OUR
MENTORS
MENTORS 2026.
Brian Tilley
Director
Brian Tilley has directed a number of documentary series’ for Al Jazeera English including five seasons of the award-winning six part ‘MY’ series, shot in Nigeria, Cuba, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. He was Series Producer of the Al Jazeera AFRICA DIRECT series of short African films – 72 films by 57 filmmakers from 28 African countries.
Brian produced the short documentary films for the Steps’ WHY DEMOCRACY global documentary series and subsequently produced both the 8 long and 40 short films for the global WHY POVERTY series.
His documentary on AIDS activist, Zackie Achmat, IT’S MY LIFE, was screened in competition at IDFA and on several international television channels including BBC, ARTE, YLE, CBC, YLE, SVT, DR and SUNDANCE CHANNEL.
He wrote and directed the drama series THE LINE aka IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE co-produced with Channel Four, YLE and ARTE, which sold to 32 countries. He has also been Story Consultant or Script Editor on acclaimed documentaries including Rehad Desai’s Emmy award-winning MINERS SHOT DOWN, Hajooj Kuka’s BEATS OF THE ANTONOV, which won the TIFF Audience Award and Anjali Nayar and Hawa Essuman’s SILAS, which premiered at TIFF and sold to Amazon.
In addition, he has script edited fiction films such as Oliver Schmitz’s HIJACK STORIES Wanuri Kahiu’s Kenyan Cannes hit, RAFIKI and Mickey Fonseca’s Mozambique feature film RESGATE. He co-wrote Akin Omotoso’s 2019 Nigerian feature film THE GHOST IN THE HOUSE OF TRUTH and was part of the writing team on the 2024 Kenyan Netflix series SPIN.
Chris Annadorai
Director | Impact Storyteller | Communications Strategist
Chris Annadorai is an award-winning documentary director, wildlife filmmaker, impact storyteller, creative director and content strategist. Across a career spanning over 25 years, he has crafted thought-provoking and emotionally resonant stories that explore our relationship with the natural world, celebrate our shared humanity and inspire action that drives real-world impact. He has directed, produced, executive produced and written hundreds of long-form factual narratives for leading global media brands including National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Al Jazeera and Channel NewsAsia.
As Head of Content at impact storytelling platform Our Better World, he led the creation of over 1,000 short-form stories and impact campaigns across Asia, spotlighting critical environmental, wildlife conservation and social impact causes while catalysing millions of actions through volunteering, donations and advocacy to protect the region’s people, biodiversity and ecosystems.
Chris is driven by a conviction that stories can change hearts, hearts can change minds and together they can change the world.
Deepa Dhanraj
Writer I Filmmaker
Award-winning filmmaker and writer Deepa Dhanraj has been part of the women's movement in India since 1980. She was one of the founding members of Yugantar, a feminist film collective that made a series of films in the early 1980s documenting rural and urban women's movements for labor rights and autonomy. The Yugantar films were recently restored by the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and screened at the Berlinale in 2019.
Focused on feminist politics, Deepa's extensive filmography spans three decades and subjects including population control programs in India, Muslim women's courts, community efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, and more. She has a special interest in education and has worked closely with government schools to create pedagogy suited for problems faced by first-generation learners who come from Dalit and Adivasi communities.
Frederico Pardo
Biologist I Photographer I Filmmaker
Federico Pardo is a Colombian biologist, award-winning filmmaker, science communicator, impact producer, and educator with over 15 years of experience transforming complex ideas into compelling visual narratives. With an MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking and a BSc in Biology, he specializes in telling stories at the intersection of science, conservation, and culture. Fluent in Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese, Federico brings a multicultural approach to his work across global contexts.
Federico is a three-time Emmy Award winner and a National Geographic Explorer known for leading Salvando Primates, an immersive multimedia project and conservation initiative aimed at protecting Colombia’s most endangered primates. His cinematography has supported major productions such as Hostile Planet and Uncovering Mercury in the Amazon (National Geographic), Super League: The War for Football (Apple TV), Ancient Builders of the Amazon (PBS), and branded content for Porsche and Apple.
As founder of Pardo Productions and Trópico Media, Federico collaborates with production companies, NGOs and academic institutions to create documentaries, impact campaigns, and educational content. He’s also an experienced educator and public speaker who has led storytelling workshops across Latin America and served as an expedition leader for National Geographic.
Geoff Luck
Filmmaker I Educator
Geoff Luck is a multiple award-winning filmmaker and educator who’s been the showrunner for eleven television series and executive producer of more than a hundred and fifty programs in science and conservation. On staff at National Geographic, he oversaw global development and production of natural history programming—including the all-time #1 series on Nat Geo WILD—broadcast in 45 different languages across 180 countries, and reaching over 440 million homes worldwide.
As a director, his work has been featured on Netflix, Disney+, PBS and many other leading outlets, awarded at numerous international film festivals, honored by the United Nations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Museum of Modern Art, and nominated for an Emmy. For the past decade, his work has focused on storytelling for impact, and has driven multimedia campaigns in support of many of the world’s leading conservation causes, scientists, and NGOs.
