Lynn Novick
director/ writer/ producer
Lynn Novick, director/writer/producer of Crime and Punishment in America, has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music for more than 30 years. Since 1994, she has created nearly 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Ken Burns, including The U.S. and the Holocaust, Ernest Hemingway, The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War, and Prohibition -- these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. Novick herself has received Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. duPont Columbia Awards.
College Behind Bars, Novick’s debut as solo director, premiered at the New York Film Festival and aired on PBS in 2019. Produced by Sarah Botstein, the four-part verité series explores urgently contemporary and timeless questions – What is prison for? Who in America has access to educational opportunity? Six years in the making, the series immerses viewers in the inspiring and transformational journey of a small group of incarcerated men and women serving time for serious crimes, as they try to earn college degrees in one of the most rigorous prison education programs in America. The Education Writers of America honored the series for Best Visual Storytelling: “The commitment and effort the filmmakers took to tell the stories of [men and women] trying to better their lives by obtaining a college degree – and what their stories say about our criminal justice system – is nothing short of incredible….The film does honor to its subjects and the debate over the purpose of education and rehabilitation.”
Novick is also currently collaborating with Burns, Botstein and writer Geoffrey C. Ward on a six-hour series on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale with honors in American Studies, and lives in New York City.
Ken Burns
executive producer
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for almost fifty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; Prohibition; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; The Vietnam War; Country Music; and, most recently, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Future film projects include The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, The American Revolution, Emancipation to Exodus, and LBJ & the Great Society, among others.
Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations. In September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken washonored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In November of 2022, Ken was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.
Sam Pollard
executive producer
Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director. Between 1990 and 2010, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee's films: Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, and Bamboozled. Mr. Pollard and Mr. Lee co-produced a number of documentary productions for the small and big screen: Four Little Girls, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award and When The Levees Broke, a four part documentary that won numerous awards, including a Peabody and three Emmy Awards. Five years later 2010 he co-produced and supervised the edit on the follow up to Levees, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise.
Since 2012 Mr. Pollard has completed as a producer/director Slavery By Another Name, a 90-minute documentary for PBS that was in competition at the Sundance Festival; August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand, a 90-minute documentary in 2015 for American Masters; Two Trains Runnin’, a feature length documentary in 2016 that premiered at the Full Frame Film Festival. Sammy Davis Jr., I’ve Gotta Be Me for American Masters premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2019 Mr. Pollard co-directed the Six Part Series Why We Hate that premiered on The Discovery Channel. In 2020 he was one of the directors on the 2020 HBO Series Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. He also completed in 2020 MLK/FBI that premiered at the 2020 Toronto Film Festival and New York Film Festival and co-directed Lowndes County and The Road to Black Power with Geeta Gandbhir in 2022.
Prisca Pointdujour
producer
Prisca Pointdujour produced the upcoming feature film, At the Barricades, for Public Square Films and an episode for PBS of Iconic America: Our Symbols & Stories with David Rubenstein about the Stone Mountain Confederate monument. Her other work includes Showtime’s Gossip, MSNBC’s Hope and Fury: MLK, the Movement and the Media, and PBS’s Going to War and Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Seasons 4-7). Prisca began her career in news, writing online for WSB-TV in Atlanta and covering the 2016 presidential election for The Boston Herald.
Lucas Frank
producer
Lucas Frank started out in documentary film at Vital Pictures in Boston where he worked on films about Gunnar Myrdal and Melville Herskovits. In 2012, Lucas joined Florentine Films and since has worked as an associate producer on The Vietnam War, and a co-producer on both Hemingway, and The U.S. and the Holocaust. He also contributed to College Behind Bars and was an assistant editor on Kenneth Rosenberg's feature documentary about serious mental illness in America, Bedlam.
Vanessa González-Block
co-producer
Vanessa González-Block was an associate producer on the Florentine Films series, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and before that, Hemingway. Vanessa also worked at CNN and StoryCorps, where she did podcast production and story collection. She now resides in Brooklyn, and is a Montclair, New Jersey native and Northwestern University graduate, where she studied Anthropology and Film.
Malia Kobara
associate producer
Malia Kobara is a seasoned Associate Producer with a background in unscripted television and documentary filmmaking. Most recently, Malia worked on director Ron Howard’s upcoming feature, Jim Henson Idea Man. She’s had the privilege of telling overlooked American stories through Black Patriots: Buffalo Soldiers and Hidden Heroes: The Nisei Soldiers of WWII. Malia first began her career at PBS’s POV before joining A+E Networks where she contributed to 100+ hours of programming including original titles like Kids Behind Bars: Life or Parole and The Clinton Affair.
