Documentary Faculty & Lecturers

Faculty

Jon Else (Professor and North Gate Chair in Journalism)

Jon Else produced and directed the documentaries “The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb,” “Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven,” “A Job at Ford’s” part of the PBS series “The Great Depression,” “Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature,” “Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle,” and “Open Outcry.” He was series producer and cinematographer for “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years.” Else served as cinematographer on documentaries for PBS, BBC, ABC, MTV and HBO, including the BBC/PBS “History of Rock and Roll,” the Paramount/MTV feature documentary “Tupac: Resurrection” and “Afghanistan: Hell of a Nation,” and numerous commercials and music videos. He is directing a feature documentary about nuclear weapons. Else was a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and has won an Academy Award, four National Emmys, several Alfred I. DuPont and Peabody awards, the Prix Italia, the Sundance Special Jury Prize and Sundance Filmmaker’s Trophy. Else received his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and his master’s degree in communication from Stanford University.

Lecturers

Sharon Tiller (reporter)

Sharon Tiller joined FRONTLINE in 1995 as senior producer for special
projects. In that role she has overseen and helped shape numerous programs
for the series, including the critically acclaimed four-part special "Drug
Wars." Other projects include “So You Want to Buy a President,” “Why
America Hates the Press,” “Fooling with Nature,” "Secrets of the SAT, and
“Blackout.” In 1997, she helped establish and runs the "FRONTLINE West"
project at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of
Journalism, where producers-in-residence work with graduates of the
documentary program on a number of FRONTLINE and “World” projects each
academic year.

Deborah Hoffmann (Visiting Lecturer)

Teaching Fellow Deborah Hoffmann received an Academy Award nomination in 1995 for her documentary Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter and again for Long Night's Journey into Day in 2000. She is widely acclaimed as editor of such classic documentaries as The Times of Harvey Milk, Marlon Riggs' Color Adjustment and Ethnic Notions, and Jon Else' Mullholland's Dream and Sing Faster. She has received two National Emmys, a Peabody, and a DuPont Columbia Award for her work.

Steve Talbot (Visiting Instructor)

In a career of more than 25 years in public television, Stephen Talbot has written and produced over 30 documentaries, including ten films for the PBS series, Frontline. Along the way, he has won nearly every major award in the field – Emmys, Peabodys, a DuPont, a George Polk, even an “Edgar” from the Mystery Writers of America. His most recent work is “News War: What’s Happening to the News” (2007) a 90-min. Frontline report on the state of the news media with reporter Lowell Bergman. Talbot is also the Series Editor for Frontline/World, Frontline’s international news magazine, where he helps commission and supervise broadcast stories and oversees the series web site.

Karen Everett (Director/Post-Production Supervisor)

Karen Everett is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor based
in San Francisco. She has directed five documentaries which have received
educational distribution and aired on PBS. Everett teaches editing at UC
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has edited the nightly news
for a top-ranked NBC affiliate, taught at several Bay Area colleges, and
recently authored “Reality in Three Acts: What Documentary Filmmakers Can
Learn From Screenwriters”.

Kean Sakata (Broadcast Technician)

Forthcoming

Previous Lecturers

Frances Reid (Visiting Instructor)

Frances Reid has been working as an independent producer, director, and cinematographer of documentaries since the 1970's. Her work is has been nationally broadcast on HBO and PBS. She has been twice nominated for Academy Awards, most recently for “Long Night's Journey Into Day.” (Directed with Debbie Hoffmann) which also won the Grand Jury Award for best Documentary at Sundance. Cinematography credits include “The Times of Harvey Milk,” and Hoffmann's “Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.”

Samuel Green (Lecturer)

Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker based in San Francisco. His most recent film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Green received his Masters Degree in Journalism from University of California at Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His other award-winning documentaries include The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30, and Pie Fight ’69. He has received grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Creative Capital Foundations. Green is currently a Carnegie Fellow at the Journalism School.

Stanley Nelson (Visiting Lecturer)

An award-winning filmmaker, Stanley Nelson has over 20 years' experience as a producer, director, and writer of documentary films and videos. Founder and president of Half Nelson Productions, Inc., an independent production company, his most recent production is The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords,a documentary on the history of African American newspapers which has received the support of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ford Foundation, among others.

Jean-Phillipe Boucicaut (Lecturer)

Jean-Philippe is a world-class editor, best known for his work on Orlando Bagwell's monumental "Citizen King," "Matters Of Race," and "Africans In America," as well as "The Last Conquistador," "American Blackout," and numerous Frontlines, including the cult favorite "Secret Daughter," and the four-part "The Gulf War." He has extensive experience teaching editing, and has served as advisor at the Sundance Edit and Story Lab for the past four years. He is fluent in French, Spanish, and Creole. After twenty years working in New York and Boston (where he and I first met at Henry Hampton's Blackside operation), Jean-Philippe and his family have just moved to the Bay Area, where he is currently editing a 1-hour biography of Congresswoman Patsy Mink, directed by our own alum Kim Bortfeld ("Cheerleader").

Andrew Stern (Senior Lecturer)

Senior Lecturer Emeritus Andrew Stern came to the Graduate School of Journalism in 1969 from New York and Washington where he had been an award-winning producer for ABC and PBS. At Berkeley he inaugurated the television news and documentary programs. While at Berkeley, he produced several documentaries, including "How Much is enough? Decision making in the Nuclear Age from Kennedy to Reagan," which won the Polk Award and was broadcast on PBS in the United States and in England, France and Israel. After retiring in 1993, Stern traveled to and in the former Soviet republics working with newly independent television stations, and the Moscow School of Journalism. In the last few years Stern went back to his first profession, photography, and scanned and printed images of Appalachia that he had shot in the early sixties. These photographs are now touring museums and galleries in the South, and can be seen on his website, andresternphoto.com.