Geoff has also served as a panelist and speaker at TEDx, Jackson Wild, NEWF, SXSW and other international conferences, taught film history, theory and production at such leading institutions as Harvard, MIT and The Savannah College of Art & Design, led workshops for industry newcomers and veterans alike, and mentored filmmakers around the world.
Geeta Gandbhir
Director
Director Geeta Gandbhir is an award-winning filmmaker and co-founder of Message Pictures. She embarked on her career in narrative film under the guidance of Spike Lee and Sam Pollard. After working for eleven years in scripted film, collaborating with renowned figures such as the Coen Brothers, Robert Altman, and others, she transitioned into documentary filmmaking.
In 2026, she made history by becoming the first woman director nominated for two Oscars in different categories in the same year: she received nominations for both Best Documentary Feature (The Perfect Neighbor) and Best Documentary Short (The Devil Is Busy) in the same year. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to documentary filmmaking, she was also honoured with the Vanguard Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Her other recent credits include the series “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water” for Netflix which won the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Nonfiction Series and was nominated for 3 Emmy Awards, and the short "The Devil is Busy" for HBO that was nominated for a 2026 Oscar. Her credits also include "Reclaimed" for Sesame Workshop, the Oscar-shortlisted film “How We Get Free” for HBO, the series "Born in Synanon" for Paramount, and the series "Eyes on the Prize" For HBO, and the feature documentary Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, which was nominated for the 2022 Critics Choice Award, won a 2023 SIMA Award, and won a 2023 Emmy Award. She directed and was the showrunner for the series "Black and Missing" for HBO, which won a 2022 NAACP Award for Best Directing, a 2022 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Series, a 2022 ATAS Honors Award, and a Cinema Eye Honors for Best Series. She directed the film "Apart," with Rudy Valdez for HBO Max which won a 2022 Emmy Award.
Her 2020 short film Call Center Blues, produced with Topic Studios, was shortlisted for the 2021 Academy Awards. She directed an episode of Asian Americans for PBS, which won the 2021 Peabody Award. Additional directing credits include the six-part Discovery series Why We Hate; I Am Evidence for HBO, which won a 2019 Emmy, DuPont Award, and ATAS Award; Armed with Faith for PBS, which received a 2019 News and Documentary Emmy; an episode of the Netflix series The Rapture focusing on rap artist Rapsody; Prison Dogs, co-directed with Perri Peltz; and A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers for PBS. She also co-directed and co-produced A Conversation on Race in collaboration with The New York Times Op-Docs. The series earned numerous accolades, including an Online Journalism Award for Online Commentary, an AFI Documentary Film Festival Audience Award for Best Short, and support through a MacArthur Grant.
Hillary Sparrow
Producer I Communications Leader
Hilary Sparrow is a strategic communications leader, Emmy and Oscar-nominated producer, and advisor for greenstories whose career spans leading The Climate Pledge's growth from 4 to 500+ corporate signatories at Amazon, executive producing documentary campaigns that reached hundreds of millions of viewers, and eight years at Vulcan Productions on films like Girl Rising and Racing Extinction.
Megha Agrawal
Funder I Field Builder
Megha Sood builds ecosystems where culture shifts. She is the founder of Project Junglee, a community space and ecosystem supercharging the impact of the Global Majority; helping to accelerate the narratives, ventures, and collectives at the forefront of a culture in transformation. Her career has been defined by the conviction that the right people, in the right room, with the right resources, can move culture at scale. As Co-Executive Director at DocSociety, she founded the Climate Story Unit - a multi-pronged initiative that wove together production funding, regional networks, and distribution partnerships to make climate a priority in culture. Under her leadership, the Climate Story Fund supported Sundance award-winning films including The Territory, Against the Tide, Nocturnes, and To Hold a Mountain; the Climate Story Labs network convened storytellers from Amazonia to Lebanon to the Pacific Islands; and the Climate Story Kitchen piloted new distribution models with public broadcasters, grassroots networks, and streaming platforms. Recognized as a champion in bringing new narratives into the mainstream, Megha brings vision and strategy to the intersections of art, activism, and climate. Her previous experience include helping purpose-driven organizations grow at the innovation firm IDEO, leading impact programming at the film company Exposure Labs, and launching an outdoor Indian food company. She serves on the board of Mountainfilm in Telluride, grew up in a beautifully rambunctious immigrant family in Sugar Land, Texas, and lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Nilotpal Majumdar
Director
Nilotpal Majumdar is the Founder of Docedge Kolkata and Co-founder of greenstories. Early in his career, he served as the Head of the Editing Department at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), where he also held the position of Dean. He later became the Director of the Manipur State Film and Television Institute in Imphal.
A respected mentor and tutor, he has contributed to several international documentary development initiatives, including the DMZ Docs Fund and DocsPort Incheon (South Korea), Dhaka DocLab, KCA – Korean Pitch for IDFA, and the Kathmandu Doc Lab. Nilotpal has also served on the juries of several prestigious international documentary film festivals, including the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA, 2017), Docaviv (Israel, 2016), DMZ Docs Fund (South Korea, 2016 and 2017), NETPAC Jury at the Kolkata International Film Festival (2014), West Lake International Documentary Festival (Hangzhou, China, 2017), Tokyo Docs (2020 and 2021), and the Dhaka International Documentary Film Festival (2016).
As a filmmaker, Nilotpal has directed and produced 16 documentaries and short films, in addition to two fiction features, Tasveer and Hridaypurer Karmashala. His debut documentary, Days and Nights in Sato's Land, was selected for competition at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF). His documentary Dhatujhar '96 (Metal Storm '96) was selected for the Indian Panorama in 1996, which he directed, shot, and produced. In 2011, he directed Rotinaama, a documentary exploring the politics of food, commissioned by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation).
Beyond his own films, Nilotpal has collaborated extensively with other filmmakers. He served as editor and cinematographer for Balaka Ghosh's Vehicle with the Soul of a Man, and as cinematographer for independent musician Tirthankar Dasgupta's documentaries Makino: An Indian Haiku, about the Japanese scholar Makino, and Barnaparichay, which explores the vibrant world of books in and around Kolkata's iconic College Street.
Nilotpal was awarded the prestigious Senior Fellowship for Outstanding Artists by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, for his research on factual narrative traditions in relation to India's indigenous storytelling practices. In addition to filmmaking, he has written numerous short stories in Bengali and contributed articles on cinema.
Patrick Morris
Executive Producer
Patrick has been making award winning natural history and environmental films for more than thirty-five years and has built a strong reputation for powerful storytelling and excellence in film craft.
His work includes many notable landmark series for international broadcasters including Europe’s Wild Kingdoms, The Future of Nature, China’s Wild Empire, The Age of Nature, Kalahari: Land of Secret Alliances, Hidden Kingdoms of China, Mexico: Earth’s Festival of Life, Wild West, Life, Galapagos, British Isles: A Natural History, Wild Europe and Wild Africa. He also wrote and directed the BBC theatrical film Enchanted Kingdom and giant screen Wild Africa 3D and has produced and written many notable specials including Canada: Surviving the Far North, Dune, Hokkaido: Garden of the Gods, People of the Sea, Africa’s Paradise of Thorns, The Lions Share, Wings over the Serengeti and Islands in the African Sky.
Patrick’s films have won the highest accolades in the industry including a Peabody award from the University of Georgia for excellence in film making, two Best of Festival (‘Grand Teton’) and three Best Series awards at Jackson Wild, five Wildscreen pandas, three Best of Festival awards at IWFF Missoula, and a host of RTS, Emmy, and BAFTA awards and nominations.
Patrick is currently executive producer, writer and director on The War of the Flowers and Wild Treasures of China, and working on three other projects TBA. He is also a mentor and executive producer with NEWF in Africa.
Shannon Service
Filmmaker I Investigative Reporter
Shannon Service is a filmmaker and investigative reporter whose Emmy-nominated documentary GHOST FLEET appeared at Sundance, Toronto, Telluride, and Berlin International Film Festivals before landing on Apple TV, Amazon and Delta Airlines. She was a finalist for DOC NYC’s Best New Director award and won the Palm Springs Film Festival’s Emerging Director Prize. Shannon’s reporting awards include an Edward R. Murrow and a Knight Award for Best Narrative Science Journalism– and her work can be found in The New York Times, National Public Radio, the BBC and The Guardian of London. She speaks on the intersection of oceans, human rights and security for the U.S. State Department and has presented at Congress, the United Nations, the Asia Pacific Economic Conference and the UN Human Rights Commission. Shannon lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California with her wife Sarah and their pet seagull family: Fluffy, Daisy and John.
Vicky Mathews
Showrunner I Producer I Director I Writer
Vicky Matthews is an Emmy-nominated television producer with over twenty-five years of experience in US and international long-form broadcast documentary. On staff at the National Geographic Society, she oversaw the development, production, and post-production of several key global series, broadcast in 25 different languages across 143 countries, reaching over 160 million homes. In the course of her career, she has produced programming in multiple genres including Natural History, Current Affairs & Investigation, Process & Engineering, Space Exploration and Archaeology, and has produced documentary films for PBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, History Channel, and ZDF.
Vicky is a strong and passionate storyteller, with a curiosity about people and places that has made her a powerhouse in the field in some of the most challenging places in the world. She has extensive interview experience with experts, scholars, scientists and advocates on a wide range of issues. As a director, she has the ability to turn the ordinary into engaging and interesting visuals, and prefers an active, ‘in-the-moment’ style that can make even the most camera-shy participant shine on television.
Born in the United States, raised and educated in the UK, Vicky has work experience on six continents. She is driven and motivated by an innate cultural sensitivity born from working and living abroad.