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Native American Unscripted Panel – Recap
November 20, 2020 @ 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
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The Native American Unscripted Panel was established in 2020, sponsored by Verizon Media, designed to provide new opportunities for Native Americans documentary filmmakers. This panel explored breaking into the unscripted arena that includes reality, lifestyle, sports and journalism. Organizations represented on the panel offered insight into unscripted production, discussed the unscripted landscape from their brand’s point of view and provided the career opportunities available in this discipline.
Guest panelists included creative executives from Verizon Media, Comcast NBCUniversal and ESPN. Each participant discussed their background, past projects and current productions they are currently overseeing.
The purpose of the panel is to empower Native American filmmakers to tell their stories that represent the cultures, experiences, and values of indigenous people. We are collaborating with numerous entities to provide professional creative guidance to participating Native American filmmakers while helping them to strategize for career development and distribution.
Panelists:
Reggie Wade is a reporter and producer for Yahoo Finance covering Education, retail, sportswear, and the entertainment industry. Before joining Yahoo Finance, he worked as a journalist for BET News and Elite Daily. He hails from Brooklyn, NY, where he worked as a public high school teacher before becoming a journalist.
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Tenaja Williams is Bravo and E!’s Director of Unscripted Development, based in the Los Angeles office. Having joined the company two years ago, Tenaja is responsible for working with production partners and agencies to find new unscripted programming and fresh talent for the network. She has developed multiple projects during her tenure, most notably Busy Tonight where she oversaw the first 52 episodes of the late-night talk show, and a soon to be announced premium documentary series hosted by Andy Cohen. Prior to Bravo & E!, Tenaja worked as a Development Executive at WEtv, where she developed the series Dr. Miami and Bossip on WEtv. Tenaja began her career as a producer with FremantleMedia, where she took pitches and helped oversee production on several projects for a variety of cable and broadcast networks, including MTV, Style, CW, and Oxygen. Tenaja is a Los Angeles transplant by way of New York, and a graduate of Howard University with a degree in Television Production.
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Lauren Saffa is a film editor specializing in documentaries. Recent editing highlights include The Cost of Silence, a whistleblowing film about the Deepwater Horizon disaster victims (Sundance Film Festival 2020) and the ESPN 30 for 30 short Blackfeet Boxing about a Native American boxing gym for girls (Big Sky Film Festival 2020). Lauren just wrapped Song Exploder, the hit new Netflix documentary series which breaks down the creative process of famous musicians. Lauren co-produced and edited the feature documentary Another World about the Occupy Wall Street movement with Director Fisher Stevens (Berlin International Film Festival, 2014). Other films with Stevens include Deepest Dive for BBC America and the feature documentary My Decisions, commissioned by Microsoft. Lauren’s narrative short Tinto for Subway Token Films premiered at TriBeCa Film Festival 2014, and her documentary short Father Rick for Paul Haggis’ Artists for Peace and Justice played at Toronto Film Festival 2014.
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Ryan Robinson is Manager of Development for CNN Original Series and Films. Robinson joined CNN in 2016 and works in development and current across both series and films content. During her CNN tenure, she’s worked on a variety of new and returning original series including United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell, This is Life with Lisa Ling, Unmasking a Killer and the 40-episode crime franchise VENGEANCE. Most recently in films, she worked on Three Identical Strangers, Apollo 11 and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. She is based in Los Angeles.
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Moderator:
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