Visiting Filmmakers
Documentary professionals who have visited Prof. Diana Nicolae’s classes
Violet Du Feng
Violet Du Feng is an Emmy and Peabody-winning independent documentary filmmaker, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Born in Shanghai and based in New York, she directed and produced The Dating Game, which premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and Hidden Letters, which was Oscar-shortlisted and Emmy and Peabody-nominated after debuting at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Her earlier directing work includes the PBS/CPB special Harbor From the Holocaust, featuring music by Yo-Yo Ma. As a producer, she launched her career on the 2007 Sundance Special Jury winner Nanking and has since produced more than a dozen documentaries about China. She serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Journalism School.
Ilinca Calugareanu
Ilinca Calugareanu is a London-based Romanian documentary director and editor. Born in Cluj-Napoca in 1981, she studied sociology and anthropology at Babes-Bolyai University and documentary filmmaking at Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. Her debut feature, Chuck Norris vs Communism (2015), about the underground network of bootleg VHS tapes in 1980s Romania and dubber Irina Margareta Nistor, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS Independent Lens and acquired by Netflix. Her follow-up feature, A Cops and Robbers Story (2020), and The Joys and Sorrows of Young Yuguo (2022) continued her work blending hybrid documentary and reenactment. She is a Berlinale Talents alum, a Sundance Institute / National Geographic Fellow, and a Chicken & Egg Accelerator Lab grantee.
Connie Bottinelli
Connie Bottinelli is a multiple Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker with international awards for producing, directing, and writing. She began her career at CBS Entertainment in New York and CBS’s documentary unit in Philadelphia, and in 1995 co-founded Grinning Dog Pictures, where she created and contributed to award-winning programs for Discovery, TLC, Lifetime, NBC, CBS, Channel 4 UK, Fox, Court TV, The New York Times, and others. Her Lifetime special Jessica Savitch: An Intimate Portrait set ratings records as the highest-rated documentary in basic cable history in its year of broadcast. Her recent independent slate as director, producer, cinematographer, and editor includes Driving Mrs M, a feature documentary about a third-grade teacher who loses her limbs after a routine illness and fights to return to teaching and driving.
Irina Malcea
Irina Malcea is a Romanian documentary producer and founder of the Bucharest-based production company Luna Film, which she established in 2013 after a background in political sciences and a start in cinema in 2011. Her producing credits include Alice On & Off (2024), Isabela von Tent’s ten-years-in-the-making feature debut about a teenage mother’s struggle with transgenerational trauma, which world-premiered in competition at the Krakow Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Transilvania International Film Festival; as well as the documentary features Teach by Alex Brendea, I Am Hercules by Marius Iacob, and Too Close by Botond Pusok. She co-produced the Bosnian feature The Son and served as Romanian executive producer on the Bulgarian co-production Palace for the People. Since 2023 she has managed Astra DocTank, the industry platform of the Astra Film Festival. She is a member of the European Film Academy and an alumna of EAVE Producers Workshop, Berlinale Talents, EWA Network, PUENTES, and Emerging Producers.
Marta Renzi & Daniel Wolff
Marta Renzi and Daniel Wolff are a filmmaking team based in Upper Nyack, New York, who are also married. Renzi is a choreographer and filmmaker with a 40-year career creating dance for stage and screen. Her first half-hour for PBS, You Little Wild Heart (1981), was set to Bruce Springsteen songs, and she later co-directed Mountainview with her brother-in-law, indie filmmaker John Sayles. She has self-produced more than three dozen short videodances that have screened at over 300 festivals, and her debut feature, Her Magnum Opus (2017), was championed by the late Jonathan Demme. Wolff is the author of The Fight for Home; How Lincoln Learned to Read; 4th of July, Asbury Park; and You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He has been Grammy-nominated, has published three poetry collections, and helped produce two documentaries by Jonathan Demme, The Agronomist and I’m Carolyn Parker. Their recent co-directed documentaries include Guardians of the Flame and Cathy & Harry, a double portrait of artists Catherine Murphy and Harry Roseman.
Alan Rosenthal
Alan Rosenthal is a Jerusalem-based documentary filmmaker, author, and professor emeritus of communications at Hebrew University. Born in London in 1936, he was educated at Oxford University in law and at Stanford University in communications, and has taught at Stanford and the national film schools of Britain, Australia, Mexico, Sweden, and Hong Kong. He has written, directed, or produced more than 60 documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, PBS, ABC, Israel TV, ARTE, ZDF, and CBC Canada, including the Peabody Award-winning Out of the Ashes. His docudrama The First Fagin, about the transportation of convicts to Australia, was a special feature at the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival. He is the author of widely used textbooks on the craft, including Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos (now in multiple editions, recent editions co-authored with Ned Eckhardt of Rowan University) and Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker.
Ken Burns
Ken Burns is widely regarded as the most accomplished documentary filmmaker of his generation and the foremost chronicler of the American experience in film. Born in Brooklyn in 1953 and based in Walpole, New Hampshire, he co-founded Florentine Films after graduating from Hampshire College in 1975. His Oscar-nominated debut, Brooklyn Bridge (1981), was followed by a landmark body of work that includes The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), Country Music (2019), Muhammad Ali (2021), Hemingway (2021), Benjamin Franklin (2022), The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), Leonardo da Vinci (2024), and most recently The American Revolution (2025). His films have earned two Academy Award nominations, 15 Emmys, two Grammys, and a Television Academy Hall of Fame induction (2022).
