Isabella Grace Cohn - Director

Isabella Grace Cohn, a 21-year-old student activist who got a BFA in Socially Engaged Arts for her undergraduate and is the director of Watch You Rise.

Isabella is a young-adult filmmaker driven by studying and creating socially engaged films and media. Her work strives to portray contradictions without resolution while refusing to minimize or exploit trauma. Isabella wonders how film can effectively portray provocative content and relay difficult truths that immerses the audience in a dialogue about gender, sex, harm, healing, transgenerational, and cultural issues with individuals who are typically left out of mainstream media and rhetoric. As she grows and develops as a filmmaker, Isabella is fostering spaces where members of a fractured world, specifically filmmakers, film subjects, and audiences, can meaningfully learn how to see through these normative states of identity; in order to create greater situational awareness of these norms so that they may be disrupted enough to foster inner stability and peace. Isabella is committed to engaging young adults in front of the camera and behind it, believing individuals, and especially those in my peer and age group, can create significant and meaningful changes in their lives, communities, and the film industry itself.

Isabella’s path toward creating Watch You Rise began seven years ago when she started the Me Too Teen Project. This online website/portal provides teens with a safe and healing space for reading and sharing stories of survival and hope after sexual abuse, assault, or threatened harm. This website has reached every continent and all 50 states. Her work associated with the Me Too Teen Project included significant fundraising for nonprofits working with sexual assault. Isabella has received local, state, and national attention from multiple news outlets and an invitation from the Boulder D.A. to be the lead speaker for sexual assault awareness month in 2018-2019. Through this work, she realized that she had to commit herself to learning to be a sustainable, lifelong activist. To be helpful, she has to actively listen to what was needed by the communities she wants to serve. Creating this film began this process of listening deeper- this time to youth.

In 2020 Isabella began creating Watch You Rise, interviewing throughout her senior year of high school. After moving to college, she spent 2021-2022 interviewing youth and young adults from all different walks of life. When she created spaces for youth and young adults, they wanted to tell their stories and participate in this movement of change and uplifting typically silenced voices. Though it was in the early stages of creation, her work on the film received media attention. She was also honored to be invited to be the youth speaker for the 2022 YWCA Reproductive March of nearly 3000 people. With a solid start as an activist, Isabella knew she had to continue building skills and getting the funding necessary to tell these important stories. Isabella completed a Sundance Festival Collab class on documentary filmmaking, after which she began her fundraising work in earnest. This summer, Isabella was invited to share about Watch You Rise at her local YWCA, Safe House Alliances, Moving to End Sexual Assault, the Boulder D.A., and the Restorative Justice programs.

As she continues growing as an activist, she had the opportunity to interview various experts to fill in gaps of current cultural, historical, and organizational limitations to understanding youth and young adult sexual assault. She has interviewed Dr. Annie Farmer, a licensed psychologist and a youth survivor of Jeffrey Epstein and Giselle Maxwell. After years of experience with major news and media outlets, Dr. Farmer said Isabella led the most respectful and skilled interview.

Most recently she was honored to be a recipient of the YWCA “Energizing The Future Award,” and was one of 50 to be invited to attend the Telluride Student Film Symposium in 2024. In September 2024 she will one of Boulder’s youngest TEDx speakers. Isabella invites you to support youth and young adults and join her as she create a film to expand the conversation around sexual assault in populations that deserve a voice. As rights to education around sexuality, sex, and sexual assault continue to be withheld, she aims to make Watch You Rise accessible and distributable so that it can reach communities across the country. Watch You Rise is fiscally sponsored by From The Heart Productions, which means that donations through From The Heart is tax deductible. Please email for more information.

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WILLA Productions and Elizabeth Woodward - Producer

Elizabeth is a producer of documentary and narrative films, and founder of WILLA.

She was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30, DOC NYC 40 Under 40, Berlinale Talents, and is an Impact Partners Producers Fellow and a Sundance Catalyst Fellow. Her