Meet the Team
Nora Jacobson, producer
Nora Jacobson is an independent filmmaker who makes documentaries and scripted films. After her first film, the documentary Delivered Vacant (New York Film Festival, Sundance), she went on to make three award winning narrative films: My Mothers Early Lovers, Nothing Like Dreaming and the featurette, The Hanji Box. Jacobson is developing a two-part film series A Peculiar Freedom: Portraits of Black New England, which was recently awarded a prestigious development grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also developing two new feature films, including Woman of Another World, about Helena Blavatsky, and Kiwakw, or Winter’s Witch about a woman on the New England frontier during the French and Indian Wars.
Recently, Jacobson’s mixed-media documentary Ruth Stone’s Vast Library of the Female Mind was featured at the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival, Santa Fe International Film Festival, and many others. The film is distributed by Icarus Films and was broadcast nationally on American Public Television.
Jacobson is the recipient of many other grants and awards, including a Guggenheim, the Sustained Excellence in Independent Filmmaking award from the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, the Herb Lockwood Award for Excellence in the Arts, a LEF Moving Image Grant, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Arts Council. She is devoted to telling stories of women, social justice and place, and believes that filmmaking promotes societal change by provoking meaningful discourse. For more information about her work: www.offthegridproductions.com
For more information, visit offthegridproductions.com
Greg Guma, producer
Greg has been a writer, editor, historian, and progressive manager for half a century, working throughout the US. His tenure as CEO of Pacifica Radio highlights an eclectic career in media and politics that began in the 1960s. After working as a daily newspaper reporter, he edited Vermont’s leading alternative weekly, worked with Bernie Sanders, and wrote The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution (1989), acclaimed as the best book on Bernie’s pre-Congress career. His first novel, Spirits of Desire (2005), focused on the meeting of Blavatsky and Olcott in Vermont. Kirkus Reviews called his second novel, Dons of Time (2013), "well-constructed, action-flooded sci fi set in a realistic historical world.”
Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History (2021) completes Greg’s decade-long, multi-platform study of the state. His other books include Bread & Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith (1985), Passport to Freedom (1992, with Garry Davis), Uneasy Empire: Repression, Globalization and What We Can Do (2002), Big Lies (2011), Progressive Eclipse (2012), Fake News (2018), Planet Pacifica (2021), Prisoners of the Real: World Disorder, Rational Management, and Dionysian Leadership (2023), and Into the Mystic: From Spiritualism to Theosophy in the Gilded Age (2023), and as well as the play Inquisitions (and Other Un-American Activities), and scripts for documentary films on Haiti, Guatemala, Vermont and Vietnam.
Greg’s books are available for purchase here.
Advisors
Grier Dill
Grier Dill is an animator and visual effects supervisor working in NYC for almost twenty years. He most recently finished working on Godfrey Reggio's latest film "Once Within a Time" executive produced by Steven Soderbergh. To see the trailer and Grier’s work on it, go to https://grierdill.com/Once-Within-a-Time
Grier has also worked in television developing the art direction and animation style of shows for Comedy Central, TruTV and In Real Life. He’s also written and directed multiple short films and animations that have screened at festivals across the country including SXSW, Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, Marfa, and Sidewalk Film Festival.
Grier is our lead animator on the project.
For more information, visit: grierdill.com
Alisa Farina Maynard
Alisa Farina Maynard, Founder and CEO of Live Climate, is a producer of musical and cultural events, bringing together extraordinary talent in environment-themed performances and retreats. Long an advocate for conservation and earth stewardship, Alisa is a founding member of the team that co-created “Earth Day” 50 years ago. She is a global futurist, who created Live Climate as an initiative to avert and transform the climate crisis into an awareness of environmental consciousness and positive change for the future. She is the Director of the Arcos Cielos Foundation, and Producer/Presenter of Avanti Consortium.
Alisa will be our music consultant and music supervisor.
For more information, visit: liveclimate.com
Jesse Guma
Jesse Guma is owner and CEO of Grand Street Media, a full service independent production company that produces multimedia content from concept to completion. operating an on-site comprehensive production and post-production facility. Jesse worked for 6 years as Director of Development at Lightstone Entertainment, Inc.
Jesse is our production and post-production consultant.
For more information, visit: www.grandstreetmedia.com
Jason Smiley
Jason was born and raised in Vermont. He currently works as a Creative Producer and Copywriter. In his spare time, he has been researching the story of Vermont’s Eddy family of spirit mediums for over a decade. Jason plans to publish his research in a trilogy of books that span the entire history of the family, including many aspects never published before. The book series will also explore the connections with other spiritualists in Vermont, New England, and beyond. Jason has also participated in several Vermont-based independent feature and short films.
Jason will be a story consultant on the project.
For more information, visit: jasonsmiley.com