Ysabel Turner
associate producer
Ysabel Turner began her documentary film career at Florentine Films as an intern on Hemingway, and then as a production associate / researcher on The U.S. and the Holocaust. Her interests in photography and film brought her to New York City, where she graduated from Parsons the New School for Design. A Boston native, Ysabel is passionate about research, history, and the arts.
Banu Newell
production coordinator
Banu Newell proudly hails from Chicago, and is drawn towards community advocacy, historical narrative, and experimental types of storytelling. Banu went to Oberlin College and received his B.A. in Creative Writing. At Oberlin he volunteered for Writers in Residence, where he assisted, then, juvenile students at Lorain County jail craft letters, poems, and essays. In 2019, He interned at Bard Prison Initiative, engaging in prison advocacy through higher education. Banu spends his free moments writing and quilting, collecting dusty soul records, and playing pick-up soccer.
Ines Frankfurt
production assistant
Ines Frankfurt received a B.A. in history at Scripps College in California, where she honed her interest in the memorialization and myth making of historical events. She is dedicated to continual and rigorous retelling, and especially passionate about how this may occur in the visual space. Outside of work, she spends her time cooking, writing, and watching films.
Nicholas Estevez
assistant editor
Nicholas Estevez graduated from the Made in New York post production program in 2019. He began his career in the reality tv space. His first experience in documentaries was at Trilogy Films where he worked on the short “Bree Wayy” and various other projects: Nicholas is a proud bronx native and lover of history.
Jess Halee
assistant editor
Jess Halee is an assistant editor who has worked on documentaries and narrative fiction projects. Jess is originally from Long Island, but grew up in Colorado. They returned to New York and attended Pace University and then Goldsmiths, University of London where they completed an MA in Film Editing. Most recently, Jess worked as an assistant editor at Trilogy Films on the feature film Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net and an upcoming documentary series for HBO.
Heather Ann Thompson
consulting producer and senior advisor
Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft-prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy and also wrote Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Thompson writes regularly as well on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for myriad scholarly and popular publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker. She also works in the film and television industry as an historical advisor as well as a consulting producer. Thompson’s work in the policy arena includes having served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and on its standing Committee for Law and Justice, as well as serving on myriad boards. She currently co-runs the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan and recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on her next book about the long history of the 1985 police bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia.
Reverend Vivian D. Nixon
consulting producer
After 20 years in leadership roles at College & Community Fellowship (CCF), a nonprofit that helps women with criminal convictions graduate from college and pursue their dreams, Vivian joined the Square One Project as a writer in residence. She contributes to narrative change and educational work that elevates racial reckoning in conversations about the United States justice system. She also serves as an advisor for the Bard Prison Initiative, building support to expand, Vivian earned an undergraduate degree after she was released from prison.
Later, she earned an MFA from the Columbia School of the Arts and was ordained an elder minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Vivian is the founding board chair of JustLeadershipUSA. Most recently, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College. Vivian's essays, poems, and commentary can be found in various periodicals and anthologies.
She co-edited What We Know: Solutions from Inside the Justice System. 2018, Vivian began a book project with support from the Art for Justice Fund and the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. The book will chronicle the influence of trauma, race, gender, and criminal stigma on her career path in the non-profit industrial complex. She is continuing her writing at The Square One Project.
Rahsaan Thomas
consulting producer
Rahsaan Thomas is a writer, director, producer, podcaster, and social justice advocate. He served 10 of his 22 years behind bars at San Quentin State Prison, where he learned journalism, podcasting, directing and producing. He is most known for co-hosting and co-producing the Pulitzer Prize finalist and 2020 Dupont Award winning podcast, Ear Hustle, as well as appearances in United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell, and the documentary 26.2 to Life.
Additionally, Rahsaan produced What These Wall Won’t Hold, which made the 2023 San Francisco International Film Festival. The Sundance Documentary Film Institute and The Marshall Project awarded him a grant to direct Friendly Signs while in prison. He was paroled on Feb. 8th, 2023 and is submitting Friendly Signs to film festivals. He is also the executive director of Empowerment Avenue, a pre-entry fiscally sponsored project of Empowerment Works, a 501(3)(c) non-profit. Its mission is to normalize the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues by bridging the gap between them.