MENTOR Roster
Below is a list of all the industry leaders who have been mentors and advisors for BWF! Canada’s Programs
Jennifer Holness
Film and Television Producer and Writer
Mentor at Black Women Film!
Jennifer Holness is an award-winning writer and producer of scripted and factual TV and films.
Jen recently co-created the TV drama series Shoot The Messenger for CBC about cops and journalists that goes to camera summer 2015. She co-wrote and produced the two-part CBC miniseries, Guns, staring Elisha Cuthbert and Colm Feore that won five Canadian Screen Awards, including a shared best writing award for Jen. She also co-created, wrote and produced the thirteen-part comedy series She’s The Mayor for Vision TV.
Jen is developing/producing the feature documentary, Hispaniola, on the roots of genocide with the Sundance award-winning team Michele Stephens and Joe Brewster (American Promise) and the National Film Board of Canada. She has also produced numerous documentaries, including; Speakers For The Dead (CBC), Badge of Pride (CBC & PBS), Brick By Brick (Omni), Yin Yin Jade Love (TVO), and Dolores: The Art of Art Modeling (Bravo!).
Jen’s feature film producing credits include Home Again with co-writer and director Sudz Sutherland. The film stars Tatyana Ali, Lyriq Bent and CCH Pounder and won the prestigious PAFF–BAFTA Festival Choice Award. The film was also nominated for two Canadian Screen Academy Awards and a Director’s Guild of Canada nod for Best Directing.
Jen also produced and co-wrote the story for the feature Love, Sex and Eating the Bones that won 9 festival awards including the Best First Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for a trifecta of Genies – Best Feature, Best Writing and Best Directing.
She is currently developing several feature projects, including the action comedy, Operation Red Dog, which she also co-wrote. ORD is a part of the CFC-Telefilm Comedy Exchange and is slated for production in 2016.
Jen is also working on several digital projects including adapting her highly rated, award- winning app The Music Biz into an animated series.
Jennifer is a member of several Boards including at the Regent Park Film Festival, Innoversity Creative Summit and the CMPA’s Prime Time Board. She spends her down-time keeping up with her three spectacular girls!
Michèle Pearson Clarke
Photographer, Video and Instillation Artist
Black Women Film! Mentor
Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist who works in photography, film, video and installation. Using archival, performative and process-oriented strategies, her work explores queer and black diasporic longing and loss. Recent exhibitions include Parade of Champions at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto (2015), (art)work(sport)work(sex)work at The Power Plant, Toronto (2015), and Complex Social Change at Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough (2015). Recent film screenings include International Film Festival Rotterdam (2015), Images Festival, Toronto (2015), and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2015). She holds an MSW from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Documentary Media Studies from Ryerson University.
Marva Ollivierre
Gemini Nominated Executive Producer
Mentor Black Women Film!
Marva Ollivierre is a Gemini Nominated Executive Producer; a management accountant; mask maker; a Floyd Chalmers awarded writer; WIFT Mentorship Award recipient; and is a recognized Women On The Move awardee for community service. Marva`s multi-faceted talents and skills, are honed by over twenty-five years of arts-culture industry experience across the disciplinary spectrum. These many years in service to the arts have inspired a lifelong commitment to mentoring and motivated the 1995 creation of the still ongoing lecture/workshop series entitled Making Your Art Your Business which has matured into the media focused Business of Creating Screen Content lecture/workshops. Across the board, growing market intelligence and knowledge sharing are integral pillars in Marva’s business practice as demonstrated when, to ensure the authenticity of the Gemini Best Series Nominee SA/CAN JOZI-H production scripts, with the assistance of South African Scriptwriters’ Association, she created, produced, and funded a free, 6-week script writers’ training workshop for South African screen-writers.
For the last seventeen years, Marva has been firmly entrenched in screen media production, in which she has accumulated over 90 credited broadcast hours. Five of those years were spent as Executive Producer, Head of Business Affairs, and Development Executive at Inner City Films <http://www.innercityfilms.com/>. Several productions on her slate received broad popular acclaim and continue in present day to deliver significant international sales earnings including US Broadcast revenues. They include: Skin Deep, a Gemini Winning Best Lifestyle/Doc, the first documentary/lifestyle television production of its kind on the international scene; and JOZI-H, the Canada/South Africa co-production medical drama series, winner of multiple Gemini Nominations including Best Drama. In 2006, Marva started her own independent production house<http://www.doeeyedmedia.com> with an eclectic slate of projects. The commissioned feature documentary Made In Canada, which she wrote and produced, had both its festival and broadcast premieres in 2013. Currently, the documentary I am not a Bully is in postproduction; Men In Raincoats – the graphic animated feature docu/drama is in pre-prep, and the coming of age narrative feature Bannock & Bratwurst, penned by 2013 Canada Screen Award winning writer Shannon Masters, is in final production prep.
