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 spotlight 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@gmail.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.

George Adams (Oklahoma City, OK) is from Los Angeles, lived for several years in New York and currently resides in the midwest. His most recent project, the feature-length documentary Panic Nation, delves into the history, reasons and the rise of state-sponsored anti-immigration laws and their effects. Individuals tell their stories interwoven with those of lawmakers, citizens, professionals, business owners and experts, who discuss various facts and opinions documenting both sides of this volatile issue. Adams was the associate producer on the award-winning documentary Torn from the Flag. The film, about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was screened at 17 festivals around the world and won more than half-a-dozen awards. He has produced, directed and edited various other independent films, documentaries and television projects, including It Hurts To Be a Rebel (about Los Angeles gang members and their body art), Max (about a homeless youth living on the streets of Southern California), the award-winning short film Dead World (IFILM Halloween Pick), and Gems (Torrance Cable Television Best Short nominee). As a theatrical producer and director of dozens of projects in Los Angeles and New York, Adams was one of five directors nominated for Best Director from over 90 participants at the SpotLight On Festival in New York. His cast went on to win the Best Ensemble Cast Award. Other plays include the following: The Boys Next Door (Drama-Logue Best Ensemble Award), Fool for Love (two Torry Awards), and the critically-acclaimed Love Letters, starring Broadway and television star Marion Ross.

Filmmaker Christina Eliopoulos (Eatontown, NJ) is currently directing Demon on Wheels, a documentary feature film. In the film, an economically depressed Catskill Mountains hamlet rallies behind their hometown mechanic, hot-rodder, inventor and one-time speed demon and bootlegger, Mike Ondish, as he sacrifices his life’s savings, his business and his reputation, to restore and race the prized car of his misspent youth, a 1968 Mustang GT500 KR, hidden in a barn for 35 years. Eliopoulos’s earlier documentary feature, Greetings from Asbury Park, a personal look at how eminent domain abuse affected her family and her hometown, had its premiere on PBS in May 2009. Additionally, she has directed documentary shorts (her favorites being the story of a beloved Jersey diner, and a tale of one man’s quest to build the world’s largest model railroad) as well as experimental films. She is developing a narrative feature, Glow, a coming-of-age and coming-to-America story in which an immigrant Polish girl searches for love, meaning and her long-lost mother on the boardwalk playland of Ocean City, Maryland. Eliopoulos will direct from her original screenplay. She has also worked in the commercial arena for the advertising agencies, Fallon and Ogilvy & Mather, writing and directing brand films and industrials. She resides on the Jersey Shore with her husband, art director Ken Barrows, and their daughter, Elena, an aspiring animator.

C.A. (Crystal) Griffith (Phoenix, AZ) is an independent filmmaker and associate professor of film and media production at Arizona State University. Griffith was raised in Washington, DC, sojourned in Barcelona, Spain, and is a graduate of Stanford University (BA) and UC-Santa Barbara (MFA). She and H.L.T. Quan are co-founders of QUAD Productions, a nonprofit, social justice-themed documentary and media production company. Mountains That Take Wing -- Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama features conversations spanning 13 years between two formidable women whose lives and political work remain at the epicenter of the most important civil rights struggles in the US. América's Home is a feature-length documentary-in-progress about América Sorrentini and other activists that explores the impact of colonization, gentrification, displacement and popular resistance in Puerto Rico. A finalist for the 2010 Sundance Screenwriters Labs, Griffith adapted Blues for the Sea from her Latino Screenplay Competition award-winning short script. Griffith directed an award-winning short, Border.Line...Family Pictures, and Del Otro Lado (The Other Side), an independent feature on love, AIDS and immigration. Her credits include Juice, the documentaries A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (cinematographer), Branford Marsalis: The Music Tells You (camera operator), Depeche Mode 101, Eyes on the Prize, Making 'Do The Right Thing' and music videos from Tracy Chapman to Public Enemy to The Rolling Stones. Griffith's publications appear in Filming Difference, Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, Black Women Film and Video Artists, The Wild Good, and the journals Meridians, SIGNS and CALYX.

