UC Berkeley Journalism - Program - Documentary Faculty

Documentary Program Faculty and Lecturers

Faculty

Jon Else (Professor)
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.
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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.

Lecturers

Jean-Phillipe Boucicaut (Not Selected)
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").

Karen Everett (Lecturer)
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”.

Sam 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.
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Stanley Nelson (Lecturer)
forthcoming

Kean Sakata (Lecturer)
forthcoming

Steve Talbot (Lecturer)
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. Talbot was senior producer for two Frontline/World stories that won Emmys in 2007: “Saddam’s Road to Hell,” a broadcast story, and “Libya: Out of the Shadow,” an online video. Some of Talbot’s Frontline documentaries include: “Justice for Sale” with Bill Moyers, “Spying on Saddam,” “Why America Hates the Press,” “The Long March of Newt Gingrich,” “Rush Limbaugh’s America,” “The Heartbeat of America” about the travails of General Motors, and “The Best Campaign Money Can Buy.” In 2004, he was the correspondent for the Frontline program, “Diet Wars.” In 2005 he went to Lebanon and Syria for Frontline/World to produce “The Earthquake,” a report on the political turmoil there. Talbot began his public television career in 1980 as a staff reporter and producer at KQED in San Francisco where he did local investigative reporting and a series of PBS biographies of writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Beryl Markham, Maxine Hong Kingston, Carlos Fuentes and Ken Kesey. He also produced numerous feature reports for “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.”

Sharon Tiller (Lecturer)
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. In 2001, Tiller and executive producer David Fanning jointly developed an international news magazine series FRONTLINE/World that is housed at the journalism school and features the work of a new generation of video journalists. As Series Executive Director, she has helped develop seventy-five broadcast stories and seventy Web-exclusive videos. Before joining FRONTLINE, Tiller was the executive director for the San Francisco-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), where in 1989 she launched an independent documentary unit. As executive producer, she developed seven investigative documentaries for FRONTLINE: “Global Dumping Ground with Bill Moyers,” “The Great American Bailout,” “Best Campaign Money Can Buy,” “Your Loan Is Denied,” “The Politics of Power,” “Public Lands, Private Profits,” and “School Colors.” Tiller has received three Dupont-Columbia University Broadcast Journalism Awards, a George Polk Award for National Television Reporting, a World Affairs Council Award of Excellence for International Reporting, two National Education Writers’ First Prizes for Documentary Television, three National Emmys and the George Foster Peabody Award for "Drug Wars," as well as the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award for the 2004 season of FRONTLINE/World.

More than fifty Journalism School graduates have worked as Frontline/WORLD staff or helped produce stories since 2002.

Previous Instructors

Deborah Hoffmann (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.

Stanley Nelson (Not Selected)

Frances Reid (Lecturer)
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.”