Alison Duke
Creative Director & Producer
Alison Duke is the creative director of Goldelox Productions, a Toronto-based production house which produces multi-platform social justice content for community-based organizations, public and private broadcasters. In recent years she has become the most prolific black female documentary filmmaker in Canada.
She has directed and collaborated with other filmmakers on numerous critically renowned films such as: Raisin Kane: a rapumentary (2001), Sisters in Cinema (2003) The Woman I Have Become (2007) Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home (2007) and My Joan of Arc (2011), Positive Women: exposing injustice (2012) and Consent (2015) to name a few.
Her films tend to focus on culture, health and wellbeing and social justice activism and sometimes intersect that with history and/or art. She is the Canadian producer of Thomas Allen Harris’ NAACP award-wining feature documentary Through a Lens Darkly: black photography and the emergence of a people (2014) and the Executive producer of The Akua Benjamin Legacy Project (2016) a series of shorts about the contributions of anti-black racism activists in Canada such as Dudley Laws, Charles Roach, Marlene Green, Rosie Douglas and Gwen and Lenny Johnson (directed by five Toronto-based female directors Ngardy Conteh George, Laurie Townshend, Ella Cooper, Sonia Godding Togobo and Sarah Michelle Brown, respectively). Since learning about the increasing infection rates among African, Black and Caribbean women living in Canada, Alison has also focused on HIV. Her films about HIV and AIDS have screened in hundreds of venues for thousands of people around the world including, the UNAIDS in Gevena, Broadway Cares in NYC and has been selected to represent Canada at the International AIDs Conference.
Currently Alison has 3 short films in various stages of productions in collaboration with community based organizations including, The Empty Desk commissioned by the Saskatchewan Teacher’s federation and Colour Coded commissioned by the Colour of Poverty as well as a short drama entitled Disclosure.
Alison programs a Diaspora shorts program called Black Boxes for the Inside Out Toronto LGBT film festival, now in its 5th year. She lives with her partner, daughter and Yorky named Quincy Jones.
Sonia Godding Togobo
TV Editor & Doc Filmmakers
Sonia Godding Togobo is a veteran TV editor. To keep her sanity, she makes docs about the diverse Black Canadian experience. You can check her out on Twitter at @sgoddis
Lea Marin
Producer and Mentor at Black Women Film!
Lea Marin is an award-winning Toronto-based producer with more than 20 years of experience in the film and television industry.
A graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Producer’s Lab, Lea joined the National Film Board of Canada as a producer in 2006. Her film credits include My Prairie Home which in 2014, premiered at the Sundance film festival, and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award, and The Portrait, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Hubert Davis, which premiered on the BBC and won Golden Sheaf awards for Best Director and Best Documentary (Arts & Culture) in 2012.
Other credits include the interactive documentary, The Next Day, which premiered at IDFA in 2011, and Astra Taylor’s critically acclaimed theatrical documentary, Examined Life, which launched at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008.
Prior to returning to the National Film Board of Canada, Lea Marin produced the CFC short dramatic film, Escape, and worked as a line producer on the Discovery Channel series Mega Builders.
Nadine Valcin
Producer, Writer and Director
Mentor at Black Women Film!
Nadine Valcin is an award-‐winning bilingual producer, writer and director. Her factual and documentary work has been shown in Canada on CBC, CBC News Network, TVO, W, Artv, Réseau de l’information (RDI), Société Radio-‐Canada (SRC), TFO, as well TV One and the History Network in the United States.
She has directed four documentary projects for the National Film Board of Canada, including the critically-‐acclaimed Black, Bold and Beautiful (1999) and Une école sans frontières (A School without Borders, 2008). Her current focus is on dramatic projects. She has written and directed three short films, and is developing two feature films, Trajectoires (in French) and My Own Angel (in English) as well as the dramatic television series Deep Shadows.
Nadine has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including the prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a Drama Prize from the National Screen Institute for the short film In Between. She has also received two International Promax awards for her creative work in advertising and branding.
Nadine Valcin holds a professional degree in architecture from McGill University. She is an alumnus of Doc Lab, the Women in the Director’s Chair, the National Screen Institute and l’Institut national de l’image et du son. She is an artist-‐in-‐residence at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University for the 2015-‐16 academic year.
Ngardy Conteh George
Director, Writer and Editor
Mentor at Black Women Film!
“I always want to tell stories of the African Diaspora to explore and bring to light a spectrum of issues, many which I’ve had to face myself.” Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and moved to Canada as a child, Ngardy Conteh George was a scholarship track and field athlete and a graduate of the University of New Orleans Film and Video program. She wrote and directed ‘Soldiers for the Streets’, a short documentary exploring empowerment of at-risk youth in Toronto produced by the NFB (aired on CBC Newsworld, 2004).
Ngardy directed four episodes of ‘Literature Alive’, a television documentary series featuring Caribbean-Canadian authors (aired on Bravo! 2005). With the Concerned Citizens and Friends of Sierra Leone, Ngardy directed and edited ‘The Circle of Slavery’, a documentary commemorating the Bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery and exploring the historical linkages between Sierra Leone and Canada.
She is also an accomplished video editor working on television shows for Bravo! (‘Arts & Minds’), Space (‘InnerSPACE’), and CTV (‘The Marilyn Denis Show’). Other editing projects include: ‘I Want To Be A Desi 2’ (documentary short, Dir. Allan Tong), ‘Something Beautiful’ (1/2 hour documentary on development in Kenya), and ‘Cypher’ (1/2 hour music series for AUX). As co-director, producer and editor, she completed her first feature-length documentary ‘The Flying Stars’ which premiered at the Montreal International Documentary Festival – RIDMand won Best Documentary at the BronzeLens Film Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. The film received international broadcast including Radio-Canada, Al Jazeera, DR in Denmark, NHK in Japan.
Audrey Dwyer
Writer, Actor, Director and Dramaturge
Mentor Black Women Film!
Audrey Dwyer has been working in theatre and film for nearly twenty years as an actor, writer, director and dramaturge.
She has worked throughout Canada and the United States. She starred in the comedy Patty’s Cake, which won a Dora Award for Outstanding Children's Production. Recent theatre work includes The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Mirvish Productions’ Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, RMTC’s Good People, thirsty at Canada's National Theatre in Ottawa, Mirvish/Studio 180's Clybourne Park and The Overwhelming, Canadian Stage's Dream in High Park - The Tempest, Obsidian Theatre's Black Medea, Mirvish/RMTC's Medea and Second City’s Touring Company. Television and film credits include Da Kink in My Hair, The Ron James Show, The State Within, Man of the Year with Robin Williams and Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies.
She directed her first opera in 2015 with Unexpectedly Opera. She workshopped Lisa Codrington’s The Aftermath at Nightwood Theatre’s New Groundswell Festival and then brought the show to the Femfest Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2011, she directed her first play, which was Darrah Teitel’s The Apology. It premiered at the Next Stage Festival and she was nominated for Outstanding Direction at the Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Independent Division).
Her first short film, The Cupcake, won Best Story at Ottawa's Digi60 Festival. Her first full-length play called Calpurnia - a satirical comedy on race, class and politics set in Toronto – will be read at The Black Theatre Workshop in Montreal in May 2016. She was a member of the Obsidian Theatre Writer’s Unit (2012), then their Development Unit (2013) and then became their Playwright in Residence (2014). The play was well received at Nightwood Theatre’s New Groundswell Festival in 2014.
In 2008, she was the Associate Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre. She is the 2015 Winner of the Cayle Chernin Awards for Theatre. She is the Artistic Director of Cow Over Moon Theatre. She graduated from The National Theatre School in 2001.
Glace Lawrence is a Social and Digital Content Producer who has merged her award winning TV production experience with her passion and empathy for creating great interactive content. From social media campaigns, to blogs, to websites, Glace is a natural storyteller with over 10 years of digital expertise in lifestyle, drama, and documentary production.
Her social and digital campaigns include: Mo’ LoveTV, Take The Magnacartafilm Challenge for the City of Toronto Museums & Heritage Services and Toronto's Film, TV and Digital Media Office; social and digital media content for Square Circle’s launch event for Clarence Ford Entertainment; and the crowdfunding campaign, social & digital content strategy and flashmob video for the smash hit PANAMANIA commissioned Obeah Opera.
Glace’s independent documentary and drama projects the award winning Coming To Voice, Hotel Babylon: Heroes & Hustlers and D-E-S-I-R-E have been broadcast on Vision TV, Bravo! TV and W networks. Mo’ Love, her half-hour dramedy TV pilot script was 1 of 10 projects selected from 100 applicants to participate in the 2016 CaribbeanTales Incubator Program. She is a past Executive Director of the Ontario Black History Society and was a founding member of Toronto’s Black Film & Video Network and CAN:BAIA. As a Line Producer, her TV projects include the multiple award-winning doc-lifestyle series The Stagers for HGTV US & HGTV Canada; Consumed for HGTV Canada; and live to tape specials for The Bachelor Canada S1 for Rogers.
ADDITIONAL MENTORS