Annie Heringer (New York, NY) is a documentary director who has produced work for PBS, National Geographic, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel among others. Her first documentary, March Time March, profiles three African-American youth drill teams. It received a Women In Film Finishing Fund Grant, premiered at the 2000 LA Freewaves Festival and was distributed by the National Educational Telecommunications Association to various PBS stations. In 2006, Heringer received an Emmy for her research work on Voices of Civil Rights, a documentary for the History Channel that drew stories from the Civil Rights Era from a collection of oral histories housed at the Library of Congress. She is currently working on a documentary called The Pigeon Game, about the disappearing culture of racing homing pigeons in New York City. The film is looking for funding to begin the post-production phase. More about the project can be found at the website: www.thepigeongame.com

Tom Jennings (Santa Monica, CA) is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. Jennings has written produced and directed more than 400 hours of programming for networks including CBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, Investigation Discovery and The History Channel. His shows have won multiple Telly Awards and several New York Festival awards for documentary filmmaking. In 2010, National Geographic Channel nominated Jennings for an Emmy for his documentary The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination. He is currently working with the producers of Robert Redford’s latest film, The Conspirator. The movie tells the story of the conspiracy behind the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Jennings' company is producing the documentary companion piece to the film. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Jennings has produced work that runs the gamut of subject matter, from politics and religion to history, crime, sports, mystery and travel. He has produced documentary films across the planet, from major world capitals to some of the most remote places on earth, always looking for new ways to tell stories that are informative and entertaining. As a print journalist, Jennings has published pieces in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. In 1994, he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series of articles about fraud in the California State Disability Insurance office. The series created massive change in how California does business in regards to disability insurance and wound up saving taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Kelly and Tammy Rundle (Moline, IL) are the owners of Fourth Wall Films. The Rundles were previously located in Los Angeles where Kelly worked for Sony Pictures and Tammy worked for Los Angeles Magazine. In LA they produced and theatrically released the critically-acclaimed Villisca: Living with a Mystery. Villisca enjoyed a 14-month theatrical run in more than 60 cities and it was released nationally on DVD in 2006. The couple's follow-up feature, Lost Nation: The Ioway, tells the story of two competing leaders of a nearly forgotten Native American tribe that once controlled a major portion of the Midwest. Ioway was released in theaters in 2007 and on DVD in 2008. Fourth Wall's fall 2010 release is a historical documentary entitled Country School: One Room - One Nation. Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg, a co-production with Garry McGee of McMarr, Ltd., will be released in 2011 to an international audience. Fourth Wall has begun production on two sequels to Ioway, and is developing a historical documentary film on orator Frederick Douglass. A docudrama based on a critically-acclaimed play Sons & Daughters of Thunder is in development. Thunder tells the dramatic true story of the 1834 Ohio anti-slavery debates and resulting controversy. Villisca has been broadcast on PBS stations and Ioway will have its broadcast premiere in fall 2010. Kelly and Tammy relocated Fourth Wall Films to Illinois in 2007 where they will continue to produce quality nonfiction projects based on timeless Midwestern stories. FourthWallFilms.com

Larry Yelen (Oceanside, NY) has worked in various forms of media for over 30 years, ranging from television production, radio, photography and publishing, to archival research and media rights clearances. Along the way he was able to convert a longtime passion for collecting rare rock music film and video into a professional pursuit by researching and supplying obscure materials for television and documentary projects such Elvis ’56 and British Invasion: The First Wave and by the late 1980s, was associate producing for MTV’s music documentary series, Rockumentary. While Yelen loves working on all history-based documentary, he tends to specialize in music. For most of the years between1994 through the present, he has been director of archival research for the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony event and broadcast, for which mini-documentaries on each of the five to seven inductees were created. When the Rock Hall opened an Annex in New York in 2008, he became the sole researcher/historical consultant for all the exhibited films, and managed all rights clearances. Besides working for the Rock Hall, he cleared archival materials rights for Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Rolling Stones: Shine A Light and associate-produced, researched and cleared archival elements for Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who. Privileged to have done various film work for legendary musician Eric Clapton, Yelen is co-producing and supervising archival research for an authorized, multiple-DVD documentary, on which he has worked for the past six years.