Producer/Director

Josh Howard is a producer and broadcast executive with more than 25 years of experience in news and documentary production.

He has been honored with 24 Emmy Awards, mostly for his work on the CBS News broadcast 60 Minutes. Josh began his career at 60 Minutes reporting stories with correspondent Mike Wallace. He was later named senior producer and then executive editor of the broadcast.  Following that, he served as executive producer of the weeknight edition of 60 Minutes.

Josh then joined NBC Universal as Vice President of Long Form Programming for CNBC. In that position, he created a unit that produced a series of award-winning documentaries focusing on American business.  The 90-minute film Big Brother, Big Business, which explored the ways in which corporate America works hand-in-hand with the government to collect information about the personal habits of private citizens, won the Emmy Award for Best Documentary on a Business Topic, one of three Emmy Awards he earned for CNBC.

Associate Director 

Jill Landes is a broadcast journalist with a wide range of experience in both breaking news coverage and documentary programming.

At CBS Radio, Jill produced a series of award-winning documentaries on such diverse subjects as The Decline of Communism and The History of Chicago Jazz.  She reported on hurricanes, political conventions, the space program and the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings, and shared in both an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and a George Foster Peabody Award for her work during the uprising at Tiananmen Square.

As a television journalist, Jill developed and produced stories at Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, America Tonight, and both the Sunday and weeknight editions of 60 Minutes.  She has been honored with two Emmy Awards, including one for a 60 Minutes report featuring the first and only television interview given by David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg and one of the key figures in the Rosenberg spy case. 

In 2006, Jill moved to CNBC, the business news channel of NBCUniversal, where she produced stories for Business Nation (the award-winning CNBC newsmagazine) as well as feature-length documentary films.  Her most recent documentary, House of Cards, which explored the origins of the worldwide financial crisis, was recognized with both a National Headliner Award and a Gerald Loeb Award, which is considered to be one of the highest honors in business journalism.

Executive Producer 

Betsy West is an award-winning producer with 25 years’ experience in network television and documentary film production. She produced Oscar-nominee Oren Jacoby's documentary Constantine's Sword and helped oversee its theatrical and DVD release in 2008. She is currently executive producer of MAKERS: Women Who Made America, a PBS documentary and internet project about the women's movement.

Betsy began her career at ABC News, where she traveled the world as one of the original producers of Nightline. After helping create the news magazine PrimeTime Live, she developed, launched and served as executive producer of the documentary program Turning Point from 1994-1998.

Betsy joined CBS News as senior vice President in 1998. At CBS she oversaw 60 Minutes and 48 Hours, and was the executive in charge of 9/11, the two-hour documentary that won a Peabody Award and the Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2002.

Betsy has won a total of 18 Emmy Awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Gold Baton Awards, an Overseas Press Club Award, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

In 2015 she was named the Fred W. Friendly Professor of Professional Practice in Media and Society at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

Executive Producer

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Kevin Jennings has spent over three decades developing and directing organizations that promote progressive change in America. 

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He currently serves as chief executive officer of Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization defending the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and everyone living with HIV.  Previously, Kevin was president of the Tenement Museum, the iconic New York City institution that not only honors the historic contributions that immigrants have made to American society, but also puts a human face on today's increasingly divisive debate over immigration policy. 

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Kevin served for five years as executive director of the Arcus Foundation, a leading global foundation advancing pressing social justice and conservation issues, and executive director of Be the Change, a non-profit organization focusing on reducing economic inequality and promoting social mobility in America.

In 2009, Kevin was named Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Education Department, where he created two nationwide initiatives -- Safe & Supportive Schools grant program and the Green Ribbon Schools Awards -- that addressed environmental issues within the education system.  But he was perhaps best known for his role as President Obama’s “anti-bullying czar,” leading a national campaign to reduce bullying that culminated in the 2011 White House Conference on Bullying Prevention.

Executive Producer

Andrew Tobias is the author of The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need and The Best Little Boy in the World, among others.

He has written extensively for New York, Esquire and Time.  His 14-page 1998 Harvard Magazine cover story, “Gay Like Me: In and Out of the Closet at Harvard, 1653-1998,” is said to have generated more reader mail than any other in the magazine’s history.

He served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee from 1999-2017.

Among the documentaries he’s been involved with: Out of the Past (1998 Sundance audience award winner, executive producer); Compared to What (The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank), 2014; A Sinner in Mecca (“Brave … an unprecedented exploration of Islam” – Out Magazine); and Where’s My Roy Cohen (2019 Sundance premiere, co-producer).

Senior Producer 

Barbara Pierce has been teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California since 2011. She’s also a writing coach in the student-run newsroom.

For more than 25 years she was a producer for CBS News, working primarily for the CBS Evening News. She also produced segments for Sunday Morning, CBS This Morning, and 60 Minutes II. She covered breaking news and produced investigative reports as well as features.

She received an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award and two National Emmys for Investigative Reporting. She has a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts from Williams College.

Director of Photography 

Richard White, Director of Photography, is an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer with over 30 years of experience behind the camera.

His keen sense of storytelling, and his ability to craft a compelling narrative through the use of video, can be seen in his work on 60 Minutes, Dateline NBC, and many other network news broadcasts for which he has traveled the world.

Rich brings those same skills to the big screen through his extensive work on documentary feature films.

His recent credits include Hey Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, a nationally released feature by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy; A Joyous Sound, filmmaker Julie Cohen’s portrait of Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra; and Pedro Ruiz: Coming Home, the story of the noted Cuban American choreographer, which was filmed in Cuba in 2011 for Julie Cohen and Better Than Fiction Productions.

His current projects, in addition to The Lavender Scare, include a feature documentary by Academy Award nominee Kristi Zea about the life and work of the late artist Elizabeth Murray.

Editor, Associate Producer, Motion Graphics 

Bruce Shaw’s long list of credits and achievements in film editing, motion graphics and post production span more than thirty years.

He has worked on a wide variety of award-winning feature documentaries including Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line and Diane Keaton’s Heaven.

For television, his credits include Ken Burns’ groundbreaking documentary The Civil War, for which he was honored with a nomination by the American Cinema Editors for Best Edited Documentary (one of two such nominations he has received).  In addition, he has edited more than two dozen programs for PBS, including episodes of Frontline, American Masters, American Experience and Nova.  His credits also include shows for HBO, HBO Family and AMC.

Bruce is a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. 

Author, The Lavender Scare

A nationally recognized authority on gay and lesbian history, David K. Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Florida.

His first book, The Lavender Scare, is based on years of research in the National Archives, dozens of interviews with former civil servants, and newly declassified government files.  It is the first scholarly work to document the powerful personal stories of the gay and lesbian Americans who became scapegoats in the Cold War hysteria over national security.

The Lavender Scare was honored with a Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, the Herbert Hoover Book Award (recognizing the best scholarly work on twentieth century U.S. history), and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (honoring works focusing on human rights).

David's research has been used to support the arguments of gay rights advocates in several court cases, including Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down laws prohibiting certain sexual acts by consenting adults that was mainly enforced against gay people. More recently, his work was used as supporting evidence in the Proposition 8 trial in California.

David earned a B.A. from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Northwestern University. He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York.

His second book, The U.S. Since 1945, is an edited anthology of key speeches, articles, and government documents from modern American politics and culture.  His current book project, Buying Gay, explores the history of gay consumer culture before Stonewall and the origins of the gay rights movement.