Lost & Found at the Movies:
Rebels and Revolutionaries

John Nein

John Nein is a Senior Programmer at the Sundance Film Festival and deals primarily with U.S. and international feature films. He also plans the festival’s panels and runs the Institute’s film preservation initiative. John grew up in Europe and the U.S., studied history at Carleton College, and earned his MFA from UCLA’s Film Directing program, where he made several award-winning shorts and lobbied tirelessly for better coffee in the vending machines.

Haifaa Al-Mansour

Haifaa Al Mansour is the first female filmmaker from Saudi Arabia.  She earned a Bachelor’s degree in literature from the American University in Cairo and completed a Master’s in Directing and Film Studies from the University of Sydney. The success of her three short films, as well as the international acclaim of her award winning 2005 documentary Women Without Shadows influenced a new wave of Saudi filmmakers.

Al Mansour’s acclaimed 2012 film Wadjda received numerous awards and accolades at festivals around the world and was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film. She was awarded the 2016 Kant World Citizen Prize in Freiburg Germany, as well as the German Prize for Children’s Literature for her young adult novel Das Madchen Wadjda.

In 2017 Al Mansour released Mary Shelley, starring Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth, about the love affair between Percy and Mary Shelley as she wrote Frankenstein. In 2018 she released the Netflix film Nappily Ever After starring Sanaa Latham and premiered a short film at Venice Film Festival through Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series entitled The Wedding Singer’s Daughter. Last year she released The Perfect Candidate, about a female doctor who runs for political office in Saudi Arabia. She recently directed episodes of Motherland for Freeform, The Good Lord Bird for Showtime, The Society for Netflix and The Wilds at Amazon.

Billy Woodberry

Billy Woodberry was Born in Dallas in 1950, Billy Woodberry is one of the founders of the L.A. Rebellion film movement. His first feature film Bless Their
Little Hearts (1984) is a pioneer and essential work of this movement, influenced by Italian neo-realism and the work of Third Cinema filmmakers. The film was awarded with an OCIC and Inter-film awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2013.
His latest feature film And when I die, I won’t stay dead (2015) about the beat poet Bob Kaufman was the opening film of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2016.
Woodberry has appeared in Charles Burnett’s “When It Rains” (1995) and provided narration for Thom Andersen’s Red HOLLYWOOD” (1996) and James Benning’s “Four Corners”(1998).
His work has been screened at Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Harvard Film Archive, Camera Austria Symposium, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou.
He received his MFA degree from UCLA in 1982 where he also taught at the School of Theater, Film and Television. Since 1989 Billy Woodberry is a faculty member of the School of Film/Video and the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.

Grace Lee

Grace Lee is a Peabody-award winning filmmaker whose credits include American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, the doc series And She Could be Next and Asian Americans, both of which aired on PBS in 2020. Other credits include, The Grace Lee Project, Janeane from Des Moines and K-Town’92. Based in Los Angeles, she is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and co-founder of Asian American Documentary Network.

Mo Perkins

Mo Perkins is an award-winning feature film and television writer and director.
She wrote and directed her first feature, a character drama called A QUIET LITTLE MARRIAGE (Mary Elizabeth Ells, Cy Carter, Jimmi Simpson, Michael O’Neill, Charlie Day and Melanie Lynskey). It won many awards on the festival circuit and was distributed by IFC.   
Her second feature was a comedy called THE LAST TIME YOU HAD FUN (Demetri Martin, Eliza Coupe, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Charlene Yi, Jimmi Simpson and Kyle Bornheimer). It also won awards on the festival circuit and was distributed by Gravitas.  
Most recently Mo directed episode 6, season 2 of the scifi drama MANIFEST for NBC and every episode in season 2 of the romantic musical comedy I SHIP IT for the CW.   
She earned an MFA in directing from UCLA. Her thesis film, PISS HAT, was nominated for a Student Academy Award.  She is an alumnus of The Ryan Murphy Half Initiative, WeForShe Program, WB TV Directors Workshop, Sony Diverse Directors’ Program and the Film Independent Feature Film Labs. 
Currently Mo is developing several series for television including one inspired by the commune she grew up on.