One of the IDA's primary goals is to develop a robust community of documentary filmmakers and supporters. To further this effort, each month we'll be spotlighting a group of new(ish) members in the Welcome New Members column.

If you're a new member and would like to be included (or an "old" member who hasn't been featured yet), please send your bio (250 words max) to associate editor Tamara Krinsky at krinskydoc@ca.rr.com. You must include "Welcome New Members" and your name in the subject line of the e-mail. Bios should focus on your filmmaking background, interests, experiences, education, accomplishments, etc. If you're a student, tell us about where you're studying. If you're a film fan, tell us what you love about documentaries. Please also include the city, state and country in which you currently reside.

Montana Berg (Bucks County, PA) recently founded Magical Flute Films, LLC. She is in the process of co-producing her first documentary, Leave Them Laughing, a musical comedy about dying, with executive producer/director John Zaritsky. Berg has a strong background in business and finance. Prior to this venture, she served as president of an international manufacturing business with annual revenue of $15 million. Her responsibilities included overseeing day-to-day operations of the production, with 70+ employees reporting to her. She was also directly involved in budgeting and played an active role in marketing and sales. During her tenure, she successfully launched the product (kitchen cabinets) in Shanghai, China.
Berg is also an established freelance photojournalist. Her articles and photographs, published under the penname Renate Siekmann, have been featured in a number of different regional newspapers. She has published more than 100 articles covering a wide array of topics including gourmet foods and cooking, travel, recreational activities and classical music. She also co-authored the latest editions of two books, the Adventure Guide to the Bahamas and the Adventure Guide to Bermuda. Furthermore, she has written extensively about the business of photography and published well over 140 photographs.
Berg lives in Bucks County, Penn., with her husband and four kids. She enjoys travelling, skiing and playing her flute in her spare time.


Amber Rose Kandarian (Long Beach, CA) is an American filmmaker with Armenian roots, and is the founder of Impact International Pictures. She has over seven years of experience as both a director/producer and cinematographer. Kandarian directed, shot and edited her first film, Respect The Doc, a documentary about how documentarians can influence and illuminate society. This film had a limited theatrical and DVD release in the United States and Australia. Her second film, Bruised Gold, a mockumentary about the dangers of a fictional drug derived from bananas, won the award for Best Cinematography at the New Zealand 48-Hour Short Film Festival, and was later shown on New Zealand’s television channel C4. In addition to directing her own projects, Kandarian has been a documentary instructor at the Sydney Film School and the Apple Academy. She has also shot music videos for groups such as White Zombie and has edited children's television series for Studio Two and Saturday Disney in New Zealand.
Kandarian also collaborates with other filmmakers. In 2005 she was invited to Armenia to assist in the post-production of A Story of War and Peace with Bars Media, the BBC and YLE. In Armenia, Kandarian exhibited a series of contemporary art video pieces at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA/NPAK). Kandarian has also produced various projects for clients including Life by Design, UC Irvine, Fuel TV, Bill Brummel Productions, BBC and YachtAide.
She is a graduate of the UC Irvine and was selected to be a video/multimedia artist scholar at Seven Degrees in Laguna Beach. She has produced and filmed in locations around the world, including Australia, Armenia, America, New Zealand and Spain. www.ImpactInternationalPictures.com

Laura Perlman (Los Angeles, CA) is a composer and musician and all-around film music and sound enthusiast looking to score documentary films. She received her masters in composition from Cal State Los Angeles, where she formed a love of documentary films. She loves movies with a meaning and a message, movies from the heart. She spent more than 20 years as a film music editor. Her credits include feature films directed by Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Robert Redford, Joel Schumacher, Penny Marshall, Dick Donner and Tony Scott, among others. She has worked side by side with many of the top composers in Hollywood, including Hans Zimmer, Mark Mothersbaugh, Mark Mancina, Howard Shore, Dave Grusin, Cliff Eidelman, Stewart Copeland and Carter Burwell. Perlman also created temporary music tracks for feature films including A League of Their Own, Thelma and Louise, Cool Runnings, True Romance, Rocky & Bullwinkle, The Power of One, The Client and Backdraft. She received two Golden Reel nominations for her work as supervising music editor. She has had her songs placed in feature films and has scored the music for several independent films. Perlman received her bachelors degree in film scoring from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She is currently an adjunct professor at Cal State Northridge, University of Southern California and Columbia College, where she teaches music and sound in film. She is also in the process of recording a CD of standard and original jazz vocals.

