Filmmakers

LeAnne Howe – Eidson Distinguished Professor, Department of English – University of Georgia, Athens

LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. Her short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Fiction International, Callaloo, Story, Yalobusha Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere, and has been translated in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Writers Residency, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Her first novel Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001) received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, and awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year, 2002. Equinoxes Rouge, the French translation, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France’s top literary awards. Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK, 2005) won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2006, and the Wordcraft Circle Award for 2006. Miko Kings: An American Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007) is the story of a Choctaw baseball pitcher Hope Little Leader, Justina Maurepas, his black-Indian lover, an all-Indian baseball team, and Ezol Day, a Choctaw postal worker who comes back across time to tell her story to a woman who should have been her granddaughter. Set in 1907 and 2006, the novel spans nearly 100 years and examines the roots of American baseball. In 2014, Howe’s memoir Choctalking on Other Realities, Aunt Lute Books, 2013, won the first MLA prize for Studies in Native American Literature, Cultures, and Languages.

LeAnne was the screenwriter and on-camera narrator for the 90-minute PBS documentary Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire that aired nationally in 2006. Part memoir, part tribal history the film takes Howe (Choctaw) to the North Carolina homelands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to discover how their fusion of tourism, community, and cultural preservation is the key to the tribe’s health in the twenty-first century. Along the way Howe seeks to reconcile her own identity as the daughter of a Cherokee father she never knew.

Joshua B. Nelson – Associate Professor, Dept. of English, The University of Oklahoma

Prof. Joshua B. Nelson, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a native Oklahoman, is an associate professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with Film & Media Studies and Native American Studies, focusing on American Indian literature and film. His book, Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture, looks to dismantle the pervasive assimilated/traditional dichotomy plaguing American Indian literary criticism. It explores the empowering potential of traditional, adaptive strategies and practices to address cultural and historical dilemmas.

Prof. Nelson takes a pluralist interest in tribalist, postcolonial, anarchistic, feminist, and pragmatic theoretical perspectives. His work has appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, TheOxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy. He is at work on a book on representations of the body in Indigenous film. He teaches courses on American Indian literature, literary criticism, and film. He and his wife divide their time between Norman and Park Hill, Oklahoma.

Joseph Erb – Lead Animation Artist

Joseph Lewis Erb is a computer animator,film producer, educator, language technologist and artist enrolled in the Cherokee Nation. He earned his MFA degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Erb created the first Cherokee animation in the Cherokee language, “The Beginning They Told”.  He used his artistic skills to teach Muscogee Creek and Cherokee students how to animate traditional stories. Most of this work is created in the Cherokee Language. He has spent many years working on projects that will expand the use of Cherokee ​​language in technology and the Arts.  ​Erb teaches at University of Missouri teaching Digital Storytelling and Animation.

Jonathan Thunder – Animation Artist

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate – Composer/Music Supervisor

Praised and honored for “his ability to effectively infuse classical music with American Indian nationalism (Washington Post),” Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, born in Norman, Oklahoma, is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. Tate is dedicated to the development of American Indian classical composition. He is a 2011 Emmy Award winner, a Governor appointed Oklahoma State Creativity Ambassador and his music was recently featured on the HBO series Westworld.

His commissioned works have been performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and Chorus, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Ballet, Canterbury Voices, Dale Warland Singers, Santa Fe Desert Chorale and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Tate has held Composer-in-Residence positions for Music Alive, a national residency program of the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA, the Joyce Foundation/American Composers Forum, Oklahoma City’s New View Summer Academy, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and Grand Canyon Music Festival Native American Composer Apprentice Project. Tate was the founding composition instructor for the Chickasaw Summer Arts Academy and has taught composition to American Indian high school students in Minneapolis, the Hopi, Navajo and Lummi reservations and Native students in Toronto.

Jennifer Kreisberg – Theme Song Composer/Performer

Mother, Singer, Composer, Producer, Teacher, and Activist – Jennifer (Tuscarora, North Carolina) comes from four generations of Seven Singing Sisters through the maternal line. She is known for fierce vocals, soaring range and lilting, breath-taking harmonies.

Jennifer has been singing since she was a child.  When she was seventeen, she joined the critically acclaimed Native women’s Trio ULALI. Her voice perfectly wove the high strand of Ulali’s renowned harmony with incomparable skill and grace for over twenty years. Together, they created a new sound in Indian Country. Jennifer’s sharp wit and stage presence infused Ulali’s shows with strong vocals, humor and camaraderie with the audience.

Jennifer is frequently called upon to guest lecture and conduct vocal workshops at universities, schools, in Native communities and at festivals throughout the United States and Canada. She has worked in film and television and has toured with renowned musicians throughout the world.

Karl W. Schmidt – Photographer/Videographer/Location Sound

Karl Schmidt is a photographer based in Norman, Oklahoma. He graduated from the prestigious photojournalism program at Western Kentucky University in 2006. He is currently the manager of the Digital Media Lab in the Film & Media Studies program at the University of Oklahoma. Karl spends his weekends traveling to weird places in Oklahoma and his summers searching for the mythical West. 

Aaron Williams – Motion Graphics Artist

Aaron Williams is an award-winning Creative Director, filmmaker, colorist, and motion graphics artist currently living in Indianapolis, Indiana. A graduate of the School of Film & Television at Loyola Marymount University, he has worked on a wide variety of projects from documentaries and narrative films to music videos and agency/commercial work. His lifelong passion (and current occupation) is leading creatives in ministry at some of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the U.S., but he still dabbles in freelance and passion projects for directors, networks, and organizations around the country.