Filmmakers
Justine Shapiro
Justine Shapiro (co-producer / co-director) was born in South Africa, and grew up in Berkeley, California. Justine graduated Magna Cum Laude in History and Theater, with honors, from Tufts University. In 1993, while studying documentary filmmaking in the San Francisco Bay Area, Justine landed a job hosting a brand-new travel series called Lonely Planet. The series (renamed GlobeTrekker) broadcasts internationally to over 35 million people. Justine hosted the series from 1994-2004, travelling through 40 countries where she interviewed hundreds of people from all walks of life. From 1995 to 2000, Justine and her co-director/co-producer BZ Goldberg created their documentary film Promises which features seven Palestinian and Israeli children. Promises was nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Documentary Film” and won two Emmy Awards. This landmark film has been seen by more than 40 million people in theaters, and on televisions around the world and is the most widely used media resource in middle & high schools and universities teaching the Middle-East conflict. From 2006-2011 Justine produced and directed the documentary film, Our Summer In Tehran which premiered on PBS in 2011. Our Summer In Tehran follows Justine and her six-year old son to Tehran where they spend the summer with three Iranian families, each from very different backgrounds. Justine recently hosted Time Team America, a new OPB/PBS series that will broadcast nationally on PBS in the summer of 2014. Time Team America is a science-reality series that sends archaeologists on a race against time to excavate historic sites around the nation.
BZ Goldberg
B.Z. Goldberg was born in Boston and grew up just outside of Jerusalem. After studying filmmaking at New York University Film School, he worked as a sound recordist and producer covering the Palestinian “Intifada” for Reuters TV, the BBC, NBC, CNN and NHK (Japanese TV). After dodging countless rocks, and inhaling much too much tear gas, B.Z. left his TV job to study alternative approaches to conflict and conflict resolution. He spent seven years as a management consultant for a variety of companies (Including Fortune 500, multi-nationals social organizations, universities, etc.) In 1995 B.Z. and Justine Shapiro founded Promises Films to produced the award winning documentary PROMISES which was released in 2001. From 2004 to 2009 BZ directed and produced a series of 170 short films (all filmed around the world on the same line of longitude) for the world’s first museum on climate change, the “Klimahaus” located in northern Germany. BZ lives and works in Jerusalem.
Carlos Bolado
Ziad Abbas
Stephen Most
Stephen began his playwrighting career with the award-winning Poe, which the Organic Theatre produced twice in Chicago. He co-wrote Loon’s Rage, which launched the Dell’Arte Players Company. As dramaturg for Dell’Arte he collaborated on Intrigue At Ah-Pah and Whiteman Meets Bigfoot. His other plays are Medicine Show, Crossing Borders (for the San Francisco Mime Troupe), Raven’s Seed, Watershed, A Free Country, and Forces of Nature. Documentary films Stephen has scripted include Oil On Ice, which is about the controversy over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; The Greatest Good, a history of the U. S. Forest Service; A Land Between Rivers, a history of central California; and Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time. Wonders of Nature, which he wrote for the Great Wonders of the World series, won an Emmy for best special non-fiction program. The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story, won a best-documentary Emmy. Promises, on which he worked as Consulting Writer and Researcher, won Emmys for best documentary and outstanding background analysis and research. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. Berkeley in the Sixties, which Stephen co-wrote, also received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary.