THE WARRIORS – Buchvorstellung in New York

Lisa Katzman is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and screenwriter. Katzman’s award-winning documentary Tootie’TOOTIE’S LAST SUIT explores New Orleans’ Black Masking Indian culture and the life and artistic work of iconic Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana was shown at numerous film festivals, including Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Pan-African Film Festival, and played theatrically in Manhattan and Chicago. The film received the Jean Rouch award from the Society of Visual Anthropology and received a special distinction from the Margaret Mead Film Festival. Katzman’s documentary FLAMENCOS: HERE AND THERE explores the contested cultural history of Flamenco music and dance in Spain, and the central role of women to the tradition. 9/11’S UNSETTLED DUST, which Katzman produced and directed, premiered on WNET in New York in honor of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. For her original investigative work on BP’s use of Corexit, a toxic dispersant used during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster, Katzman was the recipient of a research fellowship from Type Media (formerly The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund). Katzman has written extensively about film, art, the environment, feminism, food, music, the sex industry, and human rights for many publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, Film Comment, Interview, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Reader. She has taught film studies, screenwriting, and literature courses at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Tulane University, Vassar College, and Bard College in Annandale. Kimberly Flynn grew up in New Orleans and moved to NYC in 1975 to attend Barnard College. She worked as a dramaturg while attending CUNY Graduate Center, where she helped found the interdisciplinary Committee for Cultural Studies. Her Broadway work includes authoring the study guide for NYC students attending Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk (1996). In 1999, she worked with Joel Kupferman to reign in the City’s hazardous spray campaign against the West Nile virus. After 9/11, she shared Kupferman’s immediate suspicion that the air was not “safe to breathe.” Early in 2002, Flynn co-founded 9/11 Environmental Action (9/11EA), a coalition of Lower Manhattan residents, school parents, and community advocates affected by the World Trade Center disaster. Partnering with environmental, medical, and occupational health and safety experts, 9/11EA led efforts to challenge the EPA’s false safety claims and to advocate for a science-based indoor cleanup for all affected neighborhoods, and later, for federal funding and inclusion of the WTC Environmental Health Center in the WTC Health Program (WTCHP). Starting in 2016, she organized survivors, parents, and young adults to press the WTCHP to create a new, representative research cohort for individuals exposed to the WTC disaster as children. The cohort effort will go forward, so that young adults and the community will get the answers they need regarding the emergence of physical health impacts, such as cancers, reproductive health problems and autoimmune disease over the long term. Joel Kupferman, Executive Director of the Environmental Justice Initiative / New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, has advocated and litigated critical environmental and public health cases, on behalf of NYCHA Tenant Associations, Indigenous Nations, Community Gardens, Victims of Agent Orange, and Firefighter Unions during the time of 9/11. He has provided legal representation for Haitian earthquake victims and for GE workers who were severely exposed to PCBs. Whistleblowers have long relied upon Joel Kupferman for both protection and to publicly disseminate vital information that has been suppressed. For decades EJI has held recalcitrant governmental agencies, landlords, and contractors accountable. For the many environmental legal battles he has waged, Joel Kupferman earned the reputation years ago as the “most hated and most loved attorney” in EPA Region 2.