Rachel Grady & Heidi Ewing
Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing are the directing partners behind Loki Films, the Brooklyn-based non-fiction production company they co-founded in 2001. They earned an Academy Award nomination for Jesus Camp (2006) and have since collaborated on the Emmy-nominated The Boys of Baraka, the Peabody Award-winning 12th & Delaware (HBO), the Emmy-winning Detropia, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (Sundance 2016), One of Us (Netflix), the Emmy-nominated Endangered (HBO), and most recently Folktales, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures. They also created the Showtime docuseries Love Fraud, which opened the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Ewing has expanded into narrative work; her first scripted feature, I Carry You With Me, won both the audience and jury awards at Sundance 2020 and was released by Sony Pictures Classics.
David A. Wilson
David A. Wilson is a journalist, filmmaker, and media entrepreneur whose career spans broadcast news, documentary, and digital media-building. Born in Newark, New Jersey, and a 1999 graduate of Rowan University’s Radio/TV/Film program, he began at WABC-TV in New York under the mentorship of Like It Is host Gil Noble, then worked at Network News Service (the joint ABC/CBS/Fox national newsgathering operation) and on CBS’s 48 Hours. He co-directed and wrote the 2008 MSNBC documentary Meeting David Wilson, which chronicled his meeting with a descendant of the family that had enslaved his ancestors; the film premiered to a 90-minute national town hall moderated by Brian Williams from Howard University and won the RTNDA/UNITY Journalists of Color Award. In 2009 he and his partners launched theGrio, the first video-centric national news platform built for African American audiences, which they sold to NBCUniversal in 2010, reacquired in 2014, doubled in reach to over 10 million monthly visitors, and sold again in 2016 to Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios. He went on to serve as Senior Vice President of BET Digital & Studios, shaping digital strategy for one of the most influential Black media brands. He is also a co-founder of AFAR Ventures, which through a partnership with Netflix Brazil created Colaboratório Criativo, the largest diversity initiative in Latin American media, training Black storytellers as TV series creators. His earlier documentary Hidden Heroes: African-American Women in World War II (1998) is held in the collection of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington. Most recently, he is co-founder and CEO of ALTR, an AI-powered professional networking platform, and is building Pier, an AI evaluation platform. He has lectured at Oxford and divides his time between Los Angeles and Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
Deborah Oppenheimer
Deborah Oppenheimer is an Academy Award-winning producer who won the 2001 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, narrated by Judi Dench and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris. The film, made with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was inspired by her late mother’s childhood escape from Nazi-occupied Europe on the Kindertransport and was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2014. She reunited with Harris on the HBO/Participant documentary Foster (2019), a portrait of the Los Angeles County foster care system. A prolific television producer, she has served as president of Mohawk Productions at Warner Bros., executive vice president of NBCUniversal International Television Production, and executive vice president of Carnival Films, where she led U.S. strategy for the run of Downton Abbey. She was twice appointed by the White House to the governing Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ann Tegnell
Ann Tegnell is an Academy Award and Emmy-nominated producer, director, and editor, widely considered the dean of long-form documentary film editors in the Philadelphia region. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject for Family Gathering, the personal account of a Japanese American family’s internment during World War II that she co-edited with director Lise Yasui, and won the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival when it aired on PBS’s American Experience. Her editing credits also include Niños de la Memoria (2013), The Barefoot Artist (2014), Hollywood Beauty Salon (2016), Symbiotic Earth (2018), Elder Voices: Stories for These Times (2019), and W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices. She has won multiple CINE Golden Eagles and is a longtime collaborator with the Philadelphia-based Scribe Video Center, where her work as a teaching artist has shaped a generation of regional documentary makers.
Lindsay Utz
Lindsay Utz is an Academy Award-winning documentary director, editor, and producer. She won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2020 as editor of American Factory, the Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar film that was the first project released by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions on Netflix. Her additional editing credits include the Oscar-shortlisted Bully (2011), First Position (2011), Quest (2017, for which she won the Cinema Eye Honors Award for Outstanding Editing), Miss Americana (2020), Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry (2021, Emmy-nominated), Martha (2024), and The Greatest Love Story Never Told (2024). In 2025 she co-directed Prime Minister, a documentary about former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, which won the World Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. That same year she launched the production company Win Win Pictures with producer Margaret Yen. She is a 2003 graduate of the University of Arizona, a member of American Cinema Editors and the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University’s MFA in Documentary Media program.
Anna Zamecka
Anna Zamecka is a Polish writer, director, and producer whose debut feature, Communion (2016), is one of the most awarded European documentaries of the past decade. The film — an intimate portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl caring for her autistic younger brother and alcoholic father as the family prepares for the boy’s First Communion — won the Critics’ Week Award at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, the 2017 European Film Award for Best European Documentary, was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Oscars, and screened at more than 100 international festivals, collecting over forty awards. Zamecka studied cultural anthropology, journalism, and photography in Warsaw and Copenhagen and completed the Dok Pro Documentary Programme at the Wajda Film School in Warsaw. She is a member of the European Film Academy and was a 2021 fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program. She currently lives and works in the Białowieża Forest on the Polish–Belarusian border.
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