Donna Benedicto: A New Generation of Actors

May 17, 2023 by 1 Comment

Focusing outside of yourself helps you thrive in this industry and helps you deal with so much and all the obstacles we face.

I’m a Filipina-Canadian singer-turned-actress who switched careers in order to champion Asian representation in film. I want to challenge the status quo and show the next generation of ethnically diverse artists that they can dream bigger than what the world tells them they can do.

Donna Benedicto is a Filipina Canadian actress and singer born and raised in Vancouver, BC. Growing up as an ethnic minority, Donna decided to make a switch from full-time singing to pursue acting in 2013 because she saw a gap in Asian representation. Since then, she has gone on to become the first Filipina lead in multiple TV movies, including Incendo’s Farmer Seeking Love, as well as guest starring on NBC’s The Good Doctor, and booking recurring roles on CW’s Supergirl and ABC’s A Million Little Things. 

In addition to acting, Donna is currently working on her first original album and recently released two singles that appear in the Lifetime original movie Wrath. She is also an avid boxer and kickboxer, having trained for 4 years at various MMA gyms in metro Vancouver.

Mustering the courage to be true to their own feelings, no matter what types of emotional and mental obstacles they face in their lives, can be a challenging process for everyone, especially those who are living in a society that expects them to suppress their sentiments. But actress Anna Maguire’s protagonist of Anabel is doing just that with the help of her best friend and colleague, actress Donna Benedicto’s character of Casey, in the new sci-fi comedy-drama, With Love and a Major Organ.

Donna explained the reason why she thinks it’s important to reflect on how technology dictates how people live in modern society, and how the film serves as an important piece of social commentary: “I think movies are made to make you take a look into your life and how much we rely on social media. Without giving too much away, it shows how feelings are important, and it’s great not to suppress them,” she noted.

“You see the big contrast between the two characters of Casey and Anabel. Anabel is all about feelings, to the extreme, and Casey is not about feelings, to the extreme,” Benedicto emphasized. “So, I think it’s very important to showcase that; it helps us reflect on ourselves, and how we deal with these new apps and AI coming out,” the actress added.

She also is in Lifetime’s Pride: A Seven Deadly Sins Story, starring Stephanie Mills. It’s the story of Bertie, an aging matriarch and reality television star whose carefully constructed world starts to crumble–like the baked goods that catapulted her to fame–when family secrets are brought to light. To see the truth and salvage her legacy, Bertie must let go of the pride that estranged her from her late college-dropout daughter. A pride that prevents Bertie from seeing her son Gabe as the thieving opportunist he is and her granddaughter Ella as just a lost twenty-something trying to build up her life after some missteps–not someone to hold in contempt. Pride brought Bertie up the climb, but it also made her blind–it’s time for her to see or face the consequences. Stars Keeya King, Stephanie Mills, Thomas Miles, Lucia Walters, and Jaime M. Callica (2023).

Instagram: @donna_b4real

FB: Donna Benedicto – Actor/Singer 

Tiktok: @donnabenedicto0
Website: donna.benedicto.com

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Avra Sidiropoulou: Addressing an Age of Upheaval

May 8, 2023 by Leave a Comment

Karen [Malpede’s] use of the play [Troy Too] happens in a most amazing and in a structurally brilliant way. She puts two goddesses that appear to teach us a lesson about how lives need to be re-configured. She also uses the story of The Trojan Women, a story of one nation turned against another, to tell us that even in these circumstances that we’re living in, these really turbulent times, there is a sense of solidarity that needs to be built among these women and these people, in general, who have been forced to leave their homes, be exiled, who have suffered the violence of the authorities…In a very subtle and beautifully poetic way The Trojan Women and the words of Euripides come together and blend with the rhythms of today’s world and of the city of New York, that has had its own share of violence, misfortune, tragedies, in the 21st century.
 

My work has always been about bringing people together, forging new transcultural and transnational artistic relationships, and combining research with theatre-making in order to explore and extend the limits of creativity.

Avra Sidiropoulou is a theatre director and academic. She is the Artistic Director of Persona Theatre Company. She has published extensively on directing theory and practice, contemporary performance and dramaturgy and is the author of Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method (Routledge 2018) In 2020 she was nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award by the League of Professional Theatre Women.

She is also the co-editor of Adapting Greek Tragedy. Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts(CUP 2021) and editor of Staging 21 st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics and Global Crisis (Routledge, 2022) In Spring 2023 she will be a Visiting Scholar at the School of the Arts of Columbia University in New York.

Avra holds a PhD degree in Theatre Studies (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), an M.F.A. in Directing (Columbia University), an MPhil in American Literature (Cambridge University) and an M.A. in Text and Performance (King’s College London). Her main areas of scholarly specialization include directing theory, the ethics of adaptation, contemporary dramaturgy and practice as research. She was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, the Martin E. Segal Centre at CUNY, MIT, the Universities of Leeds and Surrey, the Institute of Theatre Studies at Freie University, the Berlin and a Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Tokyo.

Theater Three Collaborative in New York and Persona Theater Company in Athens, two companies known for their social justice work, will present the world premiere of Karen Malpede‘s Troy Too, a poetic play in dialogue with Euripides’ The Trojan Women and the current crises of Covid, climate change, and racism. Directed by Avra Sidiropoulou, Troy Too’s multiracial cast features one of Greece’s finest classical actresses, Lydia Koniordou, who brings a modern and ancient Hecuba to life in English and ancient Greek.

This limited engagement runs May 11-21, 2023 at HERE (145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan). Tickets are now on sale at HERE Arts Center 

Crafted in the heat of 2020 from language found on the streets during the protests for racial justice, in hospitals during the Covid lockdown, and from the mouths of endangered fish in the sea, Troy Too is an enraged and poignant play of what we have survived, and a poetic elegy for those who did not. Greek director Sidiropoulou, known for her innovative multimedia staging of modern and classical texts, brings Troy Too shockingly alive in an international production that cuts across languages and cultures. The play, one of the first to tackle the Covid pandemic, is an angry yet beautiful communal lament, one that has been lacking from public life.

Persona is a state of mind, a heart that beats with inspiration, a body that balances harmoniously but also irregularly, a team that experiments, adapts and transcends, simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal. It is a small hub of talent which was established in Athens several years ago as a way to keep us all connected to what is going on in the arts internationally.

Persona Theatre Company Fund Raising Campaign

Avra Sidiropoulou: https://persona.gr/en/people/avra-sidiropoulou/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/avrasid

Persona Theatre Company:  https://persona.gr/en/

Youtube Persona Theatre Company: https://www.youtube.com/@personatheatercompany4935

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Theresa Chaze: Feisty Filmmaker

May 3, 2023 by Leave a Comment

The [marginalized] community doesn’t want special treatment. They just want equality — to be who they are, to be respected for who they are. ~Theresa Chaze

Telling stories that activate emotions helps audiences be open to new ideas.  People can only change themselves. But until they experience the new they will remain stuck in the old–in other words, we are growing and changing or stagnating and dying.  My work helps people find the best of themselves.

Theresa Chaze began her career in the mid-1980s at a small independent TV station in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Moving to Traverse City, she worked at the local ABC affiliate as a producer, writer, editor, and director. In the mid-1990s, she ghostwrote two features and two shorts. However, after working as a producer on two independent films, she walked away from the industry. In 2009, she started her journey back began through a series of coincidences. Her time away from film and television gave her the strength and courage to turn “impossible” into “I’m possible”.

Kaleidoscope Film and Television is a new production studio that will produce projects based on age, gender, and ethnic diversity.  We will break stereotypes in front of and behind the cameras, especially for women, Native Americans, and veterans.  More of a cooperative than a traditional studio, we are looking for individual and production companies to join our team,  We will create quality entertainment while changing the world.

Kaleidoscope Film and Television combines the best of the old-school storytelling and innovative production techniques with modern technologies to create a financially stable business model for film and television projects. Based on the concept originally created by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks with the creation of United Artists, Kaleidoscope Film and Television intents to once again pull together the talents of producers, directors, actors, and crew, who want to take back their independence by having more financial and creative control of their careers. By working together and combining their skills, the KFAT team creates a cooperative that will produce and distribute projects that are based on a diversity of gender, age, and ethnic backgrounds. KFAT will give voice to the people and messages that have been overlooked and thus attract the audiences, who have been ignored. This inclusive and innovative business model that will attract the creatives with good business sense, which in turn will diversify, and expand the audience based on all the projects. It will oversee pre-production, production, post-production, distribution, and the licensing and sales of all inherent rights in both domestic and international marketplaces as well as in all current and future distribution platforms.

Horses and Heroes will focus on the human aspect by telling personal stories of courage of how veterans have chosen to heal by facing the fear, pain, and guilt of the past. This message is also valuable to civilians, who have encountered traumatic physical and emotional events. It has the right message at the right time to create a bridge of understanding between those who have served and civilians while helping them all find a way to heal from the inside out. Veterans will also be hired for jobs both in front of and behind the cameras.

Kaleidoscope Film and Television

Cosmos Productions LLC
Traverse City MI 
Eastern Time Zone
231-943-3298

231-313-8327
Monday-Friday 11 am to 7 pm

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Pamela S.K. Glasner: Fighting for Fairness

April 2, 2023 by Leave a Comment

Getting my Masters at Harvard at age sixty-nine, I hope that I’m inspiring other women that there are no limits. There’s absolutely no limits except for those you place on yourself. I never actually wrote a screenplay and now all these Film Festivals think I’m such a great writer.. . There’s always a first time for everything. Why not me?

“If you want to reach people—REALLY reach them—you have to touch their hearts. Art is what does that. And my art is my writing.”

Pamela S. K. Glasner is a critically acclaimed published author of fiction and non-fiction, a filmmaker, a playwright, a social advocate. She is also a proud member of the Writer’s Guild of America, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, the Connecticut Historical Society and Grace Episcopal Church. Additionally, she is a Registered Reader at both the Royal Society of London and the British Library.

As the daughter of two senior citizens who were exploited and abused by a stranger who insinuated himself into their lives for the sole purpose of embezzling their life savings, Glasner produced Last Will and Embezzlement, her ground-breaking and award-winning documentary. Starring Hollywood’s icon, the late Mickey Rooney, the film explores the financial exploitation of the elderly. In Glasner’s frustrating and ultimately futile struggle to obtain justice for her parents, she learned how prevalent these crimes are and how safe from prosecution and conviction the perpetrators are. For that reason, Glasner lectures nationally on the topic, teaching people how to protect themselves and those they love and/or care for from the countless vultures who are always waiting in the wings.

Hollywood icon, the late Mickey Rooney, was an American film actor and entertainer whose film, television, and stage appearances span nearly his entire lifetime. He was awarded one Oscar (“In recognition of his 50 years of versatility in a variety of memorable film performances”) and was nominated for four others. He won several other awards including a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Working as a performer since he was a small child, Mickey had one of the longest careers of any actor, spanning almost 90 years. Before he passed away in April of 2014, he was the last surviving male star from1930s Hollywood.

On March 2, 2011 Mickey testified before the United States Congress when they were considering legislation meant to curb elder abuse. He told the members of the special Senate committee that he was financially exploited by a family member, though he refused to publicly name his abuser. Not long after, Mickey’s finances were permanently entrusted into the hands of a Conservator in order to protect what remained, and to attempt to recover the missing money, which was a considerable amount. Sadly, in the end, after a protracted legal battle, his perpetrators returned a tiny fraction of what they had stolen.

Glasner’s non-fiction book, Silver and Gold, the companion piece to Last Will, was written in honor of her deceased parents and released on what would have been her father’s 93rd birthday.
She is also the bookwriter and co-composer/co-lyricist of Empty Rooms, a musical play which was endorsed by Joey Nederlander (of the world-famous Broadway producers). In his Detroit home he told her, “Your work is as good as anything I’ve ever heard on the strip.”

Her other advocacy work centers around Finding Emmaus, her historically and factually accurate novel which explores the treatment and mistreatment of the mentally ill over the course of about 350 years, and how society marginalizes and victimizes those deemed to be ‘different’ (aka ‘less than’).

Glasner earned her Bachelor’s Degree as a Dean’s List student from Eastern Connecticut State University and received her Masters in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University. She attributes her love of architecture and antique restoration—two aspects of her life which are woven into the fabric of Finding Emmaus—to her grandfather who, after emigrating to the US from Austria in the 1920’s, became an iron worker and joined the ranks of those who left their legacy in the form of New York City’s incomparable skyline. But her real hero, though gone more than forty years, is still her grandmother, whose strength, courage and unfailing faith taught her that “nothing and no one can keep you from your heart’s desire without your permission and your cooperation.”


Presently, Ms. Glasner resides in rural Connecticut where she continues working on several new projects and advocating for those who don’t always have a voice of their own.

Ms. Glasner’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pamela.glasner

Ms. Glasner’s Huffington Post Page: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/pamela-glasner

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4127649/

“Full Moon Dog Festival” official website: http://www.fullmoondog.com/

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Naomi McDougall Jones: Defying Gravity

March 30, 2023 by Leave a Comment

I truly believe we are in an apocalyptic culture shift ; truly, an historical, multi-century, multi-millennial shift and in the last gasp of the white-supremacist patriarchal society. We are living through that moment…So, what I focus on these days more than railing against what has been, we had to tear the scales from people’s eyes: ‘Hey, wake up everybody! This is what’s been happening and you need to look!’ But the moment has shifted now and now we have to build on what’s going to happen next. And what is already happening. And that is what I spend my days doing.

​Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning storyteller, and thought leader for bringing gender parity to cinema. A long-time advocate for bringing parity to film, both on and off screen, she has spoken at film festivals and conferences around the world and written extensively on this subject.

Naomi’s TEDTalk on these issues and what to do about them, “What it’s Like to Be a Woman in Hollywood,” has been viewed over a million times and produced a global outpouring of support for the women in film movement. Her follow-up TEDxTalk, which she gave with fellow media maker and activist, Sarah Springer, “How to Become a True Agent of Change,” examines the journey each of us must take to unravel white supremacy and patriarchy in our own minds. 

Naomi teamed up with former CFO of the City of Chicago, Lois Scott, to found The 51 Fund, an investment fund to finance films written, directed, and produced by women. Through The 51 Fund, Naomi became an Executive Producer of the documentary feature film, Cusp, which premiered in the US Documentary Competition at Sundance 2021 and received a global release and awards campaign through Showtime, where it now also available to stream.

​In 2021, Naomi launched Avalon: Story — a center of practice designed to incubate and birth a new media ecosystem born out of two questions: 

  • What does Story need to be to build us a bridge to a more beautiful future? 
  • What are the business structures of Story that can serve as vehicles for the same?

The inaugural Avalon: Story program was Constellation Incubator, which over the summer of 2021 brought together 60 filmmakers to participate in an 8-week incubator designed to scale innovation within the independent film industry and apply design thinking to re-imagine a more equitable and sustainable ecosystem – from development, film finance, production, to marketing and distribution. She co-founded this initiative alongside Abeni Bloodworth, Angela Harmon, and Liz Manashil. The final presentations from the participants of the incubator – 12 fully redesigned independent film ecosystems can be found on YouTube.

​Avalon: Story launched its second program, The Avalon Fellowship, in Fall 2021, bringing 6 of today’s most pioneering cinematic storytellers to The Big Lost Campus in Ketchum, Idaho, for a week-long retreat during which they explored and innovated around the question, “What does Story need to be to build us a bridge to a more beautiful future? “

​

Naomi is currently at work on her third feature screenplay, Hammond Castle, a magical realism film that explores themes of identity, legacy and gender through a modern-day seven-month pregnant woman’s unexpected interaction with the brilliant, eccentric and deceased inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr., for which Naomi received the honor of being the first artist-in-residence at Ernest Hemingway’s final home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Naomi can be seen in this PBS documentary speaking about that experience and, alongside, Sheryl Strayed, unpacking Hemingway’s complicated relationship to women. 

Naomi wrote, produced, and starred in the 2014 indie feature film, Imagine I’m Beautiful, which took home 12 awards on the film festival circuit including 4 Best Pictures and, for Naomi, 3 Best Actress Awards and The Don Award for Best Independently Produced Screenplay of 2014. The film was named as #8 of OscarWorld’s Top 10 Films of 2014 and was distributed theatrically and digitally by Candy Factory Films. The film is now available on AmazonPrime.

Naomi’s second feature film, Bite Me, is a subversive romantic comedy about a real-life vampire and the IRS agent who audits her. The film premiered at Cinequest, won Best Feature Film at VTXIFF, and then went on to the innovative, paradigm-shifting Joyful Vampire Tour of America, a 51-screening, 40-city, three-month, RV-fueled eventized tour that involved Joyful Vampire Balls, capes, a docu-series and a whole lot of joy. The film is currently available on BluRay, as well as VOD streaming platforms all over the world, including AppleTV, Amazon, and GooglePlay. 

Naomi’s first book, The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, is now available wherever books are sold in hardcover, audiobook, and e-book. It debuted as the #1 New Release on Amazon in the Entertainment Industry and received an electric response from reviewers with Booklist and Kirkus Reviews calling it “bold,” “convincing,” “passionate,” “well-written,” “urgent,” and “necessary,” and Publishers Weekly writing, “Film viewing will never be the same after reading Jones’ insightful look at the reality of being female in Tinseltown.” Rose McGowan said of the book, “We need truth. The curtain must be pulled back, and Naomi McDougall Jones has done just that.” It has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Playboy, Ms. Magazine, Salon.com, among many other national and international media outlets. 

​She is the co-creator and showrunner for the scripted, short fiction podcast, The Light Ahead, which united over 120 creatives from entertainment with next-economy activists and social justice leaders to explore the question, “What would 2030 look like if the USA had an economy that truly worked for everyone?”, which is now available wherever you get your podcasts.

​​She was a writer for season 1 of Amazon’s original series, The New Yorker Presents, based on the world’s most award-winning magazine, which premiered at Sundance, for which she wrote the teleplay adaptation of Miranda July’s short story Roy Spivey.

A pilot Naomi wrote, The Dark Pieces, was named on the 2016 WriteHer List as one of the top 16 unproduced pilots by a female screenwriter and is now in development for TV in Canada.

​During the early days of Covid-19, Naomi was invited to write an episode of Day by Day, a podcast of short, narrative radio plays exploring “stories from our new normal.” Her episode, Carry Me Home, was the series premiere.​

​Naomi is currently at work on her second book, Vivisection of a White Woman (by the Ghost of Ernest Hemingway and a Whole Host of Ancestors).

​Naomi grew up in Colorado, before attending Cornell and The American Academy of Dramatic Arts for College. Following graduation, she lived in NYC for another 13 years, spent a brief stint in Atlanta, and now lives in Hailey, Idaho with her husband, Stephen.

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