Documentary Filmmaking Course

Rita Baghdadi is an award winning Moroccan-American documentary filmmaker with a background in international film sales. Her character-driven work has been supported by Sundance, Tribeca, Film Independent, ITVS, Points North Institute and the International Documentary Association. Rita’s documentary City Rising won three Emmy awards in 2017 including Best Social Issue Film. Her film My Country No More won Best Feature at the 2018 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and was picked up for broadcast on Independent Lens in 2019. Rita lensed the feature documentary Served Like a Girl which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and received a nationwide theatrical release. The Hollywood Reporter recognized Rita’s camerawork as intimate. Rita is co-founder of the production company Endless Eye, a co-organizer of the group Women in Documentary Filmmaking and a member of Free the Bid, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Film Fatales and ICFC. When she is not filming, Rita is an active mentor dedicated to empowering women and girls through film training. Currently, she is in early production on Sirens, a coming-of-age documentary about the first female metal band in the Middle East.

Chloe Gbai is the Director for the IF/Then Shorts program. IF/Then Shorts identifies and supports original, standalone short documentaries by filmmakers working in and representing their communities. Chloe joined IF/Then from American Documentary, where, as the POV Shorts and Streaming Producer, she launched POV Shorts, which earned POV its third documentary short Oscar nomination, two News & Doc Emmy nominations and an IDA Awards nomination for Best Short Form Series. She has previously worked at Teen Vogue and Viacom, as well as served on review panels and juries for the National Endowment for the Arts, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Austin Film Festival, IDA Awards, Black Public Media, Black Harvest Film Festival, and various other film organizations. She is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and a member-in-residence of the Meerkat Media Collective.

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor makes colorful, character-based films about real people with extraordinary stories, often with Spanish-language content and frequently for PBS. Her features and shorts have shown at venues like the Sundance, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Locarno Film Festivals, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, New York Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Channel, Al Jazeera, and NHK-Japan. Feature documentary and short film credits include NEW MUSLIM COOL, DAISY AND MAX, PAULINA, MESSAGE TO ZAIRE/THE TALK, HOME FRONT, STREET KNOWLEDGE 2 COLLEGE, VISITING DAY, and REDNECK MUSLIM.

Based in San Francisco and born in Los Angeles of Mexican, Sicilian, Irish and English heritage, Jennifer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Social Documentation MFA program. She is a Sundance Documentary Institute fellow, and has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the USC Annenberg School for Journalism, and the MacDowell Colony. She is currently premiering her new verité feature FOR THE LOVE OF RUTLAND, about a small blue-collar town grappling with deep change in an era of refugee crises, the opioid epidemic, and extreme polarization. Supported by the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and the Sundance Film Music Program, For the Love of Rutland was recently named one of the “10 Most Exciting Films” at Hot Docs 2020 by Indiewire.