Filmmaking Team

Ian Cheney

Director and Producer

Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He has completed nine feature documentaries, including King Corn (2007), The Greening of Southie (2008), The City Dark (2011), The Search for General Tso (2014), Bluespace (2015), The Most Unknown (2018), Picture Character (2019) and Thirteen Ways (2019). His films have premiered at film festivals and theaters worldwide and been released on Netflix, PBS, The Sundance Channel, VICE Media, and other networks. A former Macdowell fellow and Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, he lives in Maine.

Sharon Shattuck

Director and Producer

Sharon Shattuck is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and podcast host. From This Day Forward (2015), broadcast on POV (PBS) and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. She’s the co-host of the podcast ‘Conviction: American Panic’ from Gimlet/Spotify, and the co-creator of the New York Times Op-Docs science series ‘Animated Life.’ Her work has appeared on PBS, Netflix, National Geographic Channel, The New York Times, Vox, The Atlantic, Vice, ProPublica, Spotify, and Radiolab. She has degrees in forest ecology and journalism.

Manette Pottle

Producer

Manette Pottle is a documentary film producer. Her first feature film, Behold The Earth (2017), with director David Conover, frames a multi-generational conversation between science and religion about the fate of our planet, and is distributed theatrically by Aspiration Entertainment. Prior to film production, she produced the Camden International Film Festival, a documentary film festival in Camden, Maine.

Natasha Bedu

Editor

A graduate of the American Film Institute, Natasha Bedu served as lead editor on over a dozen episodes of A&E’s Emmy-winning series ‘Intervention,’ and was an editor on the popular Netflix series ‘Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.’ Her most recent project, a documentary series for the newly launched HBO MAX, follows the lives of LGBTQ history’s greatest heroes. Picture a Scientist is her latest feature film work, and she hopes to continue working on projects that explore themes of equality, justice, and the human struggle.

Amy Brand

Executive Producer

Amy Brand is a leader in the field of scholarly communication and research information, and the current Director of the MIT Press. She is an associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and serves on the boards of Crossref, Duraspace, Altmetric, and Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.