Finding Your Compass:
A Documentary Ethics and Accountability Workshop

Anjanette Levert is a Peabody Award-winning documentary producer, filmmaker, curator, and professor based in Atlanta. Her work centers Southern Black life and amplifies underrepresented voices through powerful nonfiction storytelling. She produced The Only Doctor (Hot Doc Film Fest, PBS Reel South, Al Jazerra Witness), and has led documentary education as a professor at Spelman College, where she received Presidential Awards for Teaching and Mentorship. A frequent speaker, moderator, and cultural strategist, she brings decades of experience connecting art, activism, and media across platforms, classrooms, and communities.

Molly Murphy (she/her) is Director of Partnerships and Innovation at Working Films. She has spent the last two and a half decades connecting filmmakers and changemakers, positioning documentaries to advance social and environmental justice. She is a founding member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group and serves on the board of Justice for My Sister, which are both advancing care-centered, trauma-informed, and accountable approaches to storytelling. Molly also serves as board chair of Encore Magazine, a beloved source of news, arts, culture, and community connection in Southeast North Carolina.

Resita Cox is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who creates poetic portrayals of her community's resilience against racism. Her films, centered on Southern Black communities, explore environmental justice and hidden Black histories, with her debut Freedom Hill premiering nationally on PBS in 2024. Cox is a Hulu/Kartemquin Accelerator Fellow, North Star Fellow, 2024 Rockwood Documentary Leaders Fellow (Ford Foundation), a 2025 Chicken & Egg Eggcelorator Fellow, and 2024/2025 Grounded Possibilities Environmental Justice Fellow. She holds an MFA from Northwestern University and was named an Esteemed Artist by the City of Chicago.

Sarah Rachael Wainio is a film and television producer with 15 seasons across WEtv, MTV, TLC, Food Network, and Magnolia Network. She field produced THE LOST KITCHEN Season 2 (HBO Max), winner of Realscreen's 2023 Best Lifestyle Docureality Food Show. Her filmography includes THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON (Netflix) and 32 PILLS: MY SISTER'S SUICIDE (HBO Max). A 2023 DOC NYC and A&E Documentary New Leader, Sarah co-chairs the Documentary Producers Alliance Ethics Subcommittee and debuted the Ethics Resource Library at 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.

Natalie Bullock Brown is the director of the Documentary Accountability Working Group, a collective she co-founded in 2020, which has produced a values-based framework for documentary filmmakers, and a syllabus to teach that framework. Natalie is also a documentary film producer and emerging director; treasurer of the board of Multitude Films; a 2023 Harvard Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center, Documentary Film in the Public Interest Fellow; a 2023 DOC NYC New Leader; and a 2021 Rockwood Institute JustFilms Fellow. Her favorite and best productions are her children, EJ and Mimi.

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer, activist, and an adjunct professor at SUNY Old Westbury. Hurt is the former host of the Emmy-nominated series, "REEL WORKS with BYRON HURT.” He also directed the critically acclaimed PBS films, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes; Soul Food Junkies; HAZING; and Lee and Liza’s Family Tree. All four films aired nationally on PBS and can be streamed on PBS.org, the PBS App, Apple TV, and on Prime Video in the PBS Documentaries Channel. His 2025 short documentary film, Men of Courage, won the Breakthrough Film award at the Detroit Black Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Queen City Film Festival, and Best Short Documentary at the Gary International Black Film Festival.

Laura Asherman is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, stop-motion animator, and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia. Interested in the boundaries of documentary and fiction, Laura’s recent work takes a hybrid approach to address social issues with a sense of humor. In 2023, she earned an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. Currently, Asherman serves as Director of Ethics and the Arts and teaches in the film department at Emory University, and as an organizer for Video Consortium’s Atlanta Chapter.

AX Mina consults on impact and engagement at the Archival Producers Alliance. Mina has led exhibitions in spaces such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mozilla Festival Open Artist Studio (curated by the V&A Museum and Tate Modern), and the Museum of the Moving Image, and she produces FIVE AND NINE, a podcast about magic, work and economic justice. Her most recent book, HANMOJI HANDBOOK, co-authored with Jason Li and Jennifer 8. Lee, is a Kirkus Best Book of 2022 and teaches the Chinese language through emoji. She is a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications and member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the Asian American Documentary Network. She is directing RUBBISH: THE QUEER KINGDOM OF LEILAH BABIRYE.

Stephanie Jenkins has been making historical documentaries for fifteen years, primarily as an archival producer and producer with Ken Burns. She has also contributed research to multiple outlets, including The New York Times, Radiolab, This American Life, as well as independent films. In 2023, she co-founded the Archival Producers Alliance, and co-wrote Best Practices for Use of Generative AI in Documentaries. The APA is working closely with non-fiction mediamakers and archivists to protect the historic record in the age of Generative AI.

Darcy McKinnon is a documentary filmmaker based in New Orleans, whose recently released projects include Natchez, (Best Documentary, Tribeca, 2025), A King Like Me and Roleplay, (SXSW, 2024), Commuted (PBS, 2024), Algiers, America (Hulu, 2023), Under G-d (Sundance 2023), Look at Me! XXXTENTACION (SXSW, Hulu, 2022) and The Neutral Ground (Tribeca, POV, 2021). Current projects in production include Jason Fitzroy Jeffers’ The First Plantation, Abe Felix’s Turnaround, CJ Hunt’s Unlearned, Nicole Craine’s Kinfolk and Zac Manuel’s The Instrument.