experimental

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is the founder and president of AfroLez® Productions. She is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian independent filmmaker, international lecturer, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. Her internationally acclaimed shorts Silence...Broken, In My Father’s House, and NO!, explore the issues of race, gender, homophobia, rape and misogyny. For three years Ms. Simmons was a co-producer of two television programs for WYBE-TV35 in Philadelphia, PA. She has screened her work and lectured on the impact of the intersections of oppressions, on African-American women’s lives, in Spain, Mexico, South Africa, England, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Hungary, and at numerous colleges/universities and conferences across the United States. Her awards include the 1994 Philadelphia Gay Pride Award; the 1995 Atlantic City Black Film Festival Filmmaker Award; the 1998 Audre Lorde Legacy Award of the Union Institute Center for Women, the 1998 NAACP Exemplary Citizen Award, finalist for the 1998 Roy W. Dean Grant, and the 2000 Bread and Roses Community Fund’s Waters Award for Intergenerational Activism.

Stephanie Howland is a writer and mother who lives in Philadelphia.

Elisabeth Doyle studied fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and at the State University of New York at Albany. At Albany, Elisabeth was awarded the University’s Lovenheim Prize for best short fiction and won a journalism assistantship with the University Relations Department. On the strength of her writing samples, she was admitted as the only undergraduate into Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s graduate level fiction course. Elisabeth was also admitted into the English honors program and graduated Magna Cum Laude. She has had fiction published in the literary journal Nadir and in a Hughes Henshaw anthology of work by young writers.

Elisabeth recently completed work on a mid-length film project entitled Good, which she also wrote and directed. Good is currently being prepared for festival submission, and Elisabeth is preparing to begin production on her first feature film, Let Them Wait. Elisabeth Doyle also earned a law degree from Temple University School of Law in 1997, and served as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of New Jersey - representing the New Jersey Departments of Education, Health, and Human Services - until 2006. Elisabeth now lives in Washington, D.C., where she works in the field of education and health policy.

Deborah Rudman is the program manager for DUTV's cable channel 54, an educational channel operated by Drexel University under agreement with The City of Philadelphia's Department of Public Property. She also works as an editor, a producer of several cable access shows, and as a production facilitator for many Scribe Video Center programs, including its Documentary History Project for Youth.

For 30 years Nexus has served the public in Philadelphia by increasing access to and understanding of "Today’s Art". Nexus was conceived at a time when very few non-commercial galleries existed in Philadelphia. Established in 1975, Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art is an artist-run, not-for-profit exhibition space. Nexus serves as an incubator for local emerging and experimental artists engaged in new art practices, and a venue for traveling and curated art exhibits exploring a wide range of present-day issues. Our exhibitions of challenging, innovative, and compelling contemporary art are intended to stimulate creative thought and dialog among the diverse visitors to Nexus.

Andres Nicolini is a videomaker and computer consultant who moved from Chile to Philadelphia in 1989. His work has been shown in numerous festivals, television networks, and other venues nationally and internationally, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles Latino Film Festival and Valparaiso International Film Festival. Additional film and video works include Becoming American, Iggy & Antjuan, and Rendevous, a 2005 feature narrative film about young immigrants in New York. Prior to becoming facilitator for Bodyworks, he came to Scribe to produce the experimental video, #28 [link].

Janet Williams works as a digital video artist and graphic designer in the Philadelphia area. She performed camera, lighting and sound duties on a popular Scribe Video Center catalog work, Intermarriage: Latina's Perspective. [LINK]