Jon Raymond (Philadelphia, PA) writes, "I am an independent filmmaker, writer, photographer and Web programmer, which is my day job. I come from the Philadelphia area, was raised in Elizabethtown, Penn., lived in New Jersey as a teenager and majored in photography-film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, then called the Philadelphia College of Art. Film school there was very unstructured, and we basically just took out equipment and shot film, with or without scripts, sorting it all out with our instructors reactively. It was an artist’s approach. The art scene in Philly included the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, where David Lynch learned painting just a few years prior to my being there. I recently learned this about Lynch and immediately validated all my own feelings and experiences about film as art. I only mention all this because it really defines me.
I am currently working on a feature script based on a true story that I’m really excited about. I also started a doc project called Stop War. I am gathering materials for this film based on the premise that war can be stopped with pictures, as was purported with those of Nick Ut and Eddie Adams for the Vietnam War. I am combining protest footage I shot, with Winter Soldier testimonies. I do lots of quick docs posted on Current.com on both war and health care reform.
I won this membership at a Brave New Films screening. Cool, huh?

Rochelle Riley (Detroit, MI) is a columnist at the Detroit Free Press, where her commentary on social, political and cultural issues is published in the newspaper twice weekly and on www.freep.com several times a week. She also offers commentary on National Public Radio and local television and radio. As a 2008 Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, she studied television writing and screenwriting and has completed two scripts and two screenplays. But her heart is in telling the kinds of stories she has heard on the street during her award-winning journalism career. She is the founder and president of Church Street Films, which will be home to her passions. She is currently a producer on a wonderful new documentary directed by Pamela Johnson on the life and loves of Sherwood Schwartz, the legendary producer of the television shows The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island. She is the author of three essay collections--From the Heart, Life Lessons and the brand new Raising A Parent: Lessons I Learned From My Daughter While We Grew Up Together. She is completing a novel to be published in 2010.
Riley abandoned being a vegan because it meant not eating North Carolina barbecue. Oh, and she still believes in Santa Claus. He’s 6’5, plays tennis and loves Shakespeare.

Jackie Sharp (San Francisco, CA) writes, "I grew up in LA, graduating from UCLA film school in 1979. Soon after graduation I relocated to San Francisco. I began working with Joe Rees/Target Video, as co-producer, an association that continues today. Target Video documented hundreds of hours of underground and punk bands from the 1970s and 1980s as well as documenting artists and performance artists. Target Video has shown its work around the world and was part of the "California Video" exhibit at the Getty Museum in 2008. Today, we distribute some of our vast library on DVD and VOD including Devo, Iggy Pop and the Cramps (our Cramps Live at Napa State Hospital is now legendary).
In the 1980's I ran an independent home video distribution company and worked in the fledgling music video business. In the 1990s I was in New York with MTV Networks as vice president of production and original programs at VH1, where I oversaw countless of hours of music television and events. Music has always been and integral part of my work, although there is a large dose of skateboarding and surfing in the mix.
Current projects include further Target Video DVD releases, a book on Target Video, a book on 1970s skateboarding in Southern California, and a documentary on Target Video in the context of the San Francisco/West Coast punk rock scene and the politics of the late 70s and early 80s.
Producer/director Suzanne Taylor (Los Angeles, CA) has been involved with films since graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from New York University. First an actress, she shifted to the other side of the camera as executive producer of the award-winning feature documentary, CROP CIRCLES: Quest for Truth, released in 2002. Her newly finished feature documentary, What on Earth?, tagged, “Inside the crop circle mystery,” is her first directorial effort.
Taylor discovered the crop circle phenomenon in the late 1980s. She says, "I was immediately intrigued, and I just I knew something beyond the beyond was going on. It is astonishing that these complicated works of art – sometimes as big as two football fields – turn up in crop fields overnight. I’ve become part of a community of artists, philosophers, writers, scientists, mathematicians and assorted mavericks who gather in southern England every summer to engage with these amazing and mysterious works of art. My belief is that if it were ascertained that people are not making the circles, our worldview would change. I made What on Earth? to try to influence that shift."    
A fine arts post-impressionist painter, Taylor had a one-woman show. She is an accomplished chef, who wrote the Anybody Can Make It, Everybody Will Love It Cookbook. Her blog, "Making Sense of These Times" speaks to how we got where we are and how we might get out of the challenging situation we are in. Her Los Angeles home is a gathering place for forward-thinking activists.

John Zaritsky (Vancouver, B.C, CANADA) has won more than 40 awards for his documentary films, including an Academy Award, seven Geminis (with fourteen nominations), Canada's national television award, two Rockies and a Columbia Dupont award. Three of his films have been nominated for an Emmy. His documentaries have been screened at major international film festivals, including Sundance, Toronto, South by Southwest, Hot Docs, Vancouver, and the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. Over a 37-year film career, his films have been sold and broadcast in over 50 countries. Zaritsky made films for 20 years from his home base in Toronto. He moved to Vancouver to direct the film Ski Bums, became a ski bum himself, and never left the West Coast. Point Grey Pictures, his Vancouver production company, has recently made Gemini winners, College Days, College Nights, and The Suicide Tourist, as well as The Wild Horse Redemption. He is 66 and happily working on his latest documentary, a musical comedy about dying called Leave Them Laughing.