Watson Events

Making a Career out of Documentary Film – A Conversation with Three Brown Alumni

Making a Career out of Documentary Film – A Conversation with Three Brown Alumni

As part of the Watson Institute’s Global Conversation on media production, please join three Brown alumni who work with documentary film in the Joukowsky Forum on May 3 at noon. Bremen Donovan ’08, Lindsay Richardson ’04 and Koji Masutani ’05 will discuss their experiences in the documentary film world and the production challenges of creating successful internationally-oriented media. They each will screen parts of their work and engage in Q&A with the Brown community.

Read more about the Global Conversation here. 

Koji Masutani was born in Tokyo, Japan. He spent the majority of his childhood in Hong Kong under British colonial rule before attending a private boarding school in Massachusetts, USA. He received a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Brown University in 2005 and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies. His short films have screened at the 2004 and 2005 Cannes Film Festivals. He received photography training from cinematographer Christopher Doyle (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE; 2046). His film, VIRTUAL JFK: VIETNAM IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED, was released theatrically in North America, is available on DVD, and airs on the Documentary Channel at the end of 2010.

Bremen Donovan is a filmmaker, photographer, and youth arts educator living in New York City. She has spent the past 6 years teaching documentary and narrative filmmaking at youth arts organizations including Light House, New Urban Arts, and, most recently, the WeOwnTV workshop in Sierra Leone and the Ciné Institute in Haiti. In December, Bremen returned from a Samuel T. Arnold fellowship in Sierra Leone, where she worked in the eastern mining district of Kono on a documentary film and multimedia project about two young Sierra Leonean women and their creation of safety networks within lives of prostitution. She has most recently directed a film with UK-based peacebuilding organization Conciliation Resources, addressing tension in the Mano River border region between Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and is in the post-production phase of her Arnold project.

Lindsay Richardson has taken a number of documentary theory and production courses at NYU Tisch, Columbia, and the New School. During those courses, she shot and edited two short films: Magnetic Patriotism (utilizing the 'Support Our Troops' yellow ribbons as a lens to examine American Patriotism more broadly) and Bee King (about urban beekeeping in NYC). Recently she has been working as a Producer and consultant for a number of different documentaries: Who Does She Think She Is?, In A Dream, Human Terrain, and Gold Star Children. She is also developing a new film about the relationship between Providence social ventures, community building and Peace.


Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.