Our board

21 Grams, American Splendor, Happiness, The Ice Storm, In The Bedroom — Ted Hope, co-founder of Good Machine, This Is That and, most recently, Double Hope Films, has produced close to seventy films, including three Sundance Grand Prize winners and the first features of Alan Ball, Michel Gondry, Hal Hartley, Nicole Holofcener, and Ang Lee, among others. His blog, Hope For Film, is recognized as a core component of the indie film community; he also co-founded the Indie Film review site HammerToNail.com. Ted’s next film will be Ti West’s The Side Effect, starring Liv Tyler. Sean Baker’s Starlet premieres in competition at SXSW; Ted executive produced. Among his other recent productions are Todd Solandz’s Venice competition entry Dark Horse, Sean Durkin’s Sundance 2011 Best Director winner Martha Marcy May Marlene and Collaborator, written and directed by Martin Donovan, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Joana Vicente has been the Executive Director of the IFP since December 2009. Prior to this, she and her partner Jason Kliot produced/executive produced over forty films by such acclaimed directors as Jim Jarmusch, Miguel Arteta, Brian De Palma, Hal Hartley, Steven Soderbergh, Nicole Holofcener, and Todd Solondz.

She has co-founded three separate and unique film production entities over the course of her career. Among the many films that Vicente and Kliot have produced are Tony Bui’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award-winner Three Seasons, Jim Jarmusch’s cult classic Coffee and Cigarettes, Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Todd Solondz’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning Welcome to the Dollhouse, Brian De Palma’s controversial Redacted, and Alex Gibney’s Academy Award® nominated ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Vicente’s films have garnered numerous accolades and awards, including twenty-three Independent Spirit Award nominations and four wins. In 2007, she was the recipient of the Made in NY Award for individuals who have made outstanding contributions to New York City’s entertainment industry.

James Schamus is an award-winning screenwriter (The Ice Storm) and producer (Brokeback Mountain), and is CEO of Focus Features, the motion picture production, financing, and worldwide distribution company whose films have included Lost in Translation, Milk, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Pianist, Coraline, and The Kids Are All Right. He is also Professor of Professional Practice in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches film history and theory. He is the author of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud: The Moving Word, published by the University of Washington Press. He earned his BA, MA, and Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley.
Schamus also participates as a member of the Jury for the NYICFF, a local New York City Film Festival dedicated to screening films for children between the ages of 3 and 18.

At Vimeo, Jeremy is the Director and Co-Creator of the Vimeo Festival + Awards and also works on creative strategy across brand partnerships and editorial vision. Based between London and New York, Jeremy is also an award winning creative director and filmmaker. During the past fifteen years Jeremy has worked with Warner Brothers, PlayStation, Kswiss, Royal College of Art, TED, Britdoc, Tribeca Film Festival, Arts Alliance and Res Media Group to name a few. At RES Media Group he was Director of International Operations and Senior Programmer for the maverick digital festival RESFEST. He became Head of Programming for the final festival in 2006. As a filmmaker his film The Last Supper traveled to over a dozen festivals including Sundance and as a cinematographer he shot over 40 short films. He graduated with honours from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

As one of the most powerful producers in the country, Paula Wagner boasts an astounding résumé that includes such enormously successful films as War of the Worlds and The Others, as well as Valkyrie, The Last Samurai, Shattered Glass, and the MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE series through her long partnership with Tom Cruise. Her current efforts are as founder of Chestnut Ridge Productions, a film production company that is developing motion picture, theater, television and new media projects. Prior to producing, Wagner spent nearly 15 years as one of the industry’s top talent agents at CAA where, in addition to Tom Cruise, she guided the careers of Oliver Stone, Demi Moore, Robert Towne, and Val Kilmer, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Rick Nicita, Co-chairman of CAA and their son, Zachary, drummer for the up-and-coming band Royal Orange.

Yancey Strickler is Co-Founder of Kickstarter, the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Pitchfork, Spin, and the Village Voice, among other publications. He lives in New York City and has personally backed more than 500 Kickstarter projects.

