunoDx. Previously, Ken worked at the intersection of technology, design and media - leading several software and design projects, most recently as the founding CTO of Groupon.com. Ken's photography has been published in outlets such as National Geographic and The New York Times and has been exhibited internationally.  

Yang is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning producer with deep roots in China. She is best known for her collaboration with Steven Spielberg on EMPIRE OF THE SUN and as Executive Producer of THE JOY LUCK CLUB and Producer of THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT. Yang has developed dozens of other films with studios including The Walt Disney Studios, Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers. Yang was recently named a Governor of the Academy of Motion Pictures, and serves on a number of its committees.Committed to fostering global understanding, Yang has been a long-standing member of the Committee of 100, an organization of the most prominent Chinese-Americans and is co-founder of the influential organization, GoldHouse, which boasts the most prominent Asians from Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Since 2011, Kang has been the Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago, an organization committed to bringing together the Asian American community, and empowering them to create change in their communities. AAAJ builds power through collective advocacy and organizing to achieve racial equity. Andy currently is a board member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and serves as co-chair of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s immigration committee, and co-chair of Forefront’s policy committee. He is also an advisory board member of the Korean American Bar Association of Chicago, a member of the Asian American advisory council of University of Illinois at Chicago and is an alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Sorensen is the Associate Dean for Clinical Education and the Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at the Northwestern University School of Law. She previously worked within the law school’s Center for International Human Rights, where her teaching and research interests included international criminal law, corruption, and health and human rights. In 2010, Professor Sorensen was appointed to the American Bar Association's Global Anti-Corruption Task Force. In 2015, Professor Sorensen was appointed to the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights Working Group on Crimes Against Humanity. Sorensen is the co-author of Public Corruption and the Law: Cases and Materials. From 2003-2010, Sorensen was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, focusing on fraud and public corruption.

Before joining Will Ferrell’s Funny Or Die as Managing Director and Executive Producer, Jenkins spent four years serving as President Obama’s Associate Director in The White House Office of Public Engagement. At Funny Or Die, Jenkins produced over 40 social impact campaigns with organizations, foundations, PACs, IEs, and committees. Most notably, Jenkins produced history-making campaigns for the start-up non-profit Rise which was founded by Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, Amanda Nguyen. For his work at Funny Or Die, Brad was featured on CNN’s History of Comedy and he has won numerous awards including a Grand Clio, Halo Award for CSR, the Humanitarian of The Year from the Venice Family Clinic, and the Spirit of Innovation Award from the Asian American Victory Fund.

Xiaoli Zhou is an award-winning documentary director and producer who specializes in international journalism and documentaries about China. Zhou's work has aired on Netflix, The Discovery Channel, PBS and Al Jazeera, among many others. Her documentaries have screened at various film festivals around the world and her work has been honored by the Emmys, Foreign Press Association, American Women in Radio and Television, Asian American Journalists Association and Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Most recently, Zhou has worked as a content advisor for the Emmy nominated and Sundance award-winning documentary American Factory; co-produced documentary film Saving Mes Aynak, which has won over 30 major awards and has been broadcast on television in over 50 countries; and co-produced the documentary short Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall that has aired on PBS and premiered at Sundance. Zhou also translated former Vice President Al Gore’s global warming presentation, featured in the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, for a Chinese audience.