TEAM
VIVIEN HILLGROVE (DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, WRITER, CO-EDITOR) is a documentary film director and a picture and dialogue editor in the San Francisco Bay Area with over fifty years of experience in the film business. Her feature picture editing credits include The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June. Her sound editing credits include Blue Velvet, Mosquito Coast, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Never Cry Wolf, One From the Heart, and many others. She edited eight of Lourdes Portillo’s films including La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead, The Devil Never Sleeps, Corpus, and Senorita Extraviada, as well as three films by Deann Borshay Liem: First Person, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee and Geographies of Kinship. She is a member of AMPAS, and has served as an advisor for numerous Sundance Documentary Composer/Edit Labs. Vivien’s Wild Ride is her directorial debut.
DEANN BORSHAY LIEM (PRODUCER) is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian known for films that explore themes of war, memory, family, and identity, including her landmark adoption films First Person Plural, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, and Geographies of Kinship. Her work on the Korean War, including Memory of Forgotten War, Crossings, and the oral history project Legacies of the Korean War, explores the geopolitical underpinnings of the unresolved Korean conflict. She has served in producing capacities for numerous films, including The Apology, Mimi & Dona, Seeing Allred, Dorothea Lange: Grab A Hunk of Lightning, Ishi’s Return, Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story, Kelly Loves Tony, AKA Don Bonus, and many others. She is Producer of the ITVS-supported Vivien’s Wild Ride, directed by Vivien Hillgrove.
JESSICA ANTHONY (PRODUCER) is a producer, writer, director and impact strategist with over two decades of experience in live action, animation and visual effects. Some past producing credits include The Mask You Live In (Sundance/Netflix) directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, In The Bones (Atlanta Film Festival 2022/Grasshopper Films) and Supreme Court vs. The American Voter (NyTimes Op Doc) both of which she produced and co-directed with award winning filmmaker Kelly Duane de la Vega. She was a producer on director Guetty Felin’s narrative feature Ayiti Mon Amour which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016 and was shortlisted for an Oscar. Her most recent film, In Waves And War, directed by Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen, premiered at Telluride in 2024. Jessica is currently producing a new feature documentary for Duane de la Vega and Actual Films about corporate corruption, climate change and election fraud. Jessica is a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow, a member of the Producer’s Guild of America, and lives in the San Francisco Bay.
JANET COLE (PRODUCER, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) received Oscar and Emmy nominations and a Peabody Award as Producer/ Executive Producer of Regret to Inform, which premiered at Sundance. She produced the 30th Anniversary DVD of Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives that was selected for preservation by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. She was a producer of Paragraph 175 with directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman for HBO and Channel Four. Her Executive Producer credits also include: Promises, (two Emmys, Oscar nomination); Heart of the Sea (PBS); Granny D Goes to Washington (PBS) & Freedom Machines (PBS/POV). Cole began her producing career with director Peter Adair on their award-winning Absolutely Positive (Sundance Film Festival,PBS/BBC, IDA Distinguished Achievement Award). In the mid-1990s, she conceived and supervised production of Positive: Life with HIV, a 4-hour series for ITVS. Janet is a member of AMPAS.
DAWN VALADEZ (PRODUCER, IMPACT PRODUCER) is a second-generation Xicana, disabled, queer filmmaker and artist dedicated to telling powerful stories that center BIPOC, Latine, queer, women, and gender-expansive communities. She is co-directing Untitled Lorena with Rodrigo Reyes and Davi Merchan, winners of the 2024 DocLands Jury Prize for their recorded pitch. Dawn co-directed The Pushouts (with Galloway, 2018), earning the 2019 Imagen Best Documentary Award, and has worked as a producer on Vivien’s Wild Ride (2025) and a co-producer on Hummingbirds (2023). She's a consulting producer on many other documentary films. Her work has been supported by Ford Foundation/Just Films, Sundance/SKOLL, and Tribeca All Access. She serves on the board of the Berkeley Film Foundation and the newly formed Disability Media Alliance, and is the Co-Director of the BAVC Media Maker Fellowship and Director of Youth and Artist Development at BAVC Media.
ERIC M. IVEY (CO-EDITOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER, CO-PRODUCER) is a documentary filmmaker passionate about telling stories that explore the complexity of personal histories and the forces that shape them. He directed, filmed, and edited Not Worth Killing, a documentary short about the journey of a former death row inmate. The film screened at over 20 international festivals, earning accolades including Best Documentary Short at the Sidewalk Film Festival and Best International Documentary at NorthWestFest. He also produced, edited, and shot #KidsonTech, a documentary examining children's evolving relationship with technology, which was featured in 27 festivals worldwide. Most recently, he co-edited and co-produced Vivien’s Wild Ride, a deeply personal memoir by veteran editor Vivien Hillgrove. Eric's work is centered on bringing to light the stories of individuals whose voices might otherwise remain unheard, offering audiences an intimate and often transformative window into the human experience.
BARBARA MCBANE (CO-PRODUCER) has straddled several disciplines as an educator, scholar, free-lance writer, media artist and producer, poet, and feature-film sound editor. She has won many award nominations and an MPSE Golden Reel award for her work in sound post-production. Her credits include Apocalypse Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tell Me a Riddle, The Black Stallion, Godfather III, Terminator 2, Contact, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Dead Poet’s Society, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Munich, and many others. She is the former Head of Critical Studies at the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany, France, and has taught film, sound, and sexuality studies at the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Santa Cruz; Sonoma State University; and at Ardmore Studios, Dublin, Ireland. She has written articles for Film Quarterly, Film History, Radical History Review, The Archive, and other journals, and has published book chapters or monographs on such artists as Lourdes Portillo, Lynn Marie Kirby, Harmony Hammond, Wendy Maruyama, E.G. Crichton, and more. Diagnosed with macular degeneration in 2007, she has a scholarly and personal interest in low-vision access to film and forms of expression for visually impaired film-makers. She holds a PhD degree from the History of Consciousness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz.
TODD BOEKELHEIDE (COMPOSER) Todd’s long and varied career began with editing picture and sound on Star Wars and The Black Stallion. He subsequently mixed sound on numerous Oscar-winning films and won an Academy Award for Amadeus. He then built a career composing music for documentaries, including Hearts of Darkness, Ballets Russes, Señorita Extraviada, and 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets. He has worked with a stellar list of filmmakers: David Fincher, Carroll Ballard, David Lynch, Jon Else, Milos Forman, Philip Kaufman, David Peoples, Bill Couturié, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, Lourdes Portillo and many others. Todd has collaborated as composer on more than a dozen films edited by Vivien.
ADDITIONAL KEY CREW
Executive Producers: Lisa Kleiner Chanof, Bonni Cohen, Janet Cole, Megan Gelstein, Carrie Lozano, Lois Vossen
Supervising Producer: Michael Ehrenzweig
Cinematographers: Eric M. Ivey, Andrés Gallegos, Clare Major
Sound Recordists: Kevin Crawford, Lauretta Molitor, Adriano Bravo, Racheal Bigalow
Colorist: Gary Coates
Motion Graphics and Titles: Kia Simon, Sneaky Little Sister