DOCUMENTARY JURY

Scott Ballard is an award-winning Director, Producer and Director of Photography creating narrative and documentary films and creating client-based content.

His credits include director of photography for 9 feature films, producer of 6 feature films, and has written/directed/produced three feature films with his most recent work winning 10 awards with 16 additional nominations in the 40 festivals that it has played around the world. North & Nowhere, his most recent narrative short film won 4 awards including Best Director at the 2017 Albuquerque Film & Music Experience. He holds an MFA in Film Production from Boston University and has lived and worked in Seattle, LA, New Orleans, NYC and Boston.

Based in Portland, Oregon and Savannah, Georgia, he focuses on his dedication to narrative and documentary filmmaking. Currently, he is producing a short documentary series, is in pre-production on a documentary feature, and is in pre-production on his fourth narrative feature film. Along with his freelance work, he has taught at the NW Film Center, Portland Community College, Portland State University and Seattle Film Academy. He is currently a full time Professor & Associate Chair of Film and Television in the School of Film at Savannah College of Art and Design.

He is co-creator of WESTERN EXIT FILMS

DOCUMENTARY JURY

Born in Ireland and living in the US, SJ Murray earned her PhD in Literature & Languages from Princeton and is an award-winning author & educator on the faculty of the Honors College at Baylor University. Passionate about how storytelling intersects with culture and shapes our worldviews, SJ is also an EMMY®-nominated filmmaker and award-winning writer, producer, director, and studied screenwriting at UCLA. At Baylor, she is based in the Great Texts Program, where she focuses on asking big questions about what it means to be human and cultivating rational inquiry & critical thinking. She also teaches in the Department of Film & Digital Media, where she pioneered the course & workshop on Filmmaking for Social Change.

DOCUMENTARY JURY

PRODUCER/CINEMATOGRAPHER

Emmy® Award winner Filippo Piscopo intersects his true passion as a film producer with impactful camera work. Inspired by content resonating with diverse audiences, Filippo has crafted engaging stories supported, among other entities, by the Sundance Institute and featured at film venues such as the Venice Film Festival, IDFA’s Central Pitch, and the IFP's Spotlight on Documentaries.

Granted the Social Justice Award by Amy Goodman, Filippo’s documentary work, often in collaboration with his wife and film director/partner Lorena Luciano, has opened to good reviews by mainstream media such as Variety and the New York Times and has been distributed globally.

DOCUMENTARY JURY

Jonathan Vinson is an assistant professor of film production at Huntington University. After graduating with his Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Crown College in Minnesota in 2011, he worked freelance in film production and photography before being hired as the film producer at Wooddale Church. While at Wooddale, he finished his Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Bethel University in 2015 having completed his thesis on the 1979 Jesus film.

Following his time at Wooddale Church, Vinson worked as an editor and producer at Moving Edge Media in downtown Minneapolis, and in 2017, he was called back to Crown College to teach full time as an assistant professor of communication and completed his MFA in Film and TV Production from Asbury University in 2020.

Vinson is unabashedly passionate about writing and capturing stories. His feature length documentary Paradise Strong was accepted into multiple film festivals and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Orlando Film Festival.

Vinson loves spending time with his family, traveling, hiking, and skiing. Having run the Boston Marathon twice, he is also passionate about distance running.

NARRATIVE JURY

ERIC AMADIO is a writer/director/producer from Southeast Los Angeles, California.

After navigating the independent film world as a writer/director/producer with the feature films After Sex, Columbus Day, Stuntmen and Shadows and Lies, Eric expanded to television and went on to create the FX series Snowfall alongside John Singleton. Having developed with the majority of networks and studios, currently Eric is prepping his next feature film as a writer/director, The Faith of Long Beach, starring Common, Christina Ricci, and Brandon Perea.

Deeply rooted in Los Angeles, his grandfather opened one of the first Italian/American owned photo studios in South Central LA in the 1930’s, his mother grew up in the middle of the 1950’s car-culture in Bell, and Eric was born in Lynwood, then grew up on the border of Downey and Pico Rivera during LA’s most violent era, the 1980’s.

After having an essay published at 10 in a local paper, Eric went on to write for Rock City News at 16, then worked as an electronic music producer/DJ from 18-23, before eventually focusing on being a full-time storyteller in film/TV. Today, Eric resides in rural Texas, has found new passions in being a husband and a father, as well as a mentor to aspiring storytellers, and building the full service film/tv studio Light Work Content.

NARRATIVE JURY

Alexandra Chando got her start in the entertainment industry as an actress. With over 20 years of experience on network television and film, she is no stranger to the production process. Chando first became interested in directing while filming Freeform’s “The Lying Game” where she played two roles. The long days on set gave her the opportunity to become well acquainted with the technical aspects of directing. From there, Chando began shadowing directors on network television series (FOX’s The Gifted, ABC’s Mistresses, CBS’ Scorpion), totaling over 400 on-set hours. She directed her first short, “LPM, Likes Per Minute” which was an official selection at Oscar-Qualifying HollyShorts, among other nationwide festivals. Additionally, she created, directed and produced “The Dinner Party”, an unscripted digital series. In 2019, Chando produced a short, “A Good Son”, for Suzanne Weinert, which world premiered at SXSW and was an official selection at over a dozen U.S. and International festivals. In 2020 she directed and executive produced a pilot presentation called “NSFW” alongside Executive Producer, Eric Amadio (Creator of FX’s Snowfall) and Cameron Duncan (Preacher, 13 Reasons Why) as Director of Photography, with the intention of selling it as a series, and Hear the Dark, set in 1915 following 2 women on a journey to find a missing boy. Chando just wrapped production on her feature directorial debut, AND ON THE EIGHTH DAY, a female heist set in 1993 in West Texas.

As the Festival Manager of Mammoth Film Festival™ and the Executive Director of HER VOICE, an initiative aiming to create accessibility and opportunities to emerging female filmmakers, Chando has immersed herself in filmmaking and is dedicated to making strides in gender parity. In 2020, she launched “The Her Voice Podcast” under Kevin Connolly’s Action Park Media, a podcast about getting candid and having meaningful conversations with females (and males) in the entertainment industry. Guests have included Anne Heche (Actress/Producer), Gina Girolamo (SVP Alloy Entertainment), Carolina Garcia (Director of Original Series, Netflix), Kimberly McCullough (Episodic Director), and Lesley-Ann Brandt (Actress), Erica Huggins (President, Fuzzy Door), John Scott (Episodic Director).

Chando was a cohort in the 2022 class of the Sony Pictures Television Diverse Directors Program.

NARRATIVE JURY

An emerging writer and director returning home from Los Angeles, CA. For over 15 years, he has worked in various departments of film and television production companies, cultivating story ideas and concepts into reality.

From award-winning independent production companies such as Steakhaus Productions, Hidden Empire and Animus Films to networks and studios such as Warner Brothers, MTV, Paramount Pictures, Spike TV, Vh1, Nickelodeon, Sony Pictures, BET, Comedy Central and 20th Century Fox, Derek brings a resounding level of excellence to everything he touches.