About the team
Jamila Wignot (Director) Jamila Wignot is a documentary filmmaker based in New York. Her directing work includes the Peabody, Emmy and NAACP award-winning series The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (PBS), hosted by Henry Louis Gates and chronicling the five hundred year history of African Americans; Town Hall (co-directed with Sierra Pettingill), a feature-length co-production with ITVS following Tea Party activists determined to unseat Barack Obama; and, for PBS’s American Experience series, the Peabody Award-winning Triangle Fire and Emmy-nominated Walt Whitman. Jamila’s producing credits include W. Kamau Bell’s Bring The Pain (A&E); Sundance award-winning director Musa Syeed’s narrative feature A Stray (SXSW); Street Fighting Men, following the Black Detroiters fighting for the city they love; and The Rehnquist Revolution, the fourth episode of WNET’s series The Supreme Court, which was an IDA Best Limited Series winner.
Lauren DeFilippo (Producer) Lauren DeFilippo is a Brooklyn based filmmaker and partner at Insignia Films where she recently produced, Ailey (Sundance 2021) about iconic choreographer Alvin Ailey. The feature documentary was released in theaters nationwide by NEON and will be broadcast on PBS in 2022. Her work has been featured at festivals internationally and has been supported by major art institutions including the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, the Simon’s Foundation, the Sundance Institute, and Gotham Documentary Lab. Lauren’s directorial debut Red Heaven (SXSW 2020), which follows six people as they survive inside a NASA psychological experiment simulating humanity’s first outpost on Mars, will be released by Utopia Films in late 2021. She’s currently directing and producing a feature documentary about the world’s largest universal basic income experiment.