Filmmaker Bios

Tod LendingTod Lending is an Academy Award®-nominated and national Emmy-winning producer, director, writer and cinematographer whose work has aired nationally on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and HBO and in Europe and Asia. He has also won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. He is the president and founder of Nomadic Pictures, a Chicago-based documentary film and television production company, and director of Ethno Pictures, a not-for-profit documentary film company.

Lending's feature documentary Legacy, which he produced, directed, wrote and filmed, was broadcast on HBO/Cinemax and PBS and nominated for an Academy Award. The film won the Reel Screen Innovation in Documentary Award, was nominated for a national Emmy and two IDA awards and was broadcast internationally. Legacy inspired the creation and passing of the Legacy Act of 2003, a federal bill that provides low-income housing to grandparents raising grandchildren.

His other credits include the Emmy-winning ABC Afterschool Special Shades of a Single Protein and, for PBS, the Emmy-nominated three-part documentary series No Time to Be a Child, a co-production with Detroit Public Television; the Emmy-nominated POV documentary Omar & Pete, about two friends' experiences after a lifetime in prison; Aimee's Crossing; and the award-winning short Rosevelt's America.

Lending was a University of Maryland Journalism Fellow in child and family policy.

David MrazekDavid Mrazek is an award-winning producer, director and writer of numerous primetime PBS history and science documentary series, as well as documentaries for the History Channel and the Travel Channel.

His PBS credits include producer and co-writer of the four-hour series The Kingdom of David: The Saga of the Israelites and two programs for the American Experience series: The Duel, about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and Woodrow Wilson. He was producer, director and co-writer of Keepers of the Biosphere, the third episode of the series Intimate Strangers: Unseen Life on Earth, which is currently being used as a supplement in teaching science and microbiology in schools and colleges across America. In addition, he produced and co-edited multiple episodes of the landmark 10-part series The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, which earned Peabody, Emmy and duPont-Columbia and IDA Achievement awards.

Mrazek also produced, directed, wrote and edited the feature documentary My Prague Spring, which won the Gold Award at WorldFest Houston, Best of Festival at the Berkeley Video Festival and a Cine Golden Eagle. A graduate of the University of Illinois and the University of Southern California with a degree in English and a master of fine arts in film production, he lives in Chicago.

Visit the filmmakers' website for more information about the film.