Team
Director Allison Walsh is both a Prospect High School alum and a former student of Mr. Camardella’s World Religions class. This class served as a fundamental catalyst for her development as an artist and filmmaker. Thus, she is personally invested
in—and in many ways a testament to—the transformative power of thoughtful, explorative education in students’ lives and in society more broadly. She is interested in revisiting the classroom she once sat in as a student; this time with a documentary lens, to observe and communicate the impact of religious literacy on high school students.
Allison Walsh
Director/Producer
Allison Walsh is an independent documentary filmmaker and
fine artist, who is committed to
local political advocacy and documenting social issues in the Midwest. Walsh’s films have screened around the world including Paris, France (Paris Art and Movie Awards), Sayulita, Mexico (Festival Sayulita) and Chicago, Illinois (Pride Film Fest, Femme Filmmakers Showcase). She is the recipient of an Acorn Equality Grant, awarded to work that positively impacts the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons and allies. She has been invited to speak about her films at Western Illinois University and the El Paso Museum of History. Walsh is a recent graduate of the internship program at Kartemquin Films in Chicago. During her time at Kartemquin, she worked on the documentary film The Dilemma of Desire, led by the Emmy and Peabody award-winning director Maria Finitzo and City So Real, led by the Oscar-nominated director Steve James.
Linghua (Lily) Qi
Linghua (Lily) Qi is a Chicago-based filmmaker with a passion for visual storytelling that reflects human interests and social issues.
Her writings have appeared in various publications including Google/Pop-Up Magazine, Civil Eats, and Nikkei Asia. Her Civil Eats story on food colonialism was selected as “The Five Best Ideas of the Day” by the Aspen Institute. The reporting series she worked on at City Bureau is a finalist for the Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism in 2020.
She started her documentary filmmaking journey at Kartemquin Educational Films. Her short documentary, Whispers In the Dark, is an official selection for the 2020 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival. She has assisted projects for BBC, CNBC, WORLD Channel/Asian American Documentary Network, Belt Magazine, Global Citizen, and AARP-Chicago, among others. Lily is a former fellow at Free Spirit Media and City Bureau, a grantee of Prism Photo Workshop, and a semi-finalist for the 2022 Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellowship. Lily is a 2024 CAAM Fellow.
Producer
Shuling Yong
Sound
Shu Ling Yong is a
Singapore-born, Chicago-based documentary filmmaker, DP and Location
Sound Recordist who has worked on films like The Feeling of Being Watched (Tribeca, 2018, dir. Assia Boundaoui) and America To Me (Sundance, 2018, dir. Steve James). Her feature-length debut, Unteachable, was the first local film to win the Audience Choice Award at the 30th Singapore International Film Festival 2019, Shuling is a Tribeca Film Institute program alum, a Kartemquin Films Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow, a participating filmmaker at the BRITDOC Queer Impact Producers Lab, the DocNet Southeast Asia Strategy Workshop and the KOMAS Video For Change Forum. She was also chosen as a DOC NYC "40 under 40" Honoree in 2019.
Joann Kohng
Assistant Producer
Joann graduated from The University of Arizona with a double major in Film and Television and Communication. She is interested in complex stories that highlight a diversity of voices and perspectives, using documentaries as a catalyst for change. Joann has previously interned at Frontline PBS and The Center for New American Media and is currently working as an Associate Producer for Museums of the Night (dir. Lisanne Skyler).
Editor
Alanna Schmelter
Alanna Schmelter is a film & television editor with a concentration in narrative non-fiction & documentary. After graduating with a degree in film editing from Columbia College Chicago, she started her career by cutting comedy at the world-renowned Second City. She has since edited series for Starz, National Geographic, Travel Channel, Ovation and A&E. Finishing in 2018, she served as Co-Editor for two years on an epic ten-part documentary series directed by Steve James titled America to Me (Kartemquin Films & Participant Media), addressing race & academic achievement in public education. It made its debut in the inaugural Indie Episodic category of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and aired on Starz in Fall of 2018. Her latest episodic project, Lady Parts Justice in the New World Order (dir. Ruth Leitman), premiered in November 2018 at DOCNYC and is still pending distribution. She is currently contributing work as an editor for an upcoming Steve James project following Chicago’s 2019 mayoral election, premiering early 2020.
Producing Advisor
Diane Quon
Diane Quon is an Academy Award-nominated producer who worked as a marketing executive for 17 years at NBC and at Paramount Pictures before moving back to her hometown of Chicago. Diane is producing Kartemquin Films documentaries including the Oscar and Emmy nominated, Peabody and Sundance award-winning film, Minding the Gap directed by Bing Liu; Left-Handed Pianist along with Chicago Tribune arts critic Howard Reich, and co-directed by Leslie Simmer and Gordon Quinn; The Dilemma of Desire with Peabody Award-winning director Maria Finitzo (premiering at SXSW 2020) and FINDING YINGYING with Director Jiayan "Jenny" Shi (premiering at SXSW 2020). She is also producing the documentary, I Know, by Nadav Kurtz (Paraiso). Diane is a 2017/2018 Film Independent Fellow, a 2019 IFP Cannes Producer Fellow and a 2019 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow. She is also developing a fiction film based on the New York Times best-selling book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.
Hanna Awwad
Assistant Producer
Awwad is a writer and modern embroidery artist committed to supporting projects that explore the relationship between identity and place. She graduated from Oregon State University with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Religious Studies. Awwad is currently based in Rhode Island and pursuing a Master’s in Urban Teaching at Providence College.
Scholarly Advisors
Diane L. Moore is the faculty director of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Middle East Initiative. She focuses her research on enhancing the public understanding of religion through education from the lens of critical theory. She is currently serving as the Principal Investigator for both the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative in partnership with the Kennedy School of Government and the Religious Literacy and the Professions Symposium Series.
Dr. Michael D. Waggoner is a Senior research Scholar with the Institute for Religion and Education at the University of Northern Iowa where he taught the past 32 years. Since 2000, he has served as Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Religion & Education and in 2001 also became Editor of the book series for Routledge Research in Religion & Education.
Dr. W.Y. Alice Chan, Ph.D., has worked in multinational for-profits, and international religious and non-religious non-profits. These experiences inform her work at the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy (CCRL) and raise her desire to foster religious literacy among professionals - an understanding that was lacking in her corporate environments. As the executive director and co-founder of the CCRL, her work is also inspired by her teaching experience as a middle school teacher, McGill University and OISE/University of Toronto lecturer, her research on religious bullying, religious literacy and religious discrimination, such as violent extremism.
Andrew Mark Henry is a scholar of late antique Mediterranean religion and the producer of the religious literacy YouTube Channel Religion for Breakfast. He currently serves as a postdoctoral fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt working on a project about Coptic Christianity. He also serves as a fellow at the Center for Mind and Culture working on projects about improving the public's understanding of religion and examining how disinformation about religion spreads on social media platforms.
The Rev. Dr. Nathan C. Walker is executive director of 1791 Delegates and he serves as the managing director of The Foundation for Religious Literacy and founder of the online learning community, ReligionAndPublicLife.com. Walker teaches First Amendment law and human rights at Jefferson University and Rutgers Honors College.
Dr. Kate E. Soules is an education researcher and curriculum developer specializing in religious literacy and teacher education. Her research interests include teacher education about religion, educators' conceptualizations of religious literacy, and student outcomes in secondary religious studies courses. Dr. Soules is the co-founder and director of the Religion and Education Collaborative (REC), an interdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners.
Benjamin P. Marcus is a Freedom Forum fellow. From 2017-2020 he served as the religious literacy specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum, where he developed religious literacy programs for public schools, universities, businesses, and government organizations. His research and publications examine the intersection of education, religious literacy, and religious liberty in the United States.