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Bio

Toni Bell is the creator and host of the What's Up with Docs Podcast. She has worked in the documentary field for over 10 years. Her foray into documentary film began when she wrote and edited the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers – West newsletter. This led to her first gig as a production assistant and then an archival researcher for the film, Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, which aired nationally on PBS. Since then, she has conducted archival research for several films and television shows, including Centric's "Being." She is an independent documentary consultant and has worked as Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures, Odyssey Impact Partners, and Hartley Media Impact Initiative. She worked on films such as Fruits of Labor, Descended from the Promised Land, Building the American Dream, Councilwoman, Through the Night, and And She Can Be Next. She has been a speaker, panelist, mentor, and juror at documentary film festivals and labs such as Berlinale/EFM Toolbox, NALIP, Dok Leipzig, HotDocs, IFPWeek, Outfest, Docs by the Sea, and the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She currently works with Auburn Seminary's Hartley Media Impact Initiative and serves on the Southeast European Film Festival advisory board. Toni is also part of the inaugural cohort of Art Equity's BIPOC Leadership Circle is designed to center, support, and address the experiences of BIPOC leaders of cultural institutions. She is the former Filmmaker Services Manager at the International Documentary Association, where she was responsible for handling the day-to-day operations of the fiscal sponsorship program. Toni curated the IDA's DocuClub work-in-progress screening series, of which many of the films have premiered at film festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, and CPH: Dox. She holds a MAT-TESOL and an MA in Visual Anthropology from USC, an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in professional screenwriting from UCLA.