Filmmaker Bios

Megan MylanMegan Mylan is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker. She directed Batidania: Power in the Beat, about an Afro-Brazilian youth percussion group from Rio de Janeiro fighting drug violence and racism through music. The film screened nationally and internationally and won the Best Documentary Award from the Marin Latino Film Festival. She is currently directing a documentary on race relations in Brazil. Mylan has produced programs for Stanford University and the Lucas Educational Foundation. She was Post-Production Supervisor for Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann's Long Night's Journey Into Day, 2000 Academy Award® nominee and winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. She has worked in a variety of capacities on documentary films including: Jon Else's Open Outcry and Sing Faster; Yesterday's Tomorrows directed by Barry Levinson for Showtime; Inside the Tobacco Deal for PBS's "Frontline" and Brazil 2000 for the BBC. Before beginning her film work, Megan worked with Ashoka, an international development non-profit, in the U.S. and Brazil. She has Masters degrees in Journalism and Latin American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jon ShenkJon Shenk is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and a founder of Actual Films in San Francisco. He co-directed Afghanistan: Hell of a Nation for PBS's "Wide Angle" series, and is currently producing New Heroes, a series for PBS about social entrepreneurs. He produced, directed, and photographed The Beginning, a cinema-verité documentary about the making of Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, which was released on the Phantom Menace DVD. He has produced and photographed documentaries for MTV's True Life series about high school football in Texas and about the culture surrounding the drug MDMA (Ecstasy). He also has produced documentaries for the George Lucas Educational Foundation's series Teaching in the Digital Age. Actual Films is currently producing The Rape of Europa, a three-part series for PBS about the fate of fine art during Third Reich and World War II. Jon also works as a freelance documentary cinematographer for PBS, National Geographic, A&E, Bravo, CBS, NBC, and the BBC. He also worked as assistant editor on Cadillac Desert, a PBS series by Jon Else about the history of the struggle for water in the American West. He earned his Masters in Documentary Filmmaking from Stanford University in 1995.