Rebecca Wexler
Rebecca Wexler is the co-founder and founding instructor for VLP. After graduating from college in 2005 and completing an MPhil in 2006, she spent seven years working as a documentary filmmaker making movies for television, art galleries, and theaters. She recently returned from studying post-war media production as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sri Lanka, where she taught documentary methods, history and theory at the Eastern University of Sri Lanka, Trincomalee Campus. She is currently a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School researching scientific evidence and forensic video analysis.
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Brett Davidson
Brett Davidson is a third-year undergraduate in Yale College studying Philosophy and Political Science, with particular emphasis on the history of political and legal thought. During his time at Yale, Brett has conducted independent research in experimental philosophy, investigating moral intuitions about human action in virtual spaces. He received two public health fellowships last summer to work in Santiago helping to provide Chilean women with information about safe practices for self-induced abortion. At Yale, Brett currently volunteers with the Yale Refugee Project, partnering with refugees in the New Haven community to provide help with linguistic and cultural integration.
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Louisa de Cossy
Louisa is the technical specialist at the Yale DMCA, she has fifteen years of experience in photography and film production and is a graduate cum laude from UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department where she specialized in film production. After graduating, Louisa worked at the Saul Zaentz media center where she helped to run the Berkeley Digital Film Institute. During that time Louisa consulted on the production and development of films such as Zaytoun, Witness11, IOU, and most recently Up Pohnpei.
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Katayon Ghassemi
Katayon Ghassemi is a junior studying Global Affairs in Yale College. Thanks in part to her interest in film and to her background as an Iranian-American growing up in the Midwest (go Kansas City Royals!), she is interested in the role media and communications play in creating narratives and molding perspectives—whether informed or misinformed. Likewise, thanks to her course work that introduced topics connecting law to the development of digital media, she is similarly interested in the questions and potential problems digital development faces when confronted by law and society. In addition to her involvement with VLP, Katayon is currently a co-captain of Yale's collegiate figure skating club team and was a director within the Leadership Institute at Yale.
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Chris Hebdon
Chris Hebdon is a PhD student in Environmental Anthropology at Yale University, where he studies environmental politics, specifically energy issues, in South America. Before coming to Yale, he graduated summa cum laude in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Young-Hee Kim
Young-Hee Kim is a third year student at Yale Law School. She has been working with VLP since her second semester at law school. She has participated in three different film projects - Human Rights First, Community Policing, and the Veterans Deportation project. She mostly focuses on storyboarding, but is also involved in filming and editing.
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Helen Li
Helen is a 1L at YLS. She has always loved documentary films and has watched nearly every offering on Netflix (including Inside Chipotle and The Hidden Hand: Alien Contact and the Government Coverup). Though her experience making documentaries is limited to filming her juggling friends and editing their drops out with iMovie, she hopes her enthusiasm for the art will contribute something to the film, law, and advocacy communities.
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V Prentice
V Prentice is a third-year JD student at Yale Law School. At Yale, V works in the Veterans Legal Services Clinic and is the managing editor of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal. V enjoys making films with VLP as a way of engaging with new areas and issues in U.S. law and society, particularly those related to policing, racial justice, and immigration. After graduation, V hopes to continue to work as a public interest litigator and advocate after clerking for Judge Marsha Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. V joins VLP with limited experience in documentary filmmaking and editing. V studied documentary filmmaking and produced a couple of short films for NGOs in Barcelona, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. as as an undergraduate student in International Affairs. While completing an MA in Environmental Management at the Freie Universität Berlin with a research focus on social movements, V produced independent media at United Nations climate change conferences and led capacity-building workshops on youth-produced media and citizen journalism as part of the International Youth Climate Movement. Outside of VLP, V continues to film and edit music videos for fun.
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Alicia Sánchez Ramírez
Alicia Sánchez Ramírez is a third year law student at Yale Law School. Before law school, she attended the University of Chicago, where she studied English Literature with a concentration on creative writing. She remains convinced of the power of story telling to drive social change. At Yale, she spends most of her time and energy working for the Criminal Justice Clinic, where she represents people facing criminal charges, and the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, where she is investigating prison conditions for death row inmates in Connecticut. Her areas of interest include the collateral immigration, family, and housing consequences of a criminal conviction. After graduation, Alicia will work as a public defender in the Bronx.
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Andrey Tolstoy
Andrey Tolstoy is a fourth year PhD student in Film Studies and Comparative Literature at Yale, where he working on a dissertation about the impact of spatial theories on social organization. His other academic interests include the theory and practice of documentary film. He has taught Documentary Film Workshop (with Prof. Charles Musser) and produced several short films for NGOs working in developing countries, including Nepal and the DR Congo.
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