I'LL RISE


Kimberlee Acquaro - Director 

A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in Film, Director  Kimberlee Acquaro is an Academy Award nominated, Emmy Award winning filmmaker and photojournalist. Her first documentary, God Sleeps in Rwanda, garnered international awards including the Emmy Award for Best Documentary and an Academy Award nomination. The film was featured on HBO. Her work has also been shown at MOMA -The Museum of Modern Art - in NY, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Museo de Tolerancia in Mexico City, Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in DC, Artists for Amnesty, Steven Spielberg's SHOAH Foundation and The Museum of Tolerancein Los Angeles. Her work has been featured on CNN, CBS, The Tavis Smiley Show, The Voice of America and BBC/PRI's The World.  Acquaro's photojournalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, TIME Magazine, Mother Jones and many international publications. She was awarded a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism for her work in Rwanda. Acquaro lives in Venice, CA.

Acquaro was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Film this year. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship will support her work on I'll Rise.

Jamal El-Amin - Editor

 

Jamal El-Amin brings 15 years of editorial experience to the table.  As an assistant editor he has worked with great directors like Spike Lee & Woody Allen.  He has cut segments on the award winning documentary "Trouble the Water", Spike TV's "Boston PD" as well as several programs for "NOW on PBS, " and  "Bill Moyers Journal."  He has also edited many music videos, independent narrative and documentary films.  Jamal is also a writer and director who has produced three short films and is currently developing a feature length screenplay. A native of New York El-Amin now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Cause & Affect

Cause & Affect is an innovative agency working with influencers to create social change movements. Their projects andclients include Pulitzer-prize winner Samantha Power and her book, Chasing the Flame; Oprah Winfrey's O, Magazineand The White House Project's Women Rule! campaign among others. Before founding Cause & Affect, Meredith Blake worked as Executive Vice President at Participant Productions where she produced the social-action campaign that accompanied the release of Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.  Cause & Affect works to build high impact social change campaigns that bring widespread attention to causes and enable people to learn more about the issues and become part of the solution.

Perrin Chiles - Producer

Perrin Chiles is an Emmy Award-winning producer and founder of In Effect Films, a documentary film company created with the purpose of effecting social change through film. Perrin?s first film, Autism: The Musical, world premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, was bought by HBO and has garnered a variety of worldwide interest, awards and acclaim, including being on the Short List for the 2008 Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature.

 

Currently, Perrin works as an independent producer and writer in Los Angeles. Prior to moving to Los Angeles, Perrin assisted in the fundraising endeavors and business organization of Elevation Partners, a leading media and entertainment leveraged buyout fund with $1.8 billion under management. Before Elevation, Perrin worked at Silver Lake Partners, a premier technology private equity fund with $3.6 billion under management. Additionally, Perrin worked in investment banking for Wachovia Securities' Technology Investment Banking Group. Perrin Chiles graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Economics & History in 1999.

We have partnered with 

Cause & Affect 

to create a social action campaign around the issues of equality and justice for all.

Cause & Affect Founder & CEO, Meredith Blake

The founder, CEO and chief strategist of Cause & Affect, Meredith Blake is a nationally recognized public interest attorney, advocate and social entrepreneur with twenty years of experience in creating positive social change. Meredith works with clients to create deep impact philanthropic initiatives and social action campaigns grounded in research and with an eye toward sustainability. To achieve the greatest possible success, Meredith also brings to bear her experience at the nexus of media and social change: helping to bring visibility to causes, reach the greatest constituency possible and create cross-platform initiatives that enable individuals to learn more and become part of the solution. Prior to launching Cause & Affect, Meredith worked as a top executive at Participant Productions, a film production company founded in 2004 by former EBay president Jeff Skoll to create movies that are consciousness-raising as well as entertaining.


 

Jimmie Briggs - Executive Producer 

Jimmie Briggs is an award-winning journalist, writer and teacher. His first book, Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War, was published in 2005. His next book, The Wars Women Fight: Dispatches from A Father to A Daughter, will be published in 2010.  He has received distinguished fellowships for his writing and advocacy. His work on civil rights and diversity issues, human rights abuse in war-affected countries and child welfare has brought considerable attention to issues often disregarded in the general media.

A National Magazine Award finalist Briggs is a recipient of honors from the Open Society Institute, National Association of Black Journalists, Alicia Patterson Foundation and Carter Center among others.  His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Vibe, Outside, The Village Voice, The Source, El Pais, People, Essence and Fortune. He has served as an adjunct professor of investigative journalism at the New School for Social Research, and was a George A. Miller Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois: Champaign-Urbana.

The first African-American to be appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador and Special Envoy for Children and Armed Conflict at the United Nations Briggs has worked for the UN Special Session on Children, Seeds of Peace in New York City and Afghanistan, Oxfam, Amnesty International, the ENOUGH Project and many other organizations. Briggs is the founder and executive director of Man Up, a global campaign to engage youth in a movement to end gender violence against women and girls. 

Brian Lazzaro - Director of Photography

 

Brian began directing and shooting music videos in Los Angeles at the age of 24. The second clip he directed, ?Portions For Foxes' for indie rock band Rilo Kiley, was nominated  for MVPA's  Rock Video Of The Year  in 2006.  With over 30 videos under his belt, the 28 year-old director also DP's much of his own video work. His cinematography credits encompass a broad range - from comedy (Candor TV's "More on America") to beauty work (Angie Mattson "In Violet".)  In the 2008 he won best cinematography for the documentary "It Ain?t Over Til It's Over" at the Elevate Film Festival.

 
Lazzaro began studying photography and filmmaking at an early age and worked extensively in Public TV documentaries in Poughkeepsie, New York.  Prior to graduating from NYU Film and Television School in 2003, Brian was awarded funding from a Warner Bros Production Grant and his thesis "Navigator," earned him a Grand Prize award at the New Jersey International Film Festival. Currently Brian lives in Los Angeles, where he continues to film commercials and music videos. He recently finished two videos for the band Rooney on Geffen Records and a country video for Jack Ingram.