Singeli Agnew worked as a photographer and writer for seven years in New Mexico before becoming a filmmaker. She grew up on a sheep ranch in Montana, and now lives in the Bay Area with her husband and daughter. Her most recent project was a film about honeybees called Pollen Nation.
Jessy Beckett brings advanced production knowledge and love from Santa Cruz, California where she bases her film activist, back to the land life. She currently produces full-time for Deborah Koons Garcia of The Future of Foodall the while keeping chickens and dreaming of the day when she'll have time enough for a goat.
On her small plot in Oakland, California, Novella has raised bees, goats, rabbits, geese, and turkey, among other fauna. A graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied with Michael Pollan, Carpenter now writes about urban farming and sustainable-food production for various publications, including her blog, Ghost Town Farm. Her memoir, Farm City, is available now.
Based in Philly, the original evil twins are particularly cool cats. They’re interested in mediating relations between fairytale rebellion nanny goats and corporate media distribution networks.
Anne Dailey grew up in Maine and now lives in the Hudson Valley where she writes about food and farming, grows a little garden, and runs a raw milk co-op. She hangs out with farmers as much as possible, and hopes to join their ranks some day.
Jay is a co-founder and co-conspirator with the Werehouse Micro-Farm, a project whose mission is to increase urban biodiversity, participate in the local food micro-economy, and encourage self-sustaining food and agriculture practices. He is the project manager for the Bully Documentary Co in Winston-Salem, NC, co-manager of Omega Teen Camp in Holmes, NY, and a musician and songwriter. The Psychic Revolution never ends.
Jessica Boyd is a public law barrister working in London. She did a PhD in philosophy at Princeton before studying law and continues to do research in philosophy. In 2006 she made a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the Zabbaleen, a community of trash collectors in Cairo who make their living from recycling. A good part of her growing-up was spent on a sheep farm in Cumbria in the North of England.
Zoe Ida Bradbury Farmer, freelance writer, Food & Society Policy Fellow
Originally from southern Oregon, where she now runs her own farm and serves as a Food & Society Policy Fellow. Her work in sustainable agriculture has engaged her with numerous non-profits over the years, including Ecotrust, the Agriculture and Land-based Training Association (ALBA), the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA), and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. She is a regular contributor to Edible Portland and her work has also appeared in USA Today, Oregon Coast Magazine, The Oregonian, the Draft Horse Journal, In Good Tilth, and Stanford Magazine. She also spent three years co-managing Sauvie Island Organics, a diversified fresh market farm where she oversaw production and apprentice training for a community supported agriculture program.
Zoe did her undergraduate work at Stanford University where she studied ecological anthropology with a focus on sustainable agriculture. She recently completed her Masters degree with a focus on rural development, food systems and community change.
Charlotte Buchen is a filmmaker who has shot and produced documentaries and TV stories around the world for outlets including Current TV, Newsweek.com and PBS FRONTLINE/World. She worked with filmmaker Nancy Good on a film about the American beef industry called "The Mad Cow Investigator" and is currently enjoying living in the mecca of the food and farm movement, Berkeley California. Visit www.101films.net for information about her most recent film, "All the Way Home", a documentary short that tells the story of the psychological wounds of war. Charlotte can be reached at charlotte.buchen@gmail.com.
Brooke Budner Artist, Official Greenhorns Illustrator (guidebook, website, stickers and materials)
Brooke Budner is an artist, a grower and a food lover who manages a quarter acre urban garden in the Mission District of San Francisco. She works at the farmers market, as a waitress and for the Victory Garden Project. She is creating original drawings for our website as well as a series of stickers designs.
Ian Cheney is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker. Ian received a Master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies where he was co-chair of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition and a co-founder of the Yale Sustainable Project. Ian co-created, filmed, co-produced and starred in the feature documentary King Corn, which was nominated for the 2007 Environmental Media Awards and will be broadcast nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens 2007-2008 season.
Severine von Tscharner Fleming Director, Provisional Producer, Agrarian
Severine is an agriculturalist, activist and organizer based in the Hudson Valley, NY. She is the director and chief logistician of the Greenhorns project. The Greenhorns is a small, land-based non profit for young farmers. Severine attended Pomona College and University of California at Berkeley where she graduated with a B.S. in Conservation/AgroEcology [full resume]. Severine founded the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology and helped start the Pomona Organic Farm, she has also worked on many (particularly dairy) farms in Switzerland, California and elsewhere. She currently consults with Hawthorne Valley Farm, Slow Food International, Organic Volunteers and for private landowners.. She is also owner-operator of Smithereen Farm growing flowers, rabbits, pigs, chickens, ducks, vegetables and rare fruits with a merry coalition of young farmers.
