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Bio

Toni Achebe Bell is the creator and host of the What's Up with Docs Podcast. She has been a driving force in the documentary impact strategy. She was the Impact Producer for The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, directed by Abigail Disney, Fruits of Labor, and the award-winning A Woman on the Outside. She teaches media and impact at Saybrook University. She has worked as an Impact Strategist for Represent Justice (Kemba, Songs From the Hole) and Odyssey Impact Partners (All I See is the Future, Second Shot, Long Line of Ladies, Descended From the Promised Land, Breaking Silence). 

Toni spearheaded the impact campaign for RePresent Media’s initiative, "The Power of Personal Documentary Films," and previously served as an advisory board member for the Southeast European Film Festival. Her journey into documentary filmmaking began as the writer and editor of the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers–West newsletter, leading to her first roles as a production assistant and archival researcher on Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, which aired nationally on PBS. Since then, she has conducted extensive archival research for numerous films and television programs, including Centric's Being and VH-1's Behind the Music.

She has worked as an Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures and the Hartley Media Impact Initiative and as a facilitator and mentor for Doc Society’s Good Pitch Local. A sought-after industry expert, Toni has been a speaker, panelist, mentor, and juror at leading documentary film festivals and labs, including NALIP, Dok Leipzig, HotDocs, IFP Week, Berlinale’s European Film Market, Outfest, Docs by the Sea, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and Korea Next Media.

Toni has also contributed her expertise as a grant reviewer for Firelight Media’s William Greaves Fund and Impact Funds, California Humanities, the Jerome Foundation, and numerous other funding organizations. She was part of the inaugural cohort of Art Equity's BIPOC Leadership Circle and formerly served as the Filmmaker Services Manager at the International Documentary Association (IDA). At IDA, she managed the day-to-day operations of the fiscal sponsorship program, curated the DocuClub Work-in-Progress Screening Series, and co-organized a global convening of Indigenous filmmakers for Getting Real.

Toni holds a MAT-TESOL and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California (USC), an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in Professional Screenwriting from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In the fall, she will enter the Ph.D. program in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute for Integral Studies.