Caitlin Boyle is the founder of Film Sprout and the architect of grassroots and community screening campaigns for numerous independent documentaries, including the award-winning features King Corn (SXSW 2007), Pray the Devil Back to Hell (TriBeCa 2008), and The End of the Line (Sundance 2009). Previously on staff at the Emmy-winning PBS film series Wide Angle, Caitlin consults with dozens of filmmakers each year as they seek new, motivated audiences for documentary film. She has spoken at grassroots distribution workshops and panels at Sheffield Doc/Fest, SXSW, Hot Docs, IFP, LA Film Festival, and The New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives and works in New York City.

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of foursquare, a service that combines social networks, location awareness and game mechanics to encourage people explore the world around them. Previously, Dennis founded dodgeball.com, one of the first mobile social services in the US, which was acquired by Google in 2005. He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35″ by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005), one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40″ (2010) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Dennis holds a Master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a Bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

Frank Lantz is the Interim Director of the NYU Game Center. For over 12 years, Frank has taught game design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications. In 2005 Frank co-Founded Area/Code, a New York based developer that created cross-media, location-based, and social network games. In 2011 Area/Code was acquired by Zynga and is now Zynga New York. Frank has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.
Over the past 10 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as: the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; ConQwest, which featured the first major application of semacodes in the United States; PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

Amy Dotson is the Deputy Director of IFP, producing and overseeing IFP signature programming including the Independent Filmmaker Labs, Independent Film Week (formerly IFP Market), the Independent Filmmaker Conference and Industry Connect. IFP, the nation’s oldest and largest not-for-profit membership organization for independent filmmakers and also the premiere advocate for them, has supported the production of 7,000 films and provided resources to more than 20,000 filmmakers in the last 30 years – voices that might not otherwise have been heard. She previously held the positions of Associate Programmer/Special Programs Producer for SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, The AFI Silver’s Latin American Film Festival and The European Union Film Showcase in Washington, DC. Prior to her experience as a programmer, Amy worked with producer Fred Berner, as well as at Curious Pictures and Miramax Films, where her responsibilities included a wide variety of production, development, administrative and business affairs duties, as well as extensive script and book coverage.In her spare time, Amy enjoys eating Nutella straight out of the jar, collecting Tracy Morgan memorabilia, and is producing her first feature documentary with director Brad Beesley (Fearless Freaks, Summercamp!) on the women of the Oklahoma State Prison Rodeo.

Bob has been a pioneer in the advertising and communications industry for over three decades. He leads the vision for R/GA, an agency that serves as the digital partner for Fortune 500 companies and world-renowned brands, including Ameriprise, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oréal Paris, MasterCard, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Nokia, Verizon, and Walmart. R/GA is one of the world’s most influential advertising agencies, emphasizing the importance of integrated strategies, creative excellence, and innovative technology. The agency has offices in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, and internationally in London, Stockholm, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Singapore.

Bob, and his brother Richard, founded R/Greenberg Associates (R/GA) in 1977 with the idea of creating a company that values design, while focusing on developing leading-edge motion graphics and live-action film and video production. The company created groundbreaking visual effects for movies, including Alien, Predator, Seven, and Zelig. R/GA’s body of work spans 400 feature films and 4,000 television commercials.

Creative Director of Tribeca Enterprises, a New York company that includes the Tribeca Film Festival, the Tribeca Cinemas and the Tribeca Film Festival Doha. He joins Tribeca after serving 19 years as the Director of the Sundance Film Festival, where he was responsible for film selection in all sections of the Festival, as well as managing the Festival and providing overall artistic direction.

Renen Schorr, a leading architect of modern Israeli cinema, has been a key figure in the Israeli film arena since the late 70’s as a film director, educator and cultural entrepreneur. Nearly two decades ago, Renen Schorr founded the now internationally acclaimed Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, Jerusalem. Under his leadership, the school has become a pivotal catalyst in the renaissance of the Israeli cinema, winning the world’s “Best Film School” award 15 times, and boasting some 170 retrospectives in such international film festivals and museums as MOMA (1996) and Berlin (2004). Schorr was chosen by his colleagues as President of GEECT, the association of 70 European film schools (2000-2004).