Staff | Board of Directors | Mentors

Founder & Chair Emeritus, Board of Directors, John S. Johnson
Directors, Ben Robbins and Jennifer Grausman
Creative Director, Chase Palmer
Intern, Abby Wambaugh

John S. Johnson (Founder)
John S. Johnson is the Director of the Harmony Institute, a research organization that studies the application of behavioral science to communication in media. He consults with media creatives, socially conscious film funds, and production companies to help their work achieve concrete, positive change in specific target constituencies. He is co-founder of buzzfeed.com, a trend detector and platform for transmitting contagious media, and is the founder of Eyebeam, a MacArthur and NEA funded non-profit art and technology laboratory in New York City. John is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and is editor of a book in production titled The Economics of Creative Practice: Models and Case Studies for Artists.

Ben Robbins (Director) Ben Robbins began his film career at October Films, working for Bingham Ray in acquisitions and distribution until 1998. Since then he has worked both as a screenwriter and as a writer/producer on numerous television documentaries, including LOOKING FOR LINCOLN for PBS, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and feature-length A&E Biographies of Bob Dylan and Eugene O’Neill, both of which were nominated for Banff Awards. Ben began his screenwriting career by adapting Ernest Hemingway’s A MOVEABLE FEAST for Mariel Hemingway. Subsequent projects have included the true-crime procedural DIRT ROADS for director Hannah King, and E-TRAIN about the ecstasy smuggling trade, for director Jordan Alan. Ben is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a 2004 alumnus of the Screenwriters Colony. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jennifer Grausman (Director) Jennifer Grausman directed and produced the feature documentary, Pressure Cooker (Participant Media), which won Best Documentary at the 2009 Philadelphia Film Festival and a Special Jury Commendation at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival before going on to a successful theatrical run in summer 2009. Grausman also co-produced and line produced Eric Mendelsohn’s feature, 3 Backyards (2009), which won the Best Director Award at Sundance 2010. Previously, she produced six
short films, including Dear Lemon Lima (2007 Tribeca Film Festival), and Solidarity (2005 New York Film Festival). A graduate of the MFA film program at Columbia University, Grausman was honored with the 2005 Best Producer Award and the Arthur Krim Memorial Award. Prior to graduate school, she was the Manager of Exhibition and Film Funding at The Museum of Modern Art. She earned her BFA in Art History at Duke University. 

Chase Palmer (Creative Director)
Chase Palmer is a Brooklyn based writer/director who works with both the major studios and independent producers. Current projects as screenwriter include DALLAS BUYERS CLUB starring Ryan Gosling for Universal; the Civil War heist movie NO BLOOD, NO GUTS, NO GLORY for producer Kevin Misher (PUBLIC ENEMIES, THE INTERPRETOR) at Paramount; EVOLUTIONS CAPTAIN, a film about Charles Darwin for Academy Award winning producer Cathy Schulman (CRASH, THE ILLUSIONIST) and Focus Features; and ISABELLA V, a potential franchise produced by and starring Natalie Portman. Mr. Palmer’s planned directing debut is NUMBER THIRTEEN, with Gail Mutrux producing (KINSEY, DONNIE BRASCO). A portrait of young Alfred Hitchcock framed as a Hitchcockian thriller, the cast includes Ewan McGregor, Geoffrey Rush and Tony-winner Dan Fogler as Hitch. As director, Mr. Palmer’s two award-winning short films—NEO-NOIR (2002)—and the Fox Searchlab (Searchlight) commissioned SHOCK AND AWE (2004)—have played at film festivals worldwide including Sundance, BFI London Film Festival, LA Film Festival, Deauville Festival of American Film, Short Shorts in Tokyo and Melbourne International Film Festival. In 2004 he was invited by the State Department to screen and discuss his work as part of a program to promote short filmmaking in Burma. In 2005 he was profiled as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”