the filmmakers

 
 

Rudy Valdez, Director

Rudy Valdez is a Michigan-raised, Brooklyn-based filmmaker committed to making cinematic, meaningful documentary films about social, cultural and political issues. Rudy got his start as a camera operator on the Peabody Award-winning, Sundance series Brick City, and other credits include: Cinematographer for Academy Award-nominated Director Sebastian Junger’s film The Last Patrol (HBO); Director of Photography for Whoopi Goldberg presents Moms Mabley: I Got Something To Tell You produced and directed by Whoopi Goldberg, premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on HBO; Director of Photography for Remembering the Artist, Robert De Niro, Sr., that premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO; Director of Photography on The Conversation, a New York Times OpDoc; Cinematographer for the BET series Second Coming?: Will Black America Decide the 2012 Election?; Director of Photography for Prison Dogs, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Perri Peltz and premiered at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival; Cinematographer for Buried Above Ground, directed by Ben Selkow and premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival; The Talk a Sam Pollard documentary for PBS. And, a true passion project, The Sentence, a documentary about mandatory minimums and sentencing reform that Valdez shot and directed over the course of a decade. The film won the Audience Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and has been acquired by HBO. He’s currently directing a documentary special for ESPN that commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the Special Olympics and will air this summer. When he's not working, you can find Rudy at the park with his wife and daughter. 

 
 

Sam Bisbee, Producer

Sam Bisbee is an Independent Spirit Award nominated producer and founding partner of Park Pictures Features, the feature film division of acclaimed commercial production company Park Pictures. In 2009, Sam produced The New Tenants which won the Academy Award in 2010 for best Live Action Short. Over the last seven years, Bisbee and Park Pictures have brought nine films to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, all of which have been picked up at Sundance for distribution: 2012’s Sloan Award winner Robot and Frank (distributed by Sony/Goldwyn), 2013's Golden Globe nominated Infinitely Polar Bear  (distributed by Sony Pictures Classics) and God's Pocket (distributed by IFC), 2015's Midnight selection Cop Car (distributed by Focus World/NBC/UNIVERSAL), 2016's Independent Spirit Award winner (Molly Shannon) and four-time nominee Other People (distributed by Netflix), 2017’s The Hero (The Orchard), 2018’s Hearts Beat Loud (Gunpowder and Sky/Sony Worldwide), An Eventing with Beverly Luff Linn, and Rudy Valdez’s The Sentence (HBO) for which Sam also composed the original score. The Sentence won the 2018 Audience Award for US Documentary Competition. 


Jackie Kelman Bisbee, Producer

Jackie Kelman Bisbee is an Executive Producer and Co-Founder of Oscar-and-Emmy winning production company Park Pictures, with offices in New York, Los Angeles and London. In 1998, Jackie teamed with director-cinematographer Lance Acord to form Park Pictures. Together Jackie and Lance created a company known for their top tier talent and expert productions. After their short film, The New Tenants, won the 2010 Academy Award, Park launched the Park Pictures’ feature division. Since its inception in 2012 Park Features has produced nine successful feature films, among them Robot and Frank (2013), God’s Pocket (2014), Infinitely Polar Bear (2015), Cop Car (2015), and Other People (2016), and The Sentence (2018), all of which premiered and sold at the Sundance Film Festival. A consummate New Yorker, Jackie resides in Chelsea with her husband, two children, three rescue dogs, and one feral cat.


Viridiana Lieberman, Editor

Viridiana Lieberman is a filmmaker, writer and activist who has also been known to podcast, obsessively watch sports, frequently ride a bike and enjoy a nice whiskey. She received her BFA in Film from the Miami International University of Art and Design and her M.A. in Women's Studies from Florida Atlantic University. She was an Associate Producer on Back on Board: Greg Louganis (HBO) in 2013 and she is the author of Sports Heroines on Film: A Critical Study of Cinematic Women Athletes, Coaches and Owners, published by McFarland in 2014. In 2016, she assisted on Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper (HBO) and A Dangerous Son (HBO). In 2017, Viridiana had two documentaries she edited premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival: I Am Evidence (HBO), a feature on police departments’ handling of sexual assault cases, and Love the Sinner, a short exploring the connection between Christianity and homophobia in the wake of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Also in 2017, she co-directed Fattitude, a feature documentary that exposes how popular culture fosters fat prejudice and then offers an alternative way of thinking. She begins 2018 having edited The Sentence, which won the US Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.


Wendy Neu, Executive Producer

Bio Coming Soon


Lance Acord, Executive Producer

After studying film and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, Lance moved to New York to assist photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber. He began his career as a cinematographer shooting music videos and commercials with close friend and collaborator Spike Jonze. Lance quickly became one of the industry’s most sought after cinematographers and shot seminal music videos for directors Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, Stéphane Sednaoui, and Dayton Faris. In 2001 he won the MTV Music Award for Best Cinematography for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice. Lance’s feature Cinematography debut was Vincent Gallo’s cult classic Buffalo 66. His long list of credits include Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (BAFTA nomination for Best Cinematography), Marie Antoinette as well as Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are. In the late 90’s Lance began his transition into directing and in 1998, together with his business partner Jackie Kelman Bisbee, founded the production company Park Pictures. Over the years, he has received 25 Cannes Lions and 18 AICP Awards for his work with clients such as Nike, Apple, HP, VW, P&G, Subaru and more. He was nominated Best Commercial Director by the DGA in 2003, 2011, 2012, and 2017. In 2011, Lance’s Super Bowl spot for Volkswagen, The Force, became the undisputed highlight of the year’s Super Bowl broadcast and went viral even before kickoff (a first). The Force was named the best ad of 2011 by AdWeek, Creativity, and YouTube, and consistently ranks on lists of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time. Lance’s Nike Jogger spot was nominated for a 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Commercial and named the best spot of 2012 by Creativity. The following year, his Apple film, Misunderstood, won the 2014 Emmy. In 2015, Lance’s Super Bowl Nissan ad, With Dad, earned him another Emmy nomination. Recently, Lance directed a branded content series for HP starring Christian Slater, which won Gold at Ciclope and was named Ad Age’s Small Agency Campaign of the Year. In 2013, together with partner Sam Bisbee, Park Pictures expanded into feature films and have produced nine films garnering critical acclaim worldwide. Park Pictures Features and Lance Acord are currently in development on his first feature film The Real All Americans, a story about The Carlisle Indian school, forced assimilation, and the innovative influence Native Americans have contributed to the sport of American football. 


Theodora Dunlap, Executive Producer

Theodora Dunlap is a New York based producer and development executive with Park Pictures Features & Television. Her film credits include documentary film, The Sentence (Sundance 2018), and narrative films; Hearts Beat Loud (Sundance 2018), An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (Sundance 2018), The Hero (Sundance 2017), Other People (Sundance 2016), Cop Car (Sundance 2015), Infinitely Polar Bear (Sundance 2014), God's Pocket (Sundance 2014) and Robot and Frank (Sundance 2012). 


Geeta Gandbhir, Co-Producer

Geeta Gandbhir has been nominated for three Emmy Awards and has won two. In 2018, a feature documentary she co-produced titled The Sentence premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2017, she co-directed a feature documentary for HBO titled I Am Evidence which premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival, along with a short film she co-directed titled Love The Sinner. She also co-directed the documentary feature film Armed With Faith for PBS which premiered at the 2017 Sheffield Film Festival. In 2016, other feature docs she co-directed include Prison Dogs which premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers which premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and will air on PBS in 2018. She created and is co-directing and co-producing a series on race with The New York Times Op-Docs titled The Conversation which won the AFI Documentary Film Festival and a MacArthur Grant. She also co-directed and edited the film, Remembering the Artist: Robert DeNiro Sr. with Perri Peltz for HBO which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. 

As an editor, her films have twice been nominated for the Academy Award, winning once, and also have won four Peabody Awards and multiple Emmys. These films include: Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown with Alex Gibney which won a Peabody Award, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley for HBO, When the Levees Broke for HBO which won four Emmys and a Peabody, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama for HBO which won an Emmy, Music By Prudence for HBO which won an Academy Award, Budrus, God is the Bigger Elvis which was nominated for the 2012 Academy Awards and Which Way is the Frontline From Here? which was nominated for the 2014 News and Doc Emmys.

She has been the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant, a MacArthur Grant, among others, and in 2017, she was the recipient of Chicken and Eggs prestigious Breakthrough Filmmaker Award.


April Hayes, Co-Producer

April Hayes is a New York-based documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. She most recently directed Home Truth, a feature documentary that premiered at Lincoln Center as part of the 2017 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, screened at film festivals from Alabama to South Korea, and at events in partnership with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Council on Foreign Relations, End Violence Against Women International, Futures Without Violence, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and at over 50 universities and community organizations across the United States. Home Truth will have its national broadcast on PBS in October 2018. April also recently directed a short documentary as part of Google’s #ShowUp campaign documenting the history of Pride movements around the country, and produced Lynching in America, a multimedia documentary project with the Equal Justice Initiative on the history of lynching and racial terror in America that has won a Bronze Lion award at Cannes, two Webby awards, and went on to become a traveling exhibit at Brooklyn Museum and EJI’s The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. As a producer, she currently has two forthcoming feature documentaries, one directed by Martin Scorsese and the other directed by David O. Russell. April’s other short documentary projects include Respond & Rebuild, about Occupy’s post-Hurricane Sandy relief efforts in the Rockaways that was featured on Democracy Now! in 2013, and directed with Katia Maguire, God is a Garden (2015), about an order of environmentalist nuns. April also works as an archivist, most notably managing Bob Dylan’s media archive for seven years, and working as an in-house producer for his film and video projects.