Director · Producer · Cinematographer
Kathy Kasic
Kathy Kasic is a director, producer and cinematographer of science and natural history documentary films and television. Her passion for adventure has brought her to film off the bow of a ship, underwater in wild mountain rivers, and to an unexplored subglacial lake in Antarctica. She is a co-Principal Investigator on the NSF SALSA grant, as the lead of Education and Outreach. Her work has shown at museums, international festivals (ex. Banff, Hot Docs, Telluride Mountain Film, Wildscreen, Jackson Wild, and Wild and Scenic), and broadcast on BBC, Discovery, PBS and National Geographic. She has been part of three National Science Foundation grants and has mentored 12 graduate students. Kathy currently teaches filmmaking at California State University in Sacramento. Many years ago, in a different lifetime, Kathy was a biologist who recorded the vocalizations of a small nocturnal frog found only in the Amazon.
Producer
Elisabeth de Kleer
Elisabeth de Kleer is a producer of documentary films and television with expertise in crafting long format narratives. She has produced over 100 hours of unscripted content for Netflix, the BBC, VICE, Discovery, CBS, and National Geographic, and her documentaries cover a wide range of earth and human science topics --from archaeology to terraforming Mars. Elisabeth divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Bocas del Toro, Panama where she owns and operates a popular off-grid eco-retreat devoted to nature education, conservation, and adventure.
Assistant Producer · Cinematographer · Music Composer
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, and musician who graduated from Montana State University's MFA in Science and Natural Filmmaking program in 2019. Prior to SALSA, Billy created a variety of short films for environmentally focused non-profits. As the SALSA Education and Outreach Graduate Assistant, Billy had the opportunity to apply his interest in science communication, filmmaking, photography, design, and music towards a diverse range of outreach projects. As a science communicator, Billy aims to employ the emotive languages of art, music, and filmmaking to tap into the ineffable side of scientific stories. Billy currently works as a Multimedia Designer within the Communications team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York.
Editor
Tony Hale
Tony Hale is a documentary editor and filmmaker in Brooklyn, NY. After studying Mathematics at Boston College, he discovered a passion for helping to craft and champion important stories through the transformative work done in the edit room. He has edited the award-winning feature films A Will for the Woods, Charged, Afghan Cycles, The Story of Plastic, and YOUTH v GOV, and his work has been screened at festivals around the world (including Hot Docs, Full Frame, AFI Docs, CPH:DOX and more), been broadcast on PBS, Discovery, and Al-Jazeera, and been featured in The New York Times and The New Yorker.