Home International Documentary Series Comprehensive Distribution and Outreach Plan: Experiences with the Pilot Episode Media Education Demonstration Project Advisory Board Educational Guide Who We Are

THE CORE TEAM OF A WOMAN'S PLACE ARE:

Maria Nicolo, Executive Producer, Documentary Series and Director, Media Education
Maria Nicolo has been a filmmaker for fifteen years and also holds an MSW in Organizing and Group Work from the Hunter College School of Social Work. Her film work has focused on issues of gender, development, international politics, and community initiatives. Her advocacy work in New York City has concerned women and issues of economics and violence as well as community building initiatives.

Maria's films on the costs of success in East Asia and South East Asia have been broadcast nationally on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). From her extensive international work, she developed the concepts for the film series, A WOMAN'S PLACE, and directed the first episode, broadcast nationally on PBS and distributed to over 3,000 educational institutions and community-based groups in three countries.

Maria's domestic film work includes a segment for the documentary Fatherhood USA, which profiled young fathers in Baltimore City who are participating in a fathering and job training program. Other work for PBS includes segments for the AFL-CIO film, Working for Victory, and The Abortion Pill, a look at the battle over RU486.

Maria is located in New York City where she coordinates the United States activities for A WOMAN'S PLACE.

Paromita Vohra, Series Producer, Documentary Series and Executive Producer Media Education
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work has focused on issues of gender, politics, urban life and popular media. Her media work has been in documentary, television drama and music shows, feature film and short fiction. She teaches script writing as Visiting Faculty at the Sophia College Center for Social Communications Media in Bombay and conducts courses on gender and empowerment as well as ideas of love and women in Indian films at the Academic Staff College, Bombay University.

Paromita's documentary work has included being a Producer on the film series A WOMAN'S PLACE and Director of the documentary Goddess of Food about a women's credit co-operative in Bombay, India. She has produced, directed and written the short fiction film A Short Film About Time. Her writing work includes the mock-umentary Skin Deep, a film on women, body image and self-identity; Veru, a feature film about a woman whose life is transformed by growing fundamentalism in a Pakistani village; Saras and the Second-Hand Tempo, a short film about women and their access to health-care in rural India; and Waiting for the Mahatma, a feature film set in the Indian independence struggle.

Paromita is located in Bombay where she coordinates the international activities for A WOMAN'S PLACE.

Talat Shah, Outreach and Policy Co-ordinator
Talat Shah has worked for ten years around issues of gender and poverty in development research and programming. She is currently a consultant to the World Bank where she contributes to a number of poverty-focused projects as researcher and writer/author on several documents, among them, Voices of the Poor - a 23 country participatory poverty study documenting poor people's perspectives on their priority problems and concerns, and relationships with formal and informal institutions and Gender Inequity, Poverty and Social Capital a policy paper examining poor people's gendered access to power and resources mediated through formal and informal institutions. Talat is also the Poverty Topic Guide for the Global Development Gateway - a portal website on development issues to enable those in the development field to share information and build communities of practice around significant development challenges from the grassroots up. She has previously worked for Winrock International, an international NGO, where she designed and managed academic and leadership programs for women from developing countries and helped train hundreds of women in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe to become leaders and managers in their fields.

Talat's work on A WOMAN'S PLACE has included development and fundraising as well as coordinating the international outreach process to enroll a wide array of individuals and institutions in film screenings, discussions, and seminars and to create interfaces between the project and policy makers.

Talat has a bachelors degree in politics from Princeton University and a master in public policy and political and economic development from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is originally from Pakistan and now lives and works in Washington, DC.