Shaleece Haas, Charlise Holmes, Lauren Kawana, Nicholas Parkin

Teaches at UC Berkeley Advanced Media Institute

Shaleece Haas is an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer and a director based in Los Angeles. Her films, marked by a balance of poignancy and humor, invite audiences deep into the interior worlds of their protagonists. TEXAS STRONG, a film she produced in 2018, won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary and premiered at SXSW. Her 2016 film REAL BOY screened in 23 countries, earned 20 festival awards, and was broadcast nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens. Shaleece also co-produced THE GENIUS OF MARIAN (2013; Tribeca Film Festival, POV) and the final episode of ASIAN AMERICANS, a landmark historical series for PBS (2020), and was a consulting producer on POV’s first limited series, AND SHE COULD BE NEXT (2020; Tribeca Film Festival, POV). She is currently producing Julie Wyman’s UNTITLED DWARFISM PROJECT, a film about the Little People community’s response to new drugs promising to make children born with dwarfism taller. Her films have received support from IDA Enterprise Fund, ITVS, California Humanities, Berkeley Film Foundation, IFP, Film Independent, and Fledgling Fund, among others. Shaleece is an Impact Partners Documentary Producing Fellow, a Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellow, and a Working Films Fellow. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and was a founding staff member of the national oral history project StoryCorps.

Charlise Holmes is an LA-based producer with over 15 years of experience creating content for television and film. A skilled storyteller, she has contributed to the creative vision of a broad range of documentaries, including projects for Netflix, CNN, Amazon, A&E, Cinemax, and more. Charlise serves as an AP Council Delegate for the Producers Guild of America, and is a voting member of the Television Academy. She previously served on the selection committee for Dances With Films, and has been a guest speaker on a variety of educational panels.

Lauren Kawana is a documentary filmmaker from Honolulu, HI and a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism documentary film program. Her directorial debut was Live, Breathe, Hula, a documentary short about Native Hawaiian musician and kumu hula Mark Keali‘i Ho‘omalu. Since then she has worked on feature documentary films such as Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw, Dogtown Redemption, FREE: The Power of Performance, Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066, and No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics. Most recently, Lauren served as field producer for Try Harder! directed by Debbie Lum, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. As a freelancer, Lauren has worked for KQED, National Geographic, Jigsaw Productions and Imagine Documentaries, among other outlets. Lauren is currently based in Oakland, CA, and a member of the Asian American Doc Network, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and the Asian American Journalists

Nicholas Parkin is an award-winning educational designer, teacher, and visual storytelling jack-of-all-trades. His global career highlights include: Journalism lecturer and education consultant at Monash University, Australia, television, radio and online news reporter and producer for ABC News (Australia), freelance video journalist for ABC News and Bloomberg Quicktake (Australia, Brazil, Japan, Nepal), freelance videographer and video editor for various international NGOs (Australia, Cambodia, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam), university study tour coordinator (Cambodia, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Nepal, Singapore).