2007 Jury

Judging Procedures

All films entered into competition are eligible for the Grand Teton Award (Best of Festival). Category finalists will be notified by July 15. Judging of the finalists will be conducted by a jury of experts immediately prior to the Festival, with winners announced at the Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner on Thursday, October 4. The jury reserves the right to withhold an award in any category or to create new awards for films deserving special recognition.

William Broyles, Jr.

Bill Broyles grew up in Baytown, Texas, attended Rice University and OxfordUniversity as a Marshall Scholar, worked in the civil rights movement, and finished out the sixties as a Marine infantry lieutenant in Vietnam. He was the founding editor of Texas Monthly and editor-in-chief of Newsweek. Broyles has published in the New York Times, Atlantic, Esquire and many other newspapers and magazines. He wrote the book Brothers in Arms, and was the co-creator of the television series China Beach. He wrote the original screenplay for Cast Away and the screenplay for Jarhead. He’s co-authored six other screenplays including Apollo 13, Unfaithful, The Polar Express and Flags of Our Fathers. He’s lectured and taught at UCLA, USC, Rice, NYU, Columbia University, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Smithsonian, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 2002 he was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame. He’s married to Andrea and he's got five great kids.

Ron Devillier

Ron Devillier began his broadcasting career in 1970 at KERA-TV in Dallas, as a reporter on Newsroom. Two years later he was promoted to Program Manager and then Vice President of Programming and Productions. During that period, he served as Executive Producer of several award-winning programs, including a series of election specials that won a Columbia duPont Journalism Award. He is credited with introducing Monty Python's Flying Circus to American audiences. In 1977, Devillier joined PBS as Director of Program Acquisitions, and later was named Vice President of Network Programming, with responsibilities for all network productions, acquisitions and scheduling.

Devillier established DDE with Brian Donegan in 1980. In 1994, DDE entered into a partnership with ABC/Capital Cities, Inc. Under the new alliance, Devillier secured financing and launched ABC/Kane Productions International's award winning twenty-four part series, The Living Edens, on PBS. Over the next ten years, DDE became a major developer, producer and distributor of documentary productions, working with some of the world’s leading filmmakers. During that period, Devillier was the architect and principal negotiator of the development deal with PBS to produce over 60 hours of programming. The highlight of that partnership was the creation of the acclaimed 40-hour Empires series, exploring the history of ancient civilizations and their leaders that continue to influence our world today. With the wind down of DDE this year, Devillier will continue to manage the television interests of a few key clients including the British Comedy troupe, Monty Python.

Carol Fleisher

Carol L. Fleisher has spent the last thirty years making documentaries for television. Her film, Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry, was honored with an Emmy. She is also the proud recipient of the Writers’ Guild of America Award for her film, The White House Tapes. Carol’s six-hour telling of The Revolutionary War, narrated by Charles Kuralt, won the Cable ACE Award for Best Documentary Series. She is one of only two documentary filmmakers to be honored with the prestigious Humanitas Prize for two consecutive years. Her work has also garnered eight Cine Golden Eagles, a Golden Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival, a Gold Award from the Houston Film Festival, two Genesis Awards and two Emmy Awards.

Michael Rosenberg

Born in South Africa, Mike moved to the UK to begin his career as an assistant Film Editor for the BBC in 1969. Three years later he produced his first natural history program as part of the World About Us series. In 1974 he founded Partridge Films which went on to become renowned for producing high quality wildlife documentaries, including Etosha – Place of Dry Water, the Channel 4 series Fragile Earth and Korup – An African Rainforest. Mike has won more Wildscreen Golden Panda Awards than any other filmmaker, as well as several awards at the JHWFF. He also won two Emmy Awards and the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement. In 1996 Mike sold his share in Partridge Films and established Peartree Films, a natural history film production company which currently has several projects in production. He is now based in South Africa and producing a series for SABC.

Dyanna Taylor

A filmmaker for over twenty-five years, Dyanna Taylor is widely known for her cinematography. After producing local documentaries with her first company, Taylor/Franklin Films in San Francisco, she moved to New York for her first network assignment as producer and cinematographer for the ABC documentary covering the American women’s climbing expedition to Annapurna. More recently, her work has taken her to the Southwest to direct and produce The Light Within, on James Turrell’s Roden Crater and Vanished which takes place in the last corners of wilderness in the Southwest’s red rock canyons for the series Wild Life Adventures.

As Director of Photography, Taylor has shot numerous wildlife/environmental films around the world. Credits include: Homeland, 2005 winner of the JHWFF Best of Festival Award, Hemingway: Rivers to the Sea and Winter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald, both American Masters projects. Fitzgerald received a Peabody Award. She was also DP for NOVA’s Evolution, PBS’s Great Performances, Swingin’ With the Duke, High Fidelity, a feature documentary, 500 Nations, the eight-part CBS mini-series with Kevin Costner, and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, which won an Academy Award. Taylor is an Emmy Award winner, and was honored with the MUSE Award for “Outstanding Vision and Achievement in Cinematography” from New York Women in Film and Television.

Past Final Jurors Include

Kohei Ando - HD Director and Filmmaker
Allison Argo - Producer, Writer, and Director
Michael Apted - Motion Picture Film Director
Wolfgang Bayer - Wildlife Cinematographer
Thom Beers - CEO/Executive Producer, Original Productions
Dr. Eugenie Clark - Marine Biologist and Animal Behaviorist, Author, Explorer
Tim Cowling - Executive Producer, CACI Productions Group
David Dugan - Producer; Chairman, Windfall Films
Dr. Sylvia Earle - Oceanographer, Author, Lecturer
Richard Foster - Wildlife Cinematographer
Phylis Geller - Head, Norman Star Media; Partner, New Voyage Communications
Al Giddings - Motion Picture and Wildlife Filmmaker
Dione Gilmour - Head of Natural History Unit, Australian Broadcasting System
Michael Hill - TV Critic, Washington Post Magazine
Mitsuaki Iwago - Filmmaker and Director, NHK Japan
Dennis B. Kane - Former VP and Director, National Geographic Society; former President, ABC/Kane Productions International
Michael Lessac - Motion Picture Film Director; Artistic Director and Founding Producer, Colonnades Theatre Lab
Eugene Linden - Author and Journalist
Tim Liversedge - Wildlife Cinematographer
Terence Malick - Motion Picture Film Director
Tom Mangelsen - Wildlife Photographer and Filmmaker
Mary Jane McKinven - Editor and Communications Executive
Andrew Neal - Former Head of NHU at BBC; Independent Executive Producer
Cathe Neukum - President, Neukum Pictures
Tom Perlmutter - Director General, National Film Board of Canada
Howard Rosenberg - TV Critic, Los Angeles Times
Alan Root - Wildlife Filmmaker and Conservationist
Ileane Rudolph - Writer
Victoria Stone - Director, Cinematographer, Producer
M.A. Partha Sarathy - Filmmaker, Environmentalist