BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Opal H Bennett

Opal H. Bennett is an Emmy-winning film producer, curator and programmer, and a leader in the independent documentary community. She is on the programming teams for Aspen ShortsFest, Athena Film Festival and DOC NYC, and has served on numerous grant selection committees and juries. Bennett is the producer of “POV Shorts,” the public television series dedicated to short-form nonfiction films, where her first season curating shorts won the IDA Award for Best Short Form Series. A Columbia Law School grad, Bennett has a master’s in media studies from the London School of Economics and received her B.A. from New York University.

Doug Blush

Doug Blush is an award-winning director, producer, editor, writer and cinematographer whose work includes over 130 feature and television projects. Credits include the Critics’ Choice Award and 2022 Peabody Award-winning Mr. Soul!, the Academy Awardwinning Period, End of Sentence., the Academy Award-winning Icarus and, as supervising editor, the Oscar winner 20 Feet From Stardom. Recent projects include Justice, which premiered at Sundance 2023 and The Elephant Whisperers, which won the 2023 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Zana Lawrence

Zana began in the documentary space early in her career, interning for esteemed NYC documentarian Marc Levin at Blowback Productions. She has spent the last nine years on the Netflix documentary film team, working with a wide array of filmmakers across various projects, including the doc series, “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez”, and the doc feature, Becoming, which took an intimate look at the life of Michelle Obama. Most recently, Zana oversaw the feature doc film Pamela: A Love Story, an intimate authorized portrait of Pamela Anderson, and documentary features, such as Civil: Ben Crump, Stutz, Orgasm Inc., Britney Vs. Spears and Girl in the Picture.

SHEILA NEVINS

Sheila Nevins is the foremother of documentary filmmaking, earning countless Oscars, Peabody and Emmy awards over the course of her 50-plus-year career. Nevins joined HBO in 1979 and served as the network’s president of documentary and family programming from 2005-2018. She oversaw more than 1,000 documentaries during her tenure at HBO and is now the head of the MTV Documentary division of MTV Studios.

Best Short Film

Ben Proudfoot

An Academy Award-winning short-documentary director and entrepreneur, Ben Proudfoot is the creative force behind Breakwater Studios. The studio’s work has been recognized by the Academy Awards, The Emmys, The Peabody Awards, Critics Choice Documentary Awards, The James Beard Awards, the Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others. Proudfoot was named one of Forbes “30 Under 30” for his leadership and innovation in the brand-funded documentary space. He hails from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a graduate of the University of Southern California. Proudfoot is an accomplished sleight-ofhand magician and has performed at The Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

Tracy Rector

Tracy Rector is a filmmaker, curator, community organizer and programmer. Currently, she is serving as the managing director of storytelling at Nia Tero, a nonprofit committed to supporting Indigenous governance and guardianship. She has directed and produced over 400 shorts, the Reciprocity Project series and a number of feature films, including the award-winning Outta the Muck. As an impact producer, Tracy served on the team for the Emmy Award-winning feature documentary Dawnland, which premiered on Independent Lens’ to 2.1 million viewers in its opening week. Her work has also been featured in National Geographic, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian.

Susan Wrubel

Susan Wrubel is the executive and artistic director at Aspen Film. She is a film executive with over 25 years of experience in film acquisitions, sales, production, financing and distribution. After 11 years in the New York art-house world, Wrubel became vice president of acquisitions and co-productions for Paramount Classics in 2004. Wrubel returned to New York in 2010, consulting for several internationally focused companies in content acquisition and aggregation, as well as packaging and securing production finance for independent producers. She is an executive producer on Maggie’s Plan, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, and the Oscar-winning Still Alice. Wrubel is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.