Our Team — FRUITS OF LABOR

Emily Cohen Ibañez

DIRECTOR / PRODUCER / CINEMATOGRAPHER / CO-WRITER
**Emily Cohen Ibañez** is a Latinx filmmaker based in Oakland who earned her doctorate in Anthropology (2011) with a certificate in Culture and Media at New York University. Her film work pairs lyricism with social activism, advocating for labor, environmental, and health justice. She has become known for her collaborative methods that challenge the colonial heritage of documentary filmmaking. With parents who migrated from Colombia to the United States and a family legacy of escaping violence from Aleppo, Syria, Emily knows what it means to cross borders and fashion new identities. Her documentary BODIES AT WAR/MINA (2015) premiered at El Festival de Cine de Bogotá and screened in 22 municipalities most affected by landmines in Colombia. Her short films reach wide audiences internationally through The Guardian, The Intercept, and Independent Lens. Emily is a recipient of JustFilms Ford Foundation, Firelight Media Doc Lab, Sundance Kendeda, the National Science Foundation, and was a Fulbright scholar. Her feature documentary, FRUITS OF LABOR had its World Premiere at SXSW 2021, winning multiple awards on the festival circuit and will have its US broadcast on PBS POV American Documentary.

Ashley Pavon

PROTAGONIST/ CO-WRITER

Ashley Pavon was a farmworker and factory worker in high school and now is a full time student at Hartnell College pursuing an Associate Degree and a Certificate in Latino Business at Santa Clara University. She has spent several years working on food security and justice for her community on the Central Coast of California with the Community Agroecology Network. A member of the River Park Video Collective, she helped make a short community film, Cultivating Justice.

Tracy Rector

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Tracy Rector is a filmmaker, curator, community organizer, co-founder of Longhouse Media and a 2016 Stranger Genius. Tracy is the Managing Director of Storytelling at Nia Tero and a proud mother of two. She has made over 400 short films, and is currently in distribution with three feature documentaries. As co-producer of the award-winning film Teachings of the Tree People, producer of March Point and Outta the Muck, director of Ch’aak' S'aagi to name a few; Rector has developed an awareness and sensitivity to the power of media and film as a modern storytelling tool. Her work has been featured on Independent Lens, Cannes Film Festival, ImagineNative, National Geographic’, Toronto International Film Festival, the Seattle Art Museum and Sundance. Her focus is to uplift and amplify BIPOC voices across media platforms.

Richard Ray Perez

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
**Richard Ray Perez** executive produced and directed the feature documentary, *Cesar’s Last Fast*, a film about the spiritual commitment of American civil rights and labor leader Cesar E. Chavez that premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. He has championed documentary film as staff at the Sundance Institute and World Channel. As an EP at Brave New Films, he produced two documentary series and directed a third. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University.

Sundance2019_Gabriella+Garcia-Pardo_1.jpg — Gabriella Garcia-Pardo

CINEMATOGRAPHER
**Gabriella Garcia-Pardo** is a Colombian-American documentary cinematographer and producer based in Washington, DC. She is drawn to stories of home, migration, climate justice, and conservation. Gabriella is a 2020 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and 2020 Impact Partners Producers Fellow. She collaborates with both independent productions and media organizations including Netflix, TIME, Showtime, and BBC. Previously, Gabriella created short-form documentaries on staff at National Geographic as a one-woman-band, filmed over 150 musicians on NPR’s music team, designed an intensive summer film program for high school students at Yale, and led horse treks through Chile. Gabriella is a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design and is the founder/director of the DC chapter of the Video Consortium where she leads monthly programming for filmmakers and journalists and launched a mentorship program for emerging non-fiction mediamakers.

Kristina Motwani

EDITOR

Kristina Motwani is an Indian-American film editor. Recognized by “40 under 40,” she is the co-editor (with Emelie Mahdavian) on Midnight Traveler (2019) directed by Fazili Hassan, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019 and won a Special Jury Prize. She was Assistant Editor on After Tiller that premiered at Sundance in 2013. She was a 2017 BAVC National Media Maker Fellow and a 2018 SFFILM FilmHouse Resident. As an editor at AJ+, she received awards from the SF Press Club, the Society for Professional Journalism, and was nominated for a regional Emmy Award.

Yamil Rezc

MUSIC COMPOSER - ORIGINAL SCORE & SONGS
**Yamil Rezc** is a Grammy-nominated music producer, composer, and musician based in Mexico City. He has composed and recorded with several artists including Julieta Venegas and Carla Morrison amongst Mexico's most prominent pop artists. He composed original music for Netflix's *La Casa De Flores* and the James Bond film, *Spectre 007*.

Denise Gutierrez.png — Denise Guitierrez

SINGER-SONGWRITER OF ORIGINAL SONG
**Denise Gutierrez** is a Grammy-winning rock singer and songwriter born in Los Angeles and living in Mexico City. Her bands Hello Seahorse! and Mex Futura have garnered an international fan-base, making Denise among Mexico’s most revered musicians.

Maribel Martinez.png — Maribel Martinez

ANIMATOR
**Maribel Martinez** has worked as a Creative Director and Producer in Mexico. Her work has won awards at NY Festivals, Promax World Gold, Broadcast Design Association, Animacor, Circulo Creativo and Caracol de Plata. She independently founded Diecinueve36, a studio that focuses on title sequences for film and TV, including the title sequence for the Netflix series, *Casa De Flores*.

Dan Olmsted

SOUND DESIGN AND MIX
**Dan Olmsted** is a sound recordist, designer, and mixer, contributing sound design to films like *Boogie Nights* (1997) to independent documentary films. He works on staff with Berkeley Sound Artists and teaches at film production at San Francisco State University. Dan also plays guitar in local Bay Area bands.

Rose Cohen

COMMUNITY ADVISOR

Rose Cohen is the Executive Director of the Community Agroecology Network (CAN) and a passionate advocate for amplifying the voices of youth and women to lead grassroots social change. At CAN, Rose engages in participatory community-based learning and action, and establishing strategic partnerships to further agroecology and food sovereignty at the intersection of gender justice, alternative economies and immigration. Her doctoral research in Colombia focused on campesino and indigenous land claims under conditions of insecure land tenure, forced displacement and violence. Rose holds a Ph.D. from the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a specialization in Latin American and Latino Studies. She was a fellow at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, and serves as a Research Associate at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) at the University of California, and the Agroecology Livelihoods Collaborative at the University of Vermont.

Patricia Zavella

HUMANITIES ADVISOR
**Patricia Zavella** is an anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. She is the author of *Neither Her Nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty*, *Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley* and a co-author of *Sunbelt Working Mothers: Reconciling Family and Factory*. Zavella is a co-editor of *Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader*, *Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios*, and *Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader*.

Cassandra Jabola

CO- PRODUCER
**Cassandra** is a Filipina-American documentary film, television, and video producer based in San Francisco. A graduate of New York University with a background in cinema and broadcast journalism, she has collaborated with HBO, PBS, National Geographic, NBC, Weather Channel, TLC, Science Channel, Travel Channel, A&E, and Investigation Discovery. She has produced feature documentaries that have screened at Tribeca, DOC NYC, AFI DOCS , and SFFILM.

Deborah Esquenazi

FIRELIGHT MENTOR
**Deborah S. Esquenazi** is a film director, screenwriter, and investigative journalist–she launched Myth of Monsters Studios in the summer of 2018, a mission-driven film and television production company to upend deep-seated myths about women, POC, and gay-identified individuals. Esquenazi's first feature, the critically acclaimed documentary *Southwest of Salem: The San Antonio Four* won the Critic’s Choice Award for 'Best First Feature', garnered an Emmy nomination for 'Outstanding Social Issues Documentary', a Peabody Award, and a GLAAD Media Award for 'Outstanding Documentary. The film helped exonerate the San Antonio Four. Deborah is a 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow for her script, *A Killing on Park*, a fictional work inspired by one of her early investigations. Esquenazi’s narrative feature, *Queen of Wands*, a gay phantasmagoric coming-of-age, which she wrote and will direct was selected for the 2019 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Intensive fellowship. Her latest short film, *El Vacio,* is produced by Concordia Studios/New York Times.