Class of 2016

The Class of 2016 is currently in production. Each student is working on a short documentary, while also crewing on shoots for fellow classmates. Their fourteen documentary shorts will screen at the annual Truth Be Told public film festival in May 2016.

Angel Amaya completed her undergraduate degree in English at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi before working in marketing, public relations, and producing. The natural world is her greatest passion, and tracking wolves in Yellowstone for a film on wolf conservation was the moment that defined her as a documentarian. She chose Documentary Studies and Media Studies at The New School as preparatory programs for a creative future in the fields of human rights and the environment.

Arielle Knight is an avid collector of people and places. She wandered into the world of documentary after several years of teaching abroad. Frustrated by the absence of particular, significant stories on screen, she decided to pick up a camera and stop complaining. Her friends are grateful.

Elizabeth Rohe is a self-professed documentary junkie.  Her love of truth-telling, and her Super 8 camera, led her to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism where she graduated with honors. Her recent film, Rose-colored Rhythm, a meditative short doc on music and memory, premiered at the Flagstaff Film Festival.

Igor Myakotin is a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer in search of authentic character-driven stories. Several of his short documentaries have screened at film festivals in Europe and the U.S.   Igor graduated in 2015 with a B.A in Journalism and Mass Communication from the American University in Bulgaria, and continues his studies in documentary cinema at The New School in New York.

Inés Vogelfang is a film and television editor, and postproduction coordinator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied Sound and Image Design at the University of Buenos Aires where she discovered her passion for documentary while making her 2009 non-fiction project Heart of Fantasy on children at a paediatric hospital.

Juul Op den Kamp, born in the Netherlands, is the youngest of three witch sisters with psychologist parents.  She began documenting her surroundings at an early age, and, after high school, made a critical mockumentary on parental behavior that got her into the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. While there, she made a number of essayistic documentaries that explore alternative ways of storytelling. Her goal is to make films with universal dramatic themes that arise from particular contemporary circumstances, somewhere between fantasy and reality.

Katie Revell grew up in Scotland and has lived in Germany and India. She became interested in filmmaking while a student at Edinburgh University. She has since worked as a translator and has gained experience in documentary filmmaking while working as an intern videojournalist, production assistant, camera assistant and crew member on a number of low-budget productions, in addition to making her own short form projects. Her year in Doc Studies is an opportunity to draw all these strands together. Katie likes good coffee, good beer, good music and good people, in any combination.

Luz Zamora has experience in a range of cinematic forms — feature films, documentaries, shorts and commercials. She has a strong technical background and was the youngest and only woman to work as a Technical Director in her home country, Venezuela. At the age of six, she was given a Minolta SR T 101 and has been fascinated by cameras ever since. Early in 2015, Luz moved to New York to broaden her film industry perspective and to follow her desire to tell stories.

Mara Cates grew up in Westchester County and attended Eugene Lang College at The New School as an undergraduate. After internships and magazine work, she decided to pursue her dreams of making films. In 2012, she began work on Leaving Vacationland, a documentary film about her father, a collector, who lives in a small town in Maine.  Mara intends to apply what she is learning in the Doc Studies program to the working world of documentary and media.

Olivia Ebertz is from St. Paul, Minnesota, but set out to live all over the world since the minute she turned 18. She graduated with a certificate in Art from Agder Folkehøgskole in Norway and a BA in Anthropology from Oberlin College.  She speaks Norwegian and Italian, and is working on her Spanish. Making a documentary on the everyday life of prostitutes during her senior year at Oberlin inspired her to pursue documentary as a career.

Rafael Bergamaschi is a Brazilian multimedia journalist and documentary filmmaker who is incapable of staying in one place for long. After living in Sao Paulo, the Gold Coast, Barcelona and Milan, he came to New York to undertake the graduate certificate course in Documentary Studies at The New School. Next stop: who knows?

Steffie van Rhee was born in The Netherlands and graduated from the School of Journalism in Utrecht in 2014.  During her studies she took a course in documentary filmmaking, which brought her to New York for the first time. She fell in love with the city and with the art of documentary, and, on returning to The Netherlands, found work as a documentary researcher and reporter/producer for various media.  She regards herself as a multimedia storyteller.

Simone Maurice is a video producer from Toronto, Canada, and a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Interactive Art and Entertainment Program.  She is also a graduate of the Women In Film and Television’s Humber College Media Management for Business Professionals Program. Her career led her to hosting broadcast television, managing interactive digital media, and producing documentary videos for established Canadian recording artists. Her experience in documentary sparked a strong desire to study documentary in depth and to refine her storytelling skills.

Tish Lara was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She spent most of her childhood honing her directorial skills by organizing and performing elaborate scenes for friends and family. Inspired by revolutionary Mexican and Chicano visual artists, she attended the University of California at Berkeley where she graduated with a B.A. in Social Welfare, followed by a Masters of Social Work from the University of Southern California. She is committed to social justice and wholeheartedly believes in the transformative power of film.