Kia Simon, Director
Kia’s films have garnered critical acclaim and won numerous festival awards.  Her work most often walks a fine line between quirky and genuinely affecting, balancing the unusual with the universal — Looking for Sly, a documentary about an Armenian Rambo impersonator and his quest to meet Sylvester Stallone, is a bittersweet look at celebrity and the lure of Western culture (Best Short Documentary at South by SouthWest); Disarmed is an oddly touching tale of the perfect first date between a shy engineer and a wanna-be amputee.  Disarmed is currently on the festival circuit.  Kia’s music videos have frequently played on MTV, and those projects have enabled her to explore the art of film — telling a story visually, creating mood, and finding organic pacing in an edit.

Kia’s awards include a Pacific Pioneer Fund Grant for Emerging Filmmakers; Best Documentary at Los Angeles International Short Film Festival; Winner of the Tortured Artist Film Festival; First Place Documentary at New Arts Program; Best Art Film, Best Music Video and Best Short Narrative from Berkeley Film Festival; Best Music Video at Zoie Festival; By Women Prize from Luna Festival, and others.

Raised in Berkeley, California by two radical poets, she spent her childhood in a series of poetry readings, and the poetic vision continues to infuse her work.  She’s received retrospectives of her work from Varnish Art Gallery and KTEH, a Public Television station, and was a participant in AFI’s highly competitive Women Director’s Workshop and is currently developing ALICE in Film Independent’s Directors Lab.

Learn more about Kia at www.sneakylittlesister.com.

Elizabeth Bernstein, Writer
Elizabeth Bernstein is a screenwriter and fiction writer. She also founded and edits a literary magazine called The Big Ugly Review (www.biguglyreview.com), which showcases emerging and established writers, photographers and musicians.

She is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto (www.sfgrotto.org), and is currently working on a collection of short stories. Her story “Things I Want Back From You” appeared in the Los Angeles Times Sundaymagazine. “Alice,” the story on which her original screenplay is based, won first prize in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Fiction Contest in 2004; “Laundry Day” was published in a literary magazine in the US and reprinted in journals in the UK and Mexico. It also won a prize in the West Coast Live (radio) fiction contest, and was selected to be part of a collaborative art exhibit with the San Francisco Printmakers Guild. Other stories have been published in literary journals as well.

Also an award-winning playwright, six of her one-act plays have been produced in the Bay Area at venues including the Exit Theater, the PlayGround, Impact Theater and The Fringe of Marin.

Learn more about Elizabeth at www.elizabethbernstein.com.

Lucienne Papon, Producer
Lucienne Papon currently works as an executive for Director Martin Campbell at Sony Pictures. While there, she has worked on Beyond Borders starring Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen and The Legend of Zorro starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and is currently in production on Casino Royale, the 21st film in the James Bond franchise.

In June 2005, Lucienne graduated with an MFA from UCLA’s Producers Program. There, she was a semi-finalist in the 2004 and 2005 Producers Program Marketplace Competition and produced a half hour news documentary for the acclaimed television show UCLA: Next called “LA Dreams.” In 2005, she won the Gil Cates Fellowship, and she was awarded the first annual Debra Hill Fellowship by the Producers Guild of America given to an up and coming female producer, which included a $15,000 grant to aid in the development of her projects.