STAFF
Lillian Jiménez
INTERIM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
For over thirty-years, Lillian Jiménez has worked as a media arts center
manager and administrator, producer, advocate, exhibitor, funder and educator.
She has produced What Could You Do With A Nickel?, The PACT Project video documentary for the Rockefeller Foundation, SisterSong, a short documentary on Women of Color and the U.S. reproductive health movement, and Puerto Rico. Recently, she produced two short documentaries – "Steppin' It Up" about the life and work of activist Richie Perez, a former Young Lord and a short piece on community activist Manny Diaz. She is the current Executive Director of the Latino Educational Media Center and is completing "Antonia Pantoja: !Presente!" a documentary on the life and work of visionary leader, Dr. Antonia Pantoja. In addition, she is developing a collection of oral histories of Puerto Rican leaders from the 1950's to the present.
As a media literacy pioneer linking media images with issues of power, she has worked for over ten years with a panoply of health organizations, community based organizations, media and access centers. Through the Seeing Through AIDS media training project, she has trained nearly 3,000 health care and community based health care workers throughout the city of New York, and has offered media literacy workshops on Latino stereotypes, self representation, color/race and the construction of whiteness.
She served on the faculty of the Media Studies Dept. of the New School for Social Research in New York City where she designed and taught a critical studies graduate course, Demystifying Latino Images. She also taught an Intro to Media Studies course at Fordham University, Lincoln Center campus.
She is one of the founders and former chair of the Steering Committee of the National Association of Independent Latino Producers, a membership organization, and serves on the board of the Funding Exchange, a national network of local funders.
Karly Beaumont
Program Coordinator
Karly Beaumont, a Dominican writer/director and freelance photographer born and raised in Washington Heights, NYC. She started her career working in theater on and off stage until she found a creative position as a Lighting Director and Stage Manager. Since then she has worked with two of the most innovative theater production companies in New York City: Project 400 Theater Group and Two Noses Productions. In 2003 she made her directorial debut with a stage production of Miguel Pinero's SIDESHOW, about a night in the life of street kids. SIDESHOW at the 1st Annual East Village HOWL! Festival, and showcased at the renowned Nuyoricans Poets Cafe.
Along with her emerging work at Chica Luna, she is currently developing her latest feature script THE DIFFICULT KIND, a story of three young women surviving their "quarter life crisis." She is also making the festival circuit with her first short film that deals with the worldwide issue of child sexual abuse titled I'M NOT HERE. In Spring on 2008 she will produce and direct her next short film, BEN & ELI, a story of revenge and deceit.
Contact Karly via email at: karlybeaumont@chicaluna.com
Courtney C. Young
Director of Development
Originally
from Lafayette, Louisiana, Courtney is now a certified New Yorker. She
received her Bachelor’s Degree in English and Management in 2002 from
Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia . While an undergraduate student,
she completed the Tuck Business Bridge Program in the summer of 2000
at Dartmouth College and in the summer of 2001 was a research fellow
at UCLA’s Summer Humanities Institute finishing work on her senior honors
thesis. In 2004, she graduated from New York University receiving her
Master’s Degree from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Currently,
she is in pre-production on her first feature length documentary entitled
Black Folks Don’t Read: An Exploration of Reading, Writing, and
Literacy in African-American Culture.
Contact Courtney via email at: courtney@chicaluna.com
Tokumbo Bodunde
Administrative Assistant
Tokumbo Bodunde, a native Chicagoan, is a filmmaker, writer and educator who lives in the Bronx. Before using video to confront topics ranging from black women in popular culture to gentrification, she worked as a newspaper reporter. She has contributed to the People’s Weekly World, The Chicago Reporter, and FemmeHorizon.com. She has worked with or taught for the Brooklyn College Community Partnership, Girls CAN, UNITE-HERE and the National Urban Research Group.
Currently she serves as adjunct faculty in the Women's Studies Department at William Paterson University, teaching a Racism and Sexism course. She produced and directed Black Girls Face: R. Kelly for completion of her M.A. in Media Studies from The New School. The documentary was featured recently at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora film festival in Brooklyn. She is completing a teaching artist internship with the Community Word Project in hopes of developing a media literacy pedagogy that has video production, pop culture analysis, and black feminism at its core. She blogs at tokspace.blogspot.com.
Contact Tokumbo via email at: tokumbo@chicaluna.com