About Me...and Us

This site is a look into my story, aesthetic, work experience, and my burning reasons for making films and series as an independent film producer. It also offers a glimpse into my collaborators, whom I feel honored to work with and learn from.

Recently, longtime collaborator Jessica Green officially joined forces with me as Head of Development, Scripted Series & Films, and Business Strategy — under the banner of She Spun Films (aka She Spun) where female perspectives are magnified in memorable character driven stories.

Jessica brings her unique expertise in impact producing, cinema curation, film history, black history, music, popular culture, and brand development. I’m excited to have her inform our growing slate, with a mighty assist from Development Associate Zoe Miller (2024 MFA at AFI, BA at Northwestern University).

We welcome connecting with filmmakers, cinephiles, writers, executives, agents and financiers to turn our vital stories into entertainment that is also extraordinary art.

Appreciate you taking a scroll through. Website updates to come this winter 2025.

Creative Producer

I enjoy the challenges of connecting numerous pieces of a film’s puzzle, starting with development, all the way through its release on screens. Presently, I’m working with screenwriters on their original scripts, and on book adaptations. Having been in a continuous flow of reading screenplays by many of the top writers of the last decade, in addition to shepherding the dynamic process of reaching final cut, I’ve honed my skills in storytelling for the screen.

One of my favorite parts of filmmaking is attaching and nurturing talent: discovering writers, working with gifted directors who are often writers as well, re-connecting whenever possible with key crew I’ve been lucky to work with before.

I’m also well versed in the analysis of film & series budgets and schedules.

Executive Producer

I’ve built a career as a producer who freelances from film to film. I founded She Spun Films to create and produce series and films as an Executive Producer with a commitment to expand women’s roles on-screen as well as behind-the-scenes, and bring our compelling stories into the broader conversation of our time.

Currently, I am an Executive Producer on Sandi DuBowski’s Sabbath Queen which premiered 2024 at TriBeca Film Festival, has garnered 8 awards, and continues to screen theatrically in over 60 theatres (so far) across the US, Canada, Berlin, and Israel.

We’ll be scaling-up She Spun Films in 2026 based on financing for greenlit projects.

Post Producer

I have expertise cultivating a post-production process which allows for innovation and experimentation to serve the story cinematically, and impact audiences emotionally — delivering a phenomenal final cut of the film, beautifully mastered, on time, on budget. This goes alongside the creation and assessment of post budgets & schedules, hiring skilled crew, visual effects teams, and post vendors — all with understanding the details of delivery requirements to studios and networks.

“The Arts can move us to a vantage point that is different from where we came, and illuminate just enough for us to get our footing and grapple with it. With film, we get to feel as though we’re experiencing the story through multiple characters. When we recognize ourselves in them, including our own darkness, the greatness of our compassion blooms. With it, so does our ability to heal as a society composed of multiple cultures, races, abilities, genders — all as equally respected parts of the whole.”

– Sarah Connors

I found my path to filmmaking growing up in Brookline Massachusetts, exploring the arts as a flutist, a modern dancer, a writer, and avid movie goer. We were lucky to see films at the neighborhood Coolidge Corner Theatre, which is still operating today as a non-profit showcasing independent films and, most likely, screening the classics I saw there like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and Terrence Malick’s Badlands.

Education

I earned my B.A. in English Literature at Washington University in St. Louis where I discovered my passion for filmmaking creating short films and taking film criticism classes, watching Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, Diane Kury’s Entre Nous, and Wim Wenders Paris, Texas.

After receiving my M.F.A. from N.Y.U.’s Tisch Graduate Film & TV Program, I worked on film crews and soon became part of writer/director John Sayles and producing partner Maggie Renzi’s independent filmmaking team working under their tutelage for five years as an associate producer and post supervisor.

NYC as home base

I stayed local in NYC while raising my children, and had the good fortune to post supervise the films of such innovative filmmakers as Kasi Lemmons, Noah Baumbach, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Barry Levinson, Ira Sachs, Geoffrey Fletcher, Henry-Alex Rubin, Susan Seidelman, Bruce Beresford, Amy Talkington, David Mamet, Curtis Hanson, and Robert Altman.

**In 2022 the Promised Land series pilot premiered, which I co-produced for ABC Signature, streamed on Hulu. Creator Matt Lopez, EP/Director Michael Cuesta, EP Maggie Malina, EP Adam Kolodner.**

My Film and Art
Community

I’m a guest speaker for NYU Graduate & Undergraduate Film, Brooklyn College for Graduate & Undergraduate Film, and Syracuse University Graduate Film. Member of NYWIFT and The Gotham. Advisory Board Member since 2016 for Have Art Will Travel! created by fine artist and activist Linda Stein. Jury Panelist for the Cynopsis Media Awards 2016-2018, and for the 2019 SUNY Statewide Film Festival.

I reside in TriBeca with my husband Michael Dorf (Founder/CEO City Winery) and our children. We are proud members of Lab/Shul: labshul.org/mission-vision

Jessica’s Biography

Jessica Green was previously the Impact Producer for dream hampton’s (Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People) It Was All A Dream and Nesa Azimi’s Driver, both feature documentaries which had their premieres at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, as well as for Academy Award nominated filmmaker Laura Checkoway’s documentary short The Cat Man Eshete. She has curated critically acclaimed film and speaker series for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, multiple seasons, and was the Curator of New York in Film: Decade by Decade, a yearlong centennial film, speaker, and performance series for the Museum of the City of New York spanning the 1920s to the 2020s. Jessuca served as the Artistic Director of the Houston Cinema Arts Society 2019-2022, providing artistic leadership for year-round film programming and the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. Prior, she was the Cinema Director for the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, founded by Albert Maysles, of the Maysles Brothers, from 2008-2018. Jessica is also the former Executive Editor of BET.com and a Founder/Owner, Editor-in-Chief of the New York-based, independent hip-hop magazine Stress, which was the first magazine to put Jay-Z on the cover.

Fun Facts

Outdoors

Love hiking! The beauty and mystery of nature stirs my soul. I got married on the lawn of my home in Upstate New York, and hike regularly in the Shawagunk Mountains.
Zip Line Queen – I’m a natural, not sure why but I could compete if that existed!

In the kitchen

I’m not inclined to cook. Watching my mother in the kitchen was often comical the way she’d just want to get it done. When chopping fruits or vegetables, she would use a dull knife and cut towards her thumb, like a peasant from the old country. I often do this without thinking, and smile when I notice.

Music

I played flute through-out my years in school. As first chair in the band orchestras I got the thrill of standing tall and belting out an A for all to tune their instruments by. I have great admiration for musicians and composers and often listen to movie soundtracks by composers whom I’ve worked with such as Carter Burwell, Marcelo Zarvos, Michael Brook, Max Richter, Raphael Saadiq, Cliff Martinez, and Peter Nashel.

How We Met

Jessica (pictured on left) and I met early in our careers working in post production on two films: Ira Sach’s MARRIED LIFE Starring Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Rachel McAdams, Patricia Clarkson, and Noah Baumbach’s MARGOT AT THE WEDDING with Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, Jennifer Jason Leigh. The latter was produced by the infamous Scott Rudin whose assistant let us know he had barely missed a laptop that Scott hurled at him across the room.

Influential Fact

My mother, Feiga Hollenberg Connors, was a Holocaust survivor from Korolówka, Poland. She gave me a look into the horrors she and her family endured as Jews. Yet primarily, she expressed her gratitude for the deep love and joy she experienced at the core of her early childhood. That love took root, providing sustenance and grit for over 75 years without any of her tribe to support or guide her. Not wanting a new family, she refused to be adopted after arriving in America, alone at age 14. She ran away repeatedly, explaining all she wanted was to go to school. Her persistence paid off.

She was placed in The Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, founded and run by Max Bondy and his wife Gertrud Bondy; It was among the first schools in America to integrate races and accept immigrant orphans grades 9-12. As her parents had hoped, education provided freedom and independence. She embraced a fulfilling career as a social worker in Boston, and made a family with the love of her life, my father, Thomas Connors, an English professor and art collector. She relished deep relationships and the complexities found in literature and art, including cinema. More on Feiga another time. She is my hero. RIP 1933 – 2021