Meet the
Artists
Journey Lab

Uzbekistan-born and Russia-raised, Alia Azamat Ashkenazi has received two United Nations Awards for her documentary work and theater direction. She now writes and directs films in the United States and Europe and directs commercials for clients including Netflix and General Motors.

As reported by Variety, she is preparing to direct Children of Nowhere, a historical drama set on Réunion Island with Laëtitia Eïdo attached to lead. Her other narrative work includes the featurette Esther's Choice starring François Arnaud, the sold spec The Russian Adoption, and the thriller Prima, co-written with Allie Avital and starring Nicola Peltz-Beckham, Faye Dunaway, and Mira Sorvino, now in post-production.

Schuyler Brown is a writer, artist, facilitator, and founder of The Art of Emergence, working at the intersection of imagination, consciousness, leadership, and cultural transformation. A former brand strategist and futurist, she now focuses on intuitive practice, creative collaboration, and new ways of imagining the future. Her recent work with Ari Kuschnir explores AI-assisted visual storytelling, including films and creative experiments that combine poetry, human imagination, and emerging technology.

Michael Hartzmark, Ph.D., is a Chicago-based economist and expert witness. As President of Hartzmark Economics Litigation LLC, he has spent decades applying economics and finance to the country’s largest securities-fraud and antitrust cases. He was the testifying expert in the 2023 “Tweet” case against Elon Musk and Tesla; he worked one of the largest antitrust matters in U.S. history on behalf of Visa, MasterCard, and nearly every major bank in the world; and he served investors defrauded in the residential mortgage-backed securities market in litigation against every major financial institution in the world, with trillions of dollars at stake. He has been retained by the Attorneys General of New Jersey and New York, and his expert reports have been cited with approval by courts across the United States. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from the University of Michigan, and has taught at both.

His career has also included stops as CEO and Chairman of an automotive wheel company, CFO of a biotech company, government positions at the U.S. Treasury Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and a range of roles across financial services.

He has been a writer for more than fifty years — reports, business plans, scholarly and peer-reviewed articles, and three law review pieces. For forty-three years he was married to the novelist Gini Hartzmark, author of six murder mysteries. Throughout her career he was her problem-solver, her first reader, and her editor, the one who knew where every body was buried before the publisher did. In all those years he never let himself write a fictional word of his own.

Michael brings a lifetime spent inside other people’s stories, and one particular grief, to the subjects he knows from the inside. With LIFECYCLE, which he co-created with Alia Azamat Ashkenazi, he embarks on his first work of narrative fiction.

Originally from Bosnia, Azra Isakovic lived as a refugee in Germany before immigrating to the United States. She created Project Golden to celebrate immigrant voices in Los Angeles, using VR storytelling for advocacy.

She produced #Murder (2020); the Humanitas Prize–winning short Sevap/Mitzvah (2023), about a Muslim woman who risks her life to save Jewish friends in Nazi-occupied Bosnia; and Ausgang, Sofie (2024). Having seen the effects of war and immigration on family and identity, she explores those themes throughout her work.

Geremy Jasper is a writer, director, composer and songwriter whose feature debut, Patti Cake$, premiered at Sundance and went on to Cannes, SXSW and New Directors/New Films at MoMA. The film earned Jasper nominations from the DGA and Film Independent, and he was named one of Variety’s Directors to Watch. His most recent feature is the Searchlight Pictures rock opera O’Dessa, which he wrote and directed, continuing his distinctive integration of filmmaking, music and original songwriting.

Ari Kuschnir is a filmmaker, visual artist and Founder/Managing Partner of m ss ng p eces, the award-winning production and entertainment company he founded in 2005. His career has centered on expanding the possibilities of storytelling through film, immersive experiences and emerging technology. More recently, Kuschnir has become deeply engaged in AI filmmaking, creating original AI experiments and viral short films while exploring how emerging tools can serve imagination, craft and storytelling rather than replace them. His company has also produced dedicated AI work such as The HolidAI, which used AI tools to transform people’s holiday stories into films.

Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer and the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart (HarperCollins, 2024), a New York Times Editors' Pick and Notable Book of the Year named a best memoir of the year by Elle, NPR, and Esquire. She has written for Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor, and her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater.

She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Sewanee, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds a BA from Brown and an MFA from NYU, teaches in the MFA of the Americas program at Stetson University, and lives in Los Angeles.

Georgia Lee won the Tribeca Film Festival with her debut feature Red Doors (2005). In 2000, Martin Scorsese selected her as his on-set apprentice on Gangs of New York. In television, she wrote and produced The Expanse (Amazon) and The 100 (CW), sold pilots to CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, and Netflix, and created the Netflix drama Partner Track.

Before filmmaking she worked at McKinsey & Company, and she graduated cum laude in Biochemistry from Harvard. She was born in Philadelphia to Taiwanese immigrant parents.

Berry Liberman is a podcaster and writer whose work explores leadership, storytelling, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. Her family office, Small Giants, holds a 100% impact portfolio and is a global pioneer in impact investing across media, regenerative agriculture, venture capital, biodiversity, and energy systems.

She is Creative Director of Small Giants Academy, a not-for-profit accelerator, education, and media initiative focused on leadership for a hopeful future. She was Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Dumbo Feather magazine, now The Wisdom & Action Podcast. A mother of three, she sees her work as being in service to generations to come.

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary producer and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is a tenured professor of history at Emory University, following twelve years at UNC–Chapel Hill and four at Harvard, and the award-winning author of two books and more than fifty essays for outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Oxford American.

Her first documentary, Real Indian, premiered at Sundance in 1997. Her credits include the Peabody-winning A Chef's Life (PBS), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (HBO), and RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World. She is developing a media piece for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the episodic series Lumbeeland.

Tia Matza is an actor, writer, and director based in Los Angeles, with a career spanning more than three decades across television, film, and theater and a foundation in acting, dance, and filmmaking.

She has written, directed, and acted in short films, including pieces within multidisciplinary performance works at The LA Women's Theatre Festival, TEDx, Boobie Trap, and Theatricum Botanicum. Her feature and short screenplays have been recognized by film festivals and have appeared on the Coverfly Red List.

FLMS alumni from past Online Series cohorts — still part of the community.

Eva Michon is an award-winning Polish-Canadian filmmaker and artist whose work spans narrative film, music videos, fashion films and commercials. After studying film in Toronto, she worked as a production designer and compositor and founded the arts and culture magazine Bad Day. Her short film Small Fry premiered in TIFF’s Short Cuts program, and her debut feature project Mizeria was selected for TorinoFilmLab’s FeatureLab. Her work is known for strong visual authorship, cinematic storytelling and a distinctive sense of humor.

Gabrielle Fulton Ponder is a playwright, filmmaker, and television writer based between Atlanta and Los Angeles. Her directorial debut short Ir/Reconcilable, starring Jasmine Guy, Crystal Fox, and Dick Gregory, received an 18-month broadcast deal with HBO. She was a staff writer on Sacrifice and OWN's Ambitions, and her play Uprising received rolling world premieres at Horizon Theatre and MetroStage.

She holds a BA from Columbia and an MFA in Writing for the Screen+Stage from Northwestern, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild and WGA East. She enjoys road trips, mountain views, gardenias, and Congolese dance.

Joe Rendón is a Mexican writer, director, producer and showrunner working across film, television and theater. He has directed and written projects for HBO Latino, Televisa/VIX, Univision, Comedy Central, Amazon and HBO Max. His feature directing debut, Como Novio de Pueblo, was released by Warner Bros.; he later directed HBO Max’s Búnker, which received an International Emmy nomination for Best Comedy. In 2025 he premiered 90 Minutos, which he created, co-wrote, showran and directed for Peacock in the U.S. and Universal+ in Mexico and Latin America.

Robert Salerno is an award-winning producer and director with more than two decades of work in independent and studio film. His producing credits include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, Tom Ford’s A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, and the hit horror films Smile and Smile 2. In 2024 he made his feature directorial debut with Here After, starring Connie Britton.

Poppy Walker is a director and producer whose work explores the wonders and complexities of the human condition. Her award-winning documentary short Dust Devil (2019) has screened at festivals including Hot Docs, Big Sky, Flickerfest, Santa Barbara International and Ashland Independent, where it won the Jury Award for Best Short Documentary. Poppy co-founded H.W. Collective with director-producer Sophie Hexter, and together they created the short films Hitch (2014), The Battle (2015), The Ghost in the Machine (2016), Land to Vale (2017) and Drummer Girl (2018), screened at Aesthetica, Oberhausen, Lunafest and Big Sky and broadcast on ABC Australia and Aeon. Her commissioned work includes human rights documentary shorts for Oxfam, World Vision and UN Women. She holds a BA in Journalism from Monash University and a Graduate Diploma in Documentary from the Victorian College of the Arts.