FAUBOURG TREME: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Crew Bios

Executive Producers

Wynton Marsalis is a world-renowned jazz recording artist and Pulitzer prize-winning composer. A New Orleans native and jazz history expert, he is currently Artistic Director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center in New York.

Stanley Nelson, an award-winning filmmaker, has over 20 years' experience as a producer, director, and writer of documentary films and videos. Nelson's films include the Emmy award winning The Murder of Emmett Till, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, Two Dollars and a Dream: The Story of Madame C.J. Walker, (winner of the CINE Golden Eagle, and cited as the Best Production of the Decade by the Black Filmmaker Foundation) and many others. He is also a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Director/Editor

Dawn Logsdon made her feature-length directing debut with Faubourg Tremé. A nationally-acclaimed editor in the Bay Area for many years, Dawn returned to her hometown in 1999, determined to weld together her experience in documentary filmmaking with a quest for understanding New Orleans, its people, and culture. Dawn has directed and produced several short documentaries including Tomboy. She edited the Sundance Award-winning documentary Paragraph 175, directed by two-time Academy Award winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. She co-edited the 2004 Academy Award-nominated documentary film, The Weather Underground, directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel; and edited the Emmy and Peabody award-winning program The Castro: Hidden Neighborhoods of San Francisco, which interweaves the many strands of that community's history, culture and politics. Other editing credits include Have You Heard from Johannesburg (2010), Lindy Boggs: Steel and Velevet (2005) which she also co-directed, Hope Along the Wind: Harry Hay (2001), and Vanishing Line (1998). She is currently editing Leah Mahan's Turkey Creek about an environmentally threatened historic black community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Dawn is a Soros Open Society Institute Media Fellow and has been awarded fellowships from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, and was a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley.

Co-Director/Writer

Lolis Eric Elie is a New Orleans based writer and filmmaker. Most recently, he joined the staff of the HBO series Treme, premiering April, 2010. His essay, "America's Greatest Hits," is included in Best African American Essays: 2009. From 1995 to 2009, he wrote a thrice-weekly column for the New Orleans' Times-Picayune. A recognized expert on New Orleans food and culture, he is the author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country and co-producer and writer of the Smokestack Lightning: A Day in the Life of Barbecue, the documentary based on that book. He is editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing. A contributing writer to The Oxford American, his work has appeared in Gourmet, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bon Appetit, downbeat and the San Francisco Chronicle among other publications. His work is included in the anthologies Best Food Writing: 2008, Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience, and That's What I Like (About the South: and Other New Southern Stories for the Nineties). A former commentator for CBS News Sunday Morning, he has also appeared often on National Public Radio programs. He has an MA from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and an MFA from the University of Virginia.

Producer

Lucie Faulknor has over 20 years experience in arts administration. She has also worked with Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman and feature/experimental film director Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Lucie produced Ireland's first Women in Film and Video Film Festival in Dublin and developed and produced Artists Up-Close a series of lectures in San Francisco featuring Sydney Pollack, Laurie Anderson, Bobby McFerrin, Wayne Shorter and many others. She was also the producer of several one-woman shows by Irish actor/writer Kate Perry in San Francisco and throughout Ireland. She has managed fundraising campaigns for a number of theater companies, including Marin Theater Company's season featuring the world premiere of Tennessee Williams' Spring Storm and 5th Province Theatre Company. Lucie has been the publicity director for the Dublin (Ireland) Fringe Theatre Festival, San Francisco's Working Women Theater Festival, the Irish Arts Foundation, national recording artists 4 Non Blondes and various other independent musicians, artists, actors and filmmakers.

Composer

Derrick Hodge is currently the bass player and a composer with Terrence Blanchard's jazz band. He composed the score for the documentary Who the F@#k is Jackson Pollack and tracks for Spike Lee's Inside Man. He attended Berkelee College of Music and received a bachelor's degree in Music (emphasis on jazz and composition) from Temple University. Hodge has performed and/or recorded with Donald Byrd, Kanye West, Will Smith, Jill Scott, Bootsy Barnes, Q-Tip, Terell Stafford, Mos Def and many others.

Directors of Photography

Keith Smith is a Los Angeles-based cinematographer who brings to the project over twenty years of documentary and narrative experience-and a special eye for his hometown, New Orleans. Keith has shot numerous documentaries, such as the nationally acclaimed ten-part educational series Black Americans of Achievement, as well as a number of narrative feature films, including Luck of the Draw and Any Given Sunday. His work has been shown theatrically and on numerous television broadcast and cable stations, such as PBS, HBO, Black Entertainment Television and Lifetime Television. He has also won awards at international film festivals.

Diego Velasco was born in the United States and raised in Venezuela. He currently resides in New Orleans and Los Angeles. He has worked as the director of photography for various music videos, commercials and independent films including Tony Bravo and Mutiny. He has also worked on such feature films as The Insider, Double Jeopardy, Crazy in Alabama, My Dog Skip and Dracula 2000. His films have won more than 19 awards worldwide including being pre-selected for Oscar consideration. Velasco directed the first ever Latin American sitcom, Planeta de 6, for Venezuelan television. He is currently filming with Fox broadcasting in Los Angeles.

Post-Production Sound

Larry Blake, a New Orleans native, has supervised and mixed all of Steven Soderbergh's films, including Traffic, Ocean's Eleven, Full Frontal, Solaris and Ocean's Twelve, which were mixed at his Swelltone Labs facility in New Orleans. Swelltone's other credits include Before Sunset, Waking Life, Undertow and Keane. Larry and Swelltone also did the edited and mixed the sound of two other recent New Orleans-based documentaries, Shalom Ya'll and Desire. He is looking forward to supervising Faubourg Tremé at Swelltone.

Research Director

Caryn Cossé Bell is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is an internationally recognized authority on Creole New Orleans and her award-winning book, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her latest work for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for the African American Migration Experience chronicles Haitian immigration to Louisiana and will appear in a National Geographic publication. She has worked on documentaries for PBS, A&E, and Xavier University on A House Divided, a study of the New Orleans Civil Rights movement narrated by James Earl Jones. She is also a John E. Sawyer Fellow at Harvard University's Longfellow Institute.