Managing Director: Aurora, aurora@socialjusticefilmfestival.org
Aurora Martin is the founder of popUPjustice, a social
justice startup that aims to serve as a collaborative entity
with various independent creatives and experts across sectors, incubating ideas at the intersection of technology, social justice, the arts, and popular culture. She is also a former director of Columbia Legal Services, with undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Washington, and has served as a National Equal Justice Works Fellow focused on housing and expanded leadership development efforts and access to justice issues. Most recently, Aurora served as an inaugural 2017 Innovation Fellow with the American Bar Association (ABA) to jumpstart a new knowledge sharing platform between scholars and advocates,
www.ithinksam.org.
Director: Anne Paxton, anne@socialjusticefilmfestival.org
Anne Paxton is Director of ProForum, an educational non-profit that sponsors the Social Justice Film Festival. A writer and employment law attorney, Anne has been making films of social conscience since 2005 with a special emphasis on human rights,.Causes include prisoner literacy (Books to Prisoners), cleft palate surgery in Guatemala (Hearts in Motion), the boycott/divestment/sanctions campaign against Israel (Pressure Points), sustainability curriculum (Facing the Future), and Basic Health Care (Northwest Health Law Advocates).
Curator: Jody Cole, jody@socialjusticefilmfestival.org
Jody Cole has worked in media and event production for more than a decade, making films and documentaries, and managing festivals and events. Raised in the Seattle area, he studied at the University of Washington before pursuing his interest in events and communications. Focusing on event operations and logistics, Jody worked for several years with the Seattle International Film Festival and other festivals in the US, and has gone as far afield as Qatar, where he worked at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. “Working with guests and audiences, and being able to connect great films and events to passionate communities is really satisfying, and I’m excited to work to bring us stories that matter and engage.”
Assistant Director: Laura Brady, laura@socialjusticefilmfestival.org
Graduate of the Jackson School of International Studies at the UW, Laura Brady has a long history of social justice activism, most recently as part of the food and climate justice movements. She is a published non-fiction writer and poet and has worked as lead-editor on several publications, among them, Our Food, Our Right: Recipes for Food Justice. Her senior honors thesis about the Venezuelan cooperative movement was a recipient of the UW Library Research Award and was awarded “high honors” from the Jackson School. Outside of the festival, Laura runs a communications consulting business, Swimming Rabbit Arts, and writes and produces music under the name Wren.
Director of Public Relations: Rhenda Meiser, Meiser Communications
Programming Coordinator: Hannah Martin, hannah@socialjusticefilmfestival.org
Hannah’s undergraduate degree in film studies led her to the Social Justice Film Festival in 2016. She is currently studying Counseling Psychology and hopes to integrate her experience with cinematic storytelling and social justice into her work of journeying with others into their own story. She is a writer, photographer, and surfer.
Film Editing: Daniel Swan, danielswan41@gmail.com
Daniel Swan is a writer, actor, comedian and editor, despite rarely being paid for any of them. Daniel completed his first short film last year, and performs as the character of Notme on YouTube and Facebook. After moving to the US in 2015 from London, England, Daniel got involved with the film scene in Seattle as much as possible, including volunteering for the Northwest Film Forum, SIFF and of course working with the Social Justice Film Festival to show important films and facilitate even more important discussions.
