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Judges 2009

Judging Procedures

Every film entered into competition will be screened by screeners who will rate and rank the films they screen. These rankings will be made available to preliminary judging committees. Selected categories will be judged by outside peer committees. Preliminary judging will take place June 29-July 3.

Category finalists will be announced July 9. Judging of the finalists will be conducted by a panel of experts immediately prior to the Festival, with winners announced at the Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner on Thursday, October 1st. The jury reserves the right to withhold an award in any category or to create new awards for films deserving special recognition. All films entered into competition are eligible for the Grand Teton (Best of Festival) Award.

Final Judges

David Curl
A director of the Australasian Natural History Unit, Dr. David Curl trained as a zoologist at Oxford University and worked with the IUCN’s Endangered Species Program before moving to Australia in 1987. He has worked as a cinematographer, director and sound-recordist on a range of factual and feature films and as a writer and stills photographer for a variety of media. Working in High Definition since 2000, his own wildlife productions, including The Call of Kakadu and Silhouettes of the Desert, have won awards at Jackson Hole, Wildscreen, Banff and many other international festivals. Curl has also worked extensively with indigenous Australians, joining the Festival from Uluru (Ayers Rock) in central Australia, and has been a long-time board member of the prestigious Australian Cinematographers Society and Australian Directors Guild.

Patrick Morris
Patrick Morris is a wildlife film producer and writer with the BBC Natural History Unit. He holds a first class degree in zoology and has been making award-winning documentaries for almost twenty years. Patrick began his career as camera assistant to Alastair MacEwen, with whom he joined forces to produce a range of films in Tanzania and Kenya for Partridge Films and Nature Conservation Films including Islands in the African Sky, Wings over the Serengeti and Africa's Paradise of Thorns, under the guidance of Hugo van Lawick. In 1995 Patrick teamed up with Hugh Miles to make People of the Sea, about the fragility of the marine ecosystem in Newfoundland, Canada before joining the BBC Natural History Unit in 1997. Since then, in close collaboration with Mike Gunton and Neil Nightingale, he has produced a range of one-off specials such as Grizzly: Face to Face, Dune and Hokkaido: Garden of the Gods, and series produced major landmarks such as Wild Africa, Europe: a Natural History, and Galapagos. He recently completed the Birds and Primates episodes for LIFE, a ten-part series about extreme behavior due for transmission later this year. Patrick has won the Grand Teton award at Jackson Hole for People of the Sea (1997) and Galapagos (2007), and twice won Best Limited Series for Wild Africa (2003) and Europe(2005). His films have also been awarded three Pandas at Wildscreen, three Best of Festival awards at IWFF, and a Peabody award.

Kathryn Pasternak
Kathryn Pasternak is a producer, writer and director of wildlife films for international television distribution. After 15 years at National Geographic Television, the last nine years of which she was Senior Producer in the Natural History Unit, Pasternak left Nat Geo to pursue projects independently. She’s just completed a six-part series for Animal Planet International called Safari Sisters, producing and post-producing the series in Zimbabwe and South Africa for Wolhuter Media. From 2007-09, Pasternak also was Executive Producer of four one-hour wildlife specials for National Geographic Channels and Aquavision Television Productions in Johannesburg; Executive Producer of Swamp Troop, a one-hour blue chip film, independently produced by Road Media, SA and NGC/NGCI; writer of the Taiwanese production, Tomb Raptor, also for NGCI,  and producer/writer of a music video campaign film Montana Matters. Pasternak is the recipient of two National Emmy Awards for supervision of Wolf Pack  (2004) and Predators at War (2005), and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Science and Nature film in 2006 for her film Hyena Queen, with filmmaker, Kim Wolhuter. Pasternak is based in Washington, DC. 

Kelly Stoetzel
As the Content Producer at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), Kelly spends most of the year working on the speaker program and finds that assembling and working with 50 of the most interesting and relevant people in the world is at least as much fun as it sounds. She is also the Producer and host of TEDActive, the intimate, relaxed and very, very fun event in Palm Springs featuring special workshops, unique experiences, and a live simulcast of the TED program in Long Beach. Before TED, Kelly was the Director of Mixed Greens, a contemporary art gallery with the goal of making contemporary art a little more accessible, which is still near and dear to her. Most of her career before that was spent in the art world in one way or another, but the job that had probably the most influence on who she is and what she does now was camp counselor, and she did that for much longer than she should probably admit.

Marilyn Weiner
Through their Washington, DC production company (Screenscope), Marilyn and Hal Weiner have produced, written and directed over 225 documentaries and four public television series, including Journey To Planet Earth, Women At Work, Faces Of Man and The World Of Cooking.  They have also produced three feature films: Family Business, The Imagemaker, and K2. The Weiners have won Emmy Awards for The Earth Summit Pledge, commissioned by the United Nations to open the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and Streets of Sorrow, an NBC documentary about a support group formed to help people cope with the violent death of a family member. They are recipients of the National Academy of Television Arts and Science’s Silver Circle Award for “outstanding contributions to the television industry.” Marilyn received Women-In-Film’s “Women of Vision Award” for creative excellence. The Weiners have also won over 130 top international awards, including 39 CINE Golden Eagles. Their films have been shot on location in more than 30 countries on five continents, translated into numerous languages and broadcast throughout the world.  Marilyn Weiner was appointed to serve as a DC Commissioner for the Arts and Humanities for six years. She is on the Board of Directors of Filmfest DC, and served on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Promote Washington, DC, the Washington Urban League, Women-In-Film and the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company.  She has been President of the Washington Film Council, Vice-President of Women-In-Film, consultant to the National Commission on Working Women, Chairperson of the Advisory Committee to the Washington Office of Motion Picture Development and Panelist for both the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Preliminary Judges

Judges 2007

Final Judges

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