KQED: BAY WINDOW

Production Biographies for Bay Window: Children and Asthma

Allie Light, Producer/Director
Allie Light, winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the 1994 Emmy Award for Best Interview Program, writes, directs and produces documentary films with her partner, Irving Saraf. Her credits include: Blind Spot: Murder by Women, Rachel's Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer (HBO); Dialogues With Madwomen (Emmy Award, Freedom of Expression Award, Sundance Film Festival Award); In the Shadow of the Stars (Academy Award); Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets, Visions of Paradise (five films about folk artists) and Shakespeare's Children. She has published a book of poems, The Glittering Cave, and she edited an anthology of women's writings, Poetry From Violence. Light lectured in film at City College of San Francisco and for 10 years in the Women Studies program at San Francisco State University. Children and Asthma is the first in a four-part series, Small Bodies of Evidence, about children, health and the environment.

Irving Saraf, Director/Editor
Irving Saraf, winner of the 1994 Emmy Award for Dialogues With Madwomen and whose film In the Shadow of the Star won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (both with Allie Light), was born in Poland, raised and educated in Israel, and has a B.A. in Motion Pictures from U.C.L.A. He works in fiction and documentary film as a producer, a director and an editor, with more than 150 films to his credit, mostly made for television. He was the filmmaker of Poland, Changing World (Emmy nomination). His directorial work includes Going International (six films about working abroad, produced by Copeland-Griggs) and We Are Driven (Japanese production in the United States for Frontline/PBS). Among his editing credits are Battle of Westlands (Dupont-Columbia and Peabody Awards), Las Madres (Oscar nomination) and Three Warriors (United Artists release). With his partner, Allie Light, he has also produced and directed Mitsuye and Nellie, Visions of Paradise (five half-hour films about contemporary American folk artists), Shakespeare's Children (director), Rachel's Daughters (HBO), Blind Spot: Murder by Women and the recently completed Children and Asthma. He was founder and former head of the KQED-TV film unit and former manager of Saul Zaentz Production Company. During his tenure with Zaentz, Saraf produced a score of films and was post-production supervisor of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. For many years he taught film production at San Francisco State University.

Nancy Evans, Producer/Researcher
Nancy Evans is a health science writer/editor and environmental health advocate who co-produced (with Allie Light and Irving Saraf) the 1997 documentary Rachel's Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1991, Nancy has written and spoken extensively on breast cancer issues in the United States, Canada, Belgium and New Zealand. She currently works with The Breast Cancer Fund (TBCF) as health science consultant and represents TBCF in the Collaborative for Health and the Environment. Among her current projects is a series of documentary films on children's environmental health, Small Bodies of Evidence: The Toxic Lives of Children, co-produced with Allie Light and Irving Saraf. Films in the series will examine childhood cancer, developmental disorders and obesity.

Elizabeth Pepin, Associate Producer
Elizabeth Pepin currently works as an associate producer and research and development associate at KQED-TV, in San Francisco. Elizabeth has more than five years of production experience in the Bay Area and has won three local Emmy Awards for her documentary film work. Her numerous projects for KQED and PBS include American Experience: The Year 1900, Bay Window: Hope on the Street, and The Fillmore: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco. In addition to being a filmmaker, Pepin is a photographer and a journalist. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from San Francisco State University.

Roberta Streimer, Outreach Coordinator
Roberta Streimer is an organizational consultant with 20 years' experience in strategic planning, program development, communication strategy, management training, meeting facilitation, curriculum design and the training of trainers. She has worked with a wide variety of corporate and nonprofit organizations in government, scientific research and development, health care, education, and information technology.

Sue Ellen McCann, Executive Producer
Sue Ellen McCann joined KQED in 1999 and works primarily on current-affairs programming. She has executive-produced KQED's award-winning series Bay Window for the past four seasons and has overseen more than a dozen productions for the series, including Presumed Guilty, GunShots, No Turning Back and The Celebrity and the City. During her tenure, Bay Window has won four local Emmys and one national Emmy. McCann is also the KQED executive-in-charge of one of PBS's newest series, FRONTLINE/World, a magazine program on the global community, introducing viewers to countries and cultures rarely covered by the U.S. media.