Our Team

Heidi Hutner, Award-Winning Director, Writer, and Producer, is an Award-Winning Professor of Environmental Humanities and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University, and a scholar of nuclear and environmental history, literature, film, and ecofeminism. She is the winner of Sierra Club Long Island's 2015 Environmentalist of the Year Award. At SBU, Hutner chaired the Sustainability Studies Program for six years and was Associate Dean in the School of Marine, Atmospheric Science. Hutner publishes widely as a writer and journalist on nuclear, environmental, environmental justice, and gender issues. She regularly gives public talks. Her current book project, RADIOACTIVE: Women and Nuclear Disasters, will accompany the documentary and forms the basis of the documentary project. Hutner's many books, book chapters, and essays have been published by Oxford University Press, University of Virginia Press, Palgrave, Rowman and Littlefield, Broadview, and she has written for the New York Times -Dot Earth, Ms. Magazine, Public Radio International, Longreads, AEON, DAME, Spirituality and Health, Mom's Clean Air Force, Yes!, Tikkun, and more. Hutner produces a popular sustainability web video show in which she interviews Nobel Peace Prize winners, McArthur Genius Fellows, and other luminaries. She recently appeared on the NBC News Think episode, “Clean Water is a Human Right” and gave a Tedx on "Eco-Grief and Ecofeminism."  Hutner was the associate producer of the off-Broadway climate-change musical, Endangered. She is in development, with Richard Saperstein, President of Bluestone Pictures (formerly with Miramax and Fine Line) on several documentary and scripted film projects. RADIOACTIVE: The Women of Three Mile Island is Hutner’s first film. For more about Heidi Hutner (and full list of her projects/publications), see her website: HeidiHutner.com.

Martijn Hart, Co-Director and Director of Photography, has worked in film and video for over thirty years in the United States, South and Central America, Canada, Australia, Asia, and Europe. He began his career as cameraman and director in Rotterdam, Netherlands, for Stads TV. After moving to New York City in 1996, Hart worked as a freelance cameraman, DP, and director for BBC (UK), ARD, RTL (Germany), Canal +, Arte (France/Germany), VTM, VRT (Belgium), NOS, NTR, RTL (Netherlands), RTF (Switzerland), TV 2 (Norway), Al Jazeera and Vice News (United States), among many others. Hart is the co-creator and director of “Nova New York,” a weekly series from New York City for Dutch TV, which followed the 2004 and 2008 American elections. His documentary Directing/DP credits include The Brooklyn Connection (funded in part by Frontline-PBS, and 60 Minutes), which investigates the American connection to arms traffic from the US to Kosovo; and Saxman, which chronicles the life of legendary saxophone player Piet le Blanc from Rotterdam, Netherlands. Hart’s filmography has been shown at The Rotterdam Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, IDFA Film festival Amsterdam, and festivals throughout Europe. Hart also films art, dance, and theatre performances in New York City and collaborates on film components for theatrical events.

Simeon Hutner, Editor and Producer, is a film editor, director, and producer with twenty-five years of film and television credits, including works shown at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, Telluride and many other film festivals, as well as on HBO, BBC, Bravo, A&E and PBS. He was an editor on “16 and Recovering”, a four-part MTV documentary series about a recovery high school near Boston; the series won a 1921 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He also edited When We Walk, directed by Jason DaSilva, a follow-up to his award-winning film When I Walk. When We Walk premiered at Hot Docs in 2019 and was featured at The Human Rights Watch and Margaret Mead Film Festivals, among others. Simeon edited the documentary feature Cooked, directed by Judith Helfand, about a heat wave in Chicago in 1995 that killed 739 people. Cooked premiered at DOC NYC and was broadcast on Independent Lens. Simeon also edited Vessel, about the Dutch abortion activist Rebecca Gomperts and her organization Women on Waves. Vessel premiered at the SXSW 2014, where it won a Special Jury Award for Political Courage and the Audience Award. It was released theatrically in January 2015. Simeon also edited and co-directed Harlem Street Singer, a documentary feature about the influential blues and gospel musician the Reverend Gary Davis. Harlem Street Singer premiered at DOC NYC in 2013 and was released theatrically in 2014. Additional selected credits include: editing on the documentary features When I Walk, Melting Planet and Blue Vinyl which premiered at Sundance in 2013, 2007 and 2002, respectively; editor and co-producer on Mentor (Tribeca premier, 2006) and editor on Chicks in White Satin, which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1994. Simeon also directed the documentaries No Humans Involved, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival; St. Mulekicker, which played in over 40 film festivals world-wide; Martyrs and Saints; and My Brother, Nathaniel. Simeon has received two MacDowell and two Yaddo fellowships. He has an MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California, an MBA from New York University and a BA from Middlebury College.

Judith Helfand, Senior Consulting Producer, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker -A HEALTHY BABY GIRL, BLUE VINYL, EVERYTHING’S COOL, COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE and most recently LOVE & STUFF – is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, corporate malfeasance, environmental injustice, the climate crisis, disaster politics and more recently deep grief and parenting, and make them personal, resonant and even entertaining . A committed field-builder, Helfand co-founded Working Films in 1999, which is dedicated to using nonfiction storytelling to increase civic engagement and promote environmental and racial justice at the local, state, and national level. In 2005, she co-founded Chicken & Egg Pictures, which supports women and gender non-conforming non-fiction storytellers at critical stages in their careers with creative mentorship, community building and funding. As Creative Director, she helped design and lead Chicken & Egg Pictures’ mentorship and funding programs for nearly a decade, served as a Producer on the Oscar-nominated, Dupont-winning short, THE BARBER OF BIRMINGHAM and Executive Producer on the award-winning films SEMPER FI: ALWAYS FAITHFUL and PRIVATE VIOLENCE. She continues to work there as a Senior Creative Consultant.

In 1997, Helfand received a Peabody Award for A HEALTHY BABY GIRL, in 2002 two Emmy nominations for BlUE VINYL, in 2007 she received a United States Artist Fellowship, in 2016 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch and in 2019 she was awarded the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s 2019 Freedom of Expression Award for her work producing and actively using her film COOKED: Survival By Zip Code, for community engagement. The award winning feature documentary explores intersecting public health crises, extreme heat, extreme structural racism, the politics of disaster and survival by zip code. It was nationally broadcast on the PBS Independent Lens Series in February 2020, rebroadcast to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chicago heat wave and to give historical context to the scourge of COVID-19. It is still being used virtually with many different communities across the U.S. and Europe to frame and reframe the current COVID-19 crisis with a long view on how and why acute disparity exists in the United States and why it must be addressed as the public health crisis it is. Helfand's newest feature LOVE & STUFF, inspired by the 2014 NYT Op-Doc of the same name, had its world premiere at Hot Docs 2020, is still on the film festival circuit and will be the centerpiece of an engagement campaign and semi theatrical distribution dedicated to inspiring communities to talk about love and "stuff," living a good death, mourning and grief -- and what it is we really want to leave our children.

Joanne Doroshow, JD, Associate Producer, is a Producer (and Director of Development) of the 1992 Academy Award-winning feature length documentary, The Panama Deception. In 1994 and 1995, she was Segment Producer and Coordinating Producer for the Emmy Award-winning humorous political show, TV Nation. She was also Coordinating Producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sicko (2007) and Associate Producer of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), winner of the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and highest grossing documentary of all time. Her work on these film and television projects included leading research and fact-checking departments, acting as a media spokesperson, and working on distribution. Joanne is also Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Justice & Democracy, the only national consumer rights organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to protecting the civil justice system. She is co-founder of Americans for Insurance Reform. And she is an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, teaching "Civil Justice & National Advocacy." Joanne is a nationally recognized civil justice expert, has written or co-authored many studies on civil justice and insurance issues, has testified before the U.S. Congress and state legislatures, and has made numerous media appearances.

Kate Brown, Consulting Producer, is Professor of Nuclear History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Brown’s research interests illuminate the point where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands. She has written four books about topics ranging from population politics, linguistic mapping, the production of nuclear weapons and concomitant utopian communities, the health and environmental consequences of nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster to narrative innovations of history writing in the 21st century. She is currently exploring the history of what she calls “plant people:” indigenes, peasants and maverick scientists who understood long before others that plants communicate, have sensory capacities, and possess the capacity for memory and intelligence. She teaches environmental history, Cold War history, and creative non-fiction history writing. Brown’s books have won numerous prizes. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004) won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History. Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) was awarded the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge and John H. Dunning Prizes for the best book in American history, the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize of the Association for Slavic Studies, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Robert G. Athearn Prize from the Western History Association. Brown was awarded the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for both books. Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (University of Chicago Press 2015) was selected for Atlantic Monthly’s “Best Books We Read in 2016” list. In 2015, Brown was the recipient of the University of Maryland Regent’s Award for Excellence in Research. In 2017, Brown was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. Her books have been translated into a variety of East European languages, Chinese, Japanese and French.Manual for Survival was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, https://www.bookcritics.org/2020/02/23/manual-for-survival-by-kate-brown-2019-nonfiction-finalist/. And is also a finalist for the Ryszard Kapuscinski International Award for Literary Reporting, http://www.kulturalna.warszawa.pl/kapuscinski,4.html?locale=en_GB. Brown has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the European University Institute, The Kennan Institute, Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Social Science Research Foundation have supported Brown’s research.

Freke Vuijst, Associate Producer, has written, directed and produced over twenty documentary films, which were shown by public broadcasters in Europe and the U.S. and selected for film festivals all over the world. Many of her films received awards: Paul Robeson Award (Keep on Walking), World Hunger Media Award (Consuming Hunger), Gold Medal-New York Expo (The Last Dance). She has covered a wide range of subjects in her documentaries, from immigration, to youth culture, to religion and politics. As a journalist, she has reported about America for Dutch media – print, radio and television – for almost forty years. She was twice nominated for De Tegel, the Dutch equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written for American publications, notably The Boston Globe and Foreign Policy. In addition she has co-authored four books. Three in the Netherlands and one, The Half Jewish Book, in the US (Random House). The English-language version of her latest book, Alias Fortezza, a Hacker’s Odyssey, will be published later this year by Audible. When she started her career as a foreign correspondent, the Dutch radio company who employed her, wanted her to cover the Three Mile Island meltdown. She refused the assignment because the governor had just advised all pregnant women to evacuate. She was pregnant at the time. Her contract was not renewed.