Producer & Editor, FRONTLINE PBS

Academy and Emmy award-winning Michelle Mizner is a documentary film producer and editor on staff at FRONTLINE PBS. Her work has screened at top tier festivals including Sundance, SXSW, DOC NYC and CPH:DOX, and has been awarded by the Peabodys, World Press Photo, Overseas Press Club, Edward R. Murrow Awards and the duPont-Columbia Awards. In addition to films, she has produced podcasts and multiple acclaimed interactive documentaries, including Inheritance (2016), The Last Generation (2018), and Un(re)solved. (2021). All three earned Emmys for Outstanding New Approaches in Documentary. 

Most recently, Michelle produced and edited the feature documentary 20 Days in Mariupol (2023, dir. Mstyslav Chernov) which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award. The film was nominated in two categories for the BAFTAs, winning in Documentary Feature, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Michelle attended film school at Cal State Northridge on full academic scholarship, and ran a small production company before joining FRONTLINE in 2014. She has served as a juror for Camden Intl Film Festival short docs and the PBS Film Festival, is a member of the International Documentary Association and the Alliance of Documentary Editors, has been a panelist at Boston Editor's Bootcamp and a presenter at World Press Photo and MIT's Open Documentary Lab. pbs.org/wgbh/frontline

Founder & Senior Producer, Northern Light Productions

Bestor Cram is an established Producer / Director / Cinematographer of non-fiction films for television and museums.  Following a staff position at the MIT Film Section, he founded Northern Light Productions in 1983 which has grown to become a production company involved in all forms of new media and traditional motion picture creation and exhibition.  The work is on display at museums and visitor centers including the September 11th Memorial and Museum, various museums of the Smithsonian Institution, the Illinois Holocaust Museum, James Madison’s Montpelier, and National Parks throughout the nation.

Bestor’s recent feature documentary work includes Bonnie Blue—James Cotton’s Life in the Blues, The Last American Colony: One man’s Revolution, Gary K.- One Step at a Time, Revealed: The Hunt for bin Laden, The Birth of a Movement, JFK: The Last Speech and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison.  His work has been broadcast internationally and chosen for exhibition at film festivals worldwide.  Unfinished Symphony was selected for competition at Sundance. He is currently the producer/director/cinematographer of the work-in-progress Tiananmen Tonight and producer for director Lucy Slavinsky’s film, Not Your Average Citizen.

Bestor Cram served as the president of the International Quorum of Motion Picture Producers from 2019-2022 and is a former board member of the Massachusetts Producers Coalition MPC and FILMA. He taught at the Maine Media Workshops for more than 30 years and regularly lectures at New England colleges and universities. nlprod.com

Director

Max Esposito is a director of documentaries and commercials, as well as a photographer and runner. His documentary work is inspired by unexpected human interest stories and pressing social issues. His most recent documentary, Flashpoint, was acquired by the LA Times’ Oscar-winning Short Docs series and commissioned by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Flashpoint won the audience award for Best Documentary Short at the 2024 Independent Film Festival of Boston.

His first feature documentary, Paper Lanterns, influenced the historic meeting of former President Obama and the subject of the film, Shigeaki Mori, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor and historian who uncovered the plight of 12 American POWs that were in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was detonated. Max’s films have screened at the MFA Boston, the United Nations headquarters, and been featured in a TED Talk. His social impact work focusing on veterans was recognized with a Citation of Merit from the Massachusetts House of Representatives, his Ad Council PSA advocating for early STEM education was recognized by Google at SXSW, and in the spring of 2020 he was given unprecedented access to document a Covid-19 ICU.

Commercially, Max has directed spots for Google, Jack Daniels, DraftKings, Dunkin’, Liberty Mutual, Aetna, Fidelity Investments, New Balance, and Reebok among others. Max has lectured on visual storytelling at his alma mater, Boston University, where he was a member of the university’s Division I Track and Field program. maxesposito.com

Independent Filmmaker & Executive Director, CineFest Latino Boston

Sabrina Avilés is an award-winning independent filmmaker, whose work has taken her throughout Latin America, Canada and Europe. During her 25+ year career, she has worked on many PBS programs, among them the six-hour Peabody award-winning series, Latino Americans. Currently, she is in production for her first feature-length documentary on the city of Chelsea, MA and its response to the pandemic.

Sabrina has received grants from ITVS’ Diversity Development Fund, the LEF Foundation, Mass Humanities, Latino Public Broadcasting, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. She was a 2019 LEF Foundation Flaherty Fellow, is a member of the Documentary Producers Alliance and currently serves on the boards of Filmmakers Collaborative and Massachusetts Production Coalition. In addition to her film production career, in 2016 Sabrina became the Executive Director of the Boston Latino International Film Festival. In 2022, Sabrina founded CineFest Latino Boston film festival. cinefestlatino.com