Severine hosts a weekly radio show. Also active are our blog, wiki, and mailing list - we have events all over the country! Got a hankering for young farmer merchandise? We Greenhorns are here to serve the rosy cheeked young muscle of a new American countryside so please contact us if you need help, contacts or a pep-talk -- but please only email / call the office (845) 756-3124 if you cannot find the answer to your question on the website!
Amanda Flagg grew up in Texas and has spent the last few years living up and down the East Coast. In between trying to perfect the art of apartment gardening, she is working on various graphic design projects for The Greenhorns.
Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator who works with notions of community, sustainability and a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her work manifests "on-" and "off-line" in the form of dynamic websites, installations, open-access laboratories, and educational formats that collectively question or challenge the social, political and economic systems we live in.
Amy founded Futurefarmers in 1995, and Free Soil in 2004. Her solo and collaborative work have been included in exhibitions internationally including ZKM, Whitney Museum, NYMOMA and SFMOMA. She is the recipient of the Artadia Award, Cultural Innovation, Eureka Fellowship and SFMOMA SECA. BFA, San Francisco State University; MFA, Stanford University. She is currently a professor of art at University of San Francisco and visiting faculty at CCA.
Sara has worked in a circus, toured with a rock band, and traveled with truck drivers - who gave her the handle MovieMaker. She organizes elaborate picnics, salon-style supper clubs and a legendary tour of New York City's best hot chocolate. Professionally, she produces documentary-style videos, directs the occasional music video, and creates educational media for historical museums and exhibits. These projects express her interest in cultural history, craft, design, music, film, and food.
Peter Hale lives and works in Brooklyn and is going to raise as much money as possible for this documentary. He came to the project through colleagues at the Diner Journal, to which he is a contributor.
Laura Hanna is a maker of films. Her New York based production company HiddenDriver specializes in feature length and short form films focusing on intellectual, cultural and political issues. She is currently directing the documentary feature Megapolis.
Louella Hill Contributing Author, Greenhorns Guidebook
Louella Hill is a cheesemaker for Narragansett Creamery, Rhode Island's first and only artisan cheese producer. She spends long hours gazing into milk filled vats, knowing that magic is occuring.
Simon Huntley works on Small Farm Central,
a splendid project making web-templates available to young farmers for pretty cheap. He is a gifted web-maven.
Kendra Johnson advocates for land, food, agriculture and equity. She is a regional program coordinator for California FarmLink in Davis, CA, where she works to keep farmland for farmers. She assists beginning farmers to secure land tenure, financing, and other services, and sees first-hand the barriers faced by young people in entering agriculture. She is also a master’s candidate in community development and is writing her thesis on agricultural conservation easements and land tenure for beginning farmers. She has operated a market garden and founded a small CSA in the East Bay Area, owned and operated a restoration-oriented landscape business, and will always and forever grow food.
Ghislain Jutras teaches organic agriculture at the University Laval in Quebec City and farms at Les Jardins Naturlutte. He co-founded the organization of young ecological vegetable growers of Quebec. Ghislain filmed a young farmer conference in Argentina, which we may end up using in the film. He's our consultant in regions to the north and hosted our film team during Quebec’s first blizzard of the 07/08 winter.
Talia Kahn-Kravis aspires to be a young farmer someday herself. Currently she resides in Queens doing urban environmental education throughout the city. She is working on a young farmer wiki and organizing resources into a comprehensive database for The Greenhorns site.
Patrick Kiley is a rooftop gardener in Brooklyn and spent the last two summers farming in Connecticut. When he isn't mongering or eating cheese he writes grant proposals for the Greenhorns and daydreams about barns.
Mary King loves vegetables and aspires to spend her life growing them. She spent her childhood in Oklahoma collecting ceramic pigs. After ten years in Boston then Brooklyn, she left to apprentice beekeeping in Sicily. She now resides in the Hudson Valley, Stony Brook, and Brooklyn.
Savanna can do anything. She helped put on the Rabbit Roast, and then went on to produce our filming missions in Appalachia coordinating an epic 6 state roadtrip-- and driving most of the way. Savanna now directs a farmers market and urban redevelopment project in West Virginia.
Andrew Legge filmed the interviews and b-roll in Ireland (in case we can manage to make this an international film in the end). Andrew lives in Dublin, his films have landed him many awards as a young filmmaker.
The most recent is Fowl, a documentary film about the chicken industry. Severine and Andrew met in West Cork at the Ferguson's house, Gubeen.
Eric works as a principle cinematographer for the collaborative film collective Meerkat Media. His work has appeared in international film festivals, screened at the IFC & Anthology theaters in New York, and has been broadcast on networks including MTV, the French-German public television channel Arte, and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. He currently works in camera and production in New York City, and teaches production and digital crafts at DCTV in Manhattan.
Script advisor, new mummy. Living in Washington DC and privy to a lot of the apocalypta from the inner circles. Nora Maccoby is jazzed about young farmers.
Melissa Mahoney is working towards a PhD in Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her research focuses on economic well-being and inequality with particular attention on disparities in public school expenditures across students in the United States. She was introduced to the Greenhorns in the summer of 2008 and shortly after began organizing and keeping track of their budget. Though not a farmer, she sometimes daydreams about becoming one, particularly when days go by and the numbers still make little sense to her.
McKay helped as a co-producer on some shoots when The Greenhorns was in the seedling stage. She founded the blog The Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles and did a lot of work editing our language and outreach. McKay co-hosted the Brooklyn party in March of 2008, and is consulting to maintain event continuity in this midsummer's agrarian pageant. She now works for PBS documentarian Ken Burns in New York and earns a steady salary there.
Cassie is a shopkeeper and coolkeeper at Gravel + Gold, a tiny little venue of commerce and chic on Treat Street, San Francisco. Cassie is a longtime supporter, informer and inspirer of the Greenhorns project and she helps maintain our relative sanity with her warm hospitality, clucking impresarios and Bolinas outlook on life.
Curt Ellis is a filmmaker and Food and Society Policy Fellow. Curt co-created and starred in the 2007 feature documentary King Corn, which was released in theaters in 60 cities and aired nationwide on PBS. He later produced The Greening of Southie, The Sundance Channel's Earth Day broadcast selection in 2008. Currently living in Austin, Texas, Curt works alongside filmmaking partner Ian Cheney at Wicked Delicate Films.
Jordon is a coal activist and film maker currently working to save mountain tops in West Virginia. He occasionally drives 14 hours across the Appalachians to come work with the Greenhorns. We are very grateful to have him aboard the team.
Ben Fundis graduated from Bard College with a degree in film studies and is the co-director and editor for "Border Stories" an award-winning documentary website and film about the U.S.–Mexico border. His documentary work has been screened at several international film festivals. He's also edited numerous non-primetime television programs for broadcast on some of the finest cable networks such as The Weather Channel, Country Music Television, USA Network, Food Network, and Animal Planet.
Michaela McKee graduated with honors from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts with a B.F.A. from the Film and Television Department. While attending school she produced numerous award winning short films and interned with several filmmakers including Rob Marshall. After school she began her career as a Production Coordinator for the documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song and a Production Manager for the upcoming documentary Harry Belafonte: Get Them To Your Song. Following these projects she produced the feature documentary The Meaning of Tea; for which she traveled all over the world. McKee is excited to lend her energy, creativity and knowledge to the Greenhorns.
May Nguyen is based in Berkeley, a member of SAFE, and student of architecture. She finds particular pleasure in the texture of pumpkins, zine design, and cover crop elves.
Youngna is a Brooklyn-based photographer, web consultant, restaurant reviewer, and avid hostess of dinner parties. She currently works at 20x200 and spends most of her free time thinking about food.
Lucas Patzek is currently an odd job master, and does community education and events from his home base in Oakland, CA. He has been making the website. He will soon be starting his PhD program in Crop and Soil Sciences at WSU Pullman.
Bonnie Powell runs The Ethicurean food politics blog, is deputy editor of Edible San Francisco magazine, and founded the Bay Area Meat CSA. She is a farm groupie.
Megan is a writer, library-builder, and artist in San Francisco. She is co-creator of the agriculture-rich Prelinger Library, and is also a seabird rehabilitator and oil spill responder. She has key insights about analog-digital hybridization.
Chris is the communications manager at The After-School Corporation (TASC), a nonprofit dedicated to giving all kids opportunities to grow through after-school and summer activities that support, educate and inspire them. Working in new media for over nine years (yikes) now, he is passionate about the power of communication and local food systems. In his spare time he is learning to play banjo, composting (ask me, I'll get you started in NYC) in his apartment and volunteering with NYC Greenmarket and serving on advisory boards for Slow Food NYC and LinkEducation. He also laughs at (with) his cats Sid and Pumpkin.
Angelo Sacerdote made Fed Up, a film about genetically modified food. He is an expert in video and food preservation and a guidance counselor when it comes to technology.
In 2001, Ethan Schaffer and his brother Grayson founded OrganicVolunteers, a network of over 1200 farms in the USA and Latin America offering internships and educational work exchanges. Since then, the organization has helped over 17,000 members live, work and learn on organic farms. His efforts landed him the Brower Youth Award, a top national honor for young environmental leaders. Currently, Ethan is bridging the worlds of food and climate change, working as a major gifts officer for the nonprofit Climate Solutions.
Sasie Sealy is an award-winning filmmaker living and working in New York City. She is a two-time winner of the Tribeca Film Festival, and her films have aired internationally on PBS, ARTE, SBS, and been screened at the Smithsonian and numerous festivals around the world. She is an alumna of the NYU graduate film program and is currently in development on her first feature SARAHN_12, winner of the Sloan Foundation Feature Film Grant. Given the state of her Brooklyn garden, Sasie doubts she will ever become a farmer, but she loves strawberries, okra, and (pasture-raised) bacon.
Amelia fell in love with shelling beans, sorting apples, and building local food systems while living on a farm in the mountains of Costa Rica. She currently works for Marin Farmers Markets, where she shares the stories of local farmers with local eaters. She's addicted to the value of giving farmers a voice.
Naomi is a media specialist on food policy and advocacy issues for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, and recently served as the Communications & Policy Director for Slow Food Nation. Her other food and agriculture-related clients include the California Coalition for Food and Farming, the Community Alliance with Family Farms, the documentary King Corn and Urban Rustic, a sustainable grocery store in Brooklyn, NY. She is an aspiring organic grower and has worked on several organic farms in Central America and apprenticed at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, and at the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, in Goleta, California. In 2006, she helped manage Helsing Junction Farm, one of the country's largest and oldest organic farms, located in Washington State. She has worked as a media relations consultant to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Portfolio, GQ and WIRED magazines; as a senior publicist at Newsweek magazine; and as the Director of Communications for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Naomi helped with the media launch of Air America Radio, and appears in the 2005 HBO documentary, "Left of the Dial." From 1997 to 2000, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, a municipal agency charged with oversight of the city's ethics laws. She holds a double B.A. in International Relations and German from San Francisco State University, and a J.D. from Santa Clara Law School, with certificates in International and Public Interest Law.
Alan Webber was born and raised in Elkader, Iowa, 20 mi. west of the Mississippi River and the historic Wisconsin pioneer village of Prarie du Chien. He has been making films and videos since age 16, and obtained his M.A. in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research while apprenticing under director Hal Hartley. Alan's writer/director/editor credits include: Adventures of the Brooklyn Hipster Superhero, Day is Done, and Hawkeye Fever. He has recently shot music videos for rock bandsJapanther, Federation-X, and The Silver Jews, and has completed a feature-length script about teenage angst in rural Iowa.
As the lead singer of the Ginger Ninjas, Kipchoge has created a unique alt-folk sound that has captivated hip-hoppers, rednecks, and hippies in a single song. He's going to write one of these songs for the film. He is President of Xtracycle, a social change company that makes car-replacing sport-utility bicycles. Kipchoge is about to embark on his most ambitious adventure yet: a 5000 mile tour with his band through Mexico, self-supported by bicycle.
Once Lisa Foti-Strauss finishes up her documentary about cult-folk star Michael Hurley, we hope she'll come back to us in a contributing kind of a way.
Basia Winograd started making fiction and documentary while living in Chennai, India in 1997. Her work has taken her from India to the National Film School of Poland, to the World Cup for homeless soccer teams in Austria, to Harlem, where she now resides.
