Mark Kitchell – Director/Producer
A veteran documentarian, Kitchell is best known for Berkeley in the Sixties -- which was nominated for an Academy Award, won many top honors, and has become one of the definitive films about the protest movements that gripped America in the 1960s. His other films include Integral Consciousness and The Godfather Comes to Sixth St. He works as a writer/producer and segment director of non-fiction television, and has a long career in film production. Kitchell spent three years developing A Fierce Green Fire. Since production began he has shot eighteen interviews and led a massive archival search, directed and scripted a rough-cut.
Veronica Selver - Editor
Over forty years Veronica has edited some distinguished documentaries: On Company Business; You Got to Move; Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin; Coming Out Under Fire; Blacks and Jews; and Berkeley in the Sixties... making this is an encore collaboration. She was part of the collective that made Word Is Out, a pioneering film about being gay in America. Other films she has directed include KPFA On the Air and Raising the Roof.
Jonathan Beckhardt – Editor
After tackling the Liberal Arts at Oberlin College, Beckhardt moved to San Francisco to pursue riches in the worlds of Environmental and Arts Journalism. When he discoverd that what he really liked was the Arts and the Environment, and not as much the journalism, Beckhardt gave up the writing life, and picked up where he left off with making films in college. Beckhardt worked in pre- and post-production for a variety of advertising firms and nonfiction filmmakers, as well as makinghis own films, including "Obligatory Lunch Saga." In the summer of 2007 he came under the tutelage of Mark Kitchell, designing graphics for a film on the Eastern-philosophic origins of the Center for Intergral Studies. Betaken by the Director's brutish charms, he continued working with Kitchell after finishing up Integral Yoga to help get a Fierce Green Fire into production, where he then moved over to the post-production table to help edit the damn thing.
Tamara Alexa - Associate Producer
After graduation from the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU Tamara moved to Los Angeles where she worked in production on countless commercials, feature films and music videos. After nearly a decade in Europe, where she owned her own catering business in Paris and worked on documentary films in Germany (Berlin and Munich) Tamara relocated back to San Francisco to produce the feature film “Juko’s Time Machine” in the summer of 2009. Tamara joined the Fierce Green Fire team in October of 2009.
Betsy Bayha – Senior Archivist
Betsy made Outsider: The Life and Art of Judith Scott, plus six shorts for Lucasfilm on Edith Wharton, Robert Graves, W.B.Yeats, ballet and New Guinea. Betsy also served as Associate Producer on many more shorts for Lucasfilm; on the documetary Freedom Machines; and on the series Livelyhood. She was a field producer for The Botany of Desire, and has done extensive archival research for NOVA and Frontline programs. For ten years she was a reporter at KQED.
Alyssa Martin - Archivist
Alyssa is a freelance writer and researcher based in San Francisco. She co-founded a film society at her alma mater, Elon University, where she received the Communication Fellow Leadership Award, the JF Hurley Legacy Scholarship and the BB&T Business scholarship for her work on human rights and media. With a grant from the Department of Natural Resources, she published a manual on Green Roof construction and worked on the greening of public art projects in Seattle. Her work as an investigative journalist helped low-income tenants win a landmark case against the Seattle Housing Authority and she continues to write and research for progressive causes in San Francisco.
Tom Turner - Writer
A protégé and colleague of David Brower, Tom was on staff at the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth for seventeen years and Senior Editor at Earthjustice for more than twenty years. His books include: The Sierra Club:100 Years of Protecting Nature; Wild by Law: the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and the Places It Has Saved; Justice on Earth; and Roadless Rules-- the Struggle for the Last Wild Forests.
James Gowdey - Assitant Editor
A scholar of media studies at the University of Puget Sound, James returned fresh-eyed to the Bay Area to find himself running errands for high-strung directors on films and music videos of questionable merit. After working on a zany lesbian interpretation of "Run Lola Run", he soon realized that this was the industry for him. His introverted nature and attention to detail led him to the seedy world of post-production (fast cars and faster women!!), and he eventually found his niche as assistant editor for LinkTV's Stephen Olsson on the "Sound of the Soul" TV series. His cutting skills and newfound borderline OCD led him to this very project. On the side, he dances with the DS Players, a funkstyles dance crew based out of San Jose, and will serve you up on the dance floor three times before you hit the floor.
Katherine Stanford - Music Supervision and Capture
Since graduating from Mills College with an Intermedia Arts degree, Katie has worked for KQED Public Radio, the San Francisco International Film Festival, The Tiburon Film Festival, and has also worked on several feature films in a variety of different roles. She hosts a weekly music program, and contributes to a film show for KALX Berkeley, as well as teaching guitar at the Bay Area chapter of Girls Rock Camp- dedicated to empowering young women through music.
Advisors:
Edward O. Wilson is professor emeritus at Harvard University, a pre-eminent biological theorist and author of twenty-one books. Among them are The Theory of Island Biogeography, a landmark work that led to the field of conservation biology; his masterwork, The Diversity of Life; and The Future of Life, a popular call to preserve earth’s biodiversity.
Roderick Nash is professor emeritus of history and environmental Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara. Among his books are the classic Wilderness and the American Mind; and The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics.
Philip Shabecoff is a journalist who focused on environmental issues as a reporter for the New York Times, then as founder of Greenwire. He has written three books that make up an excellent history of environmentalism: A Fierce Green Fire; A New Name for Peace; and Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century.
Stephen Schneider is professor of interdisciplinary environmental studies and biology at Stanford University. A pioneering climate change scientist, he was on staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research from 1973-1996, where he founded the Climate Project. Among his books are: Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? and Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can’t Afford to Lose.
Tom Lovejoy is a conservation biologist who heads the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. As employee #13 at the World Wildlife Fund he directed all research and created the Forest Fragments Project in Amazonas. Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian for Environmental Affairs and Chief Biodiversity Advisor to the World Bank, Tom originated the term biodiversity and the concept of debt-for-nature swaps.
Daniel Horowitz is a historian specializing in American Studies of postwar culture and affluence. He teaches at Smith College. His best known book is The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979. He also edited a book about Jimmy Carter and his “crisis of confidence” speech during the energy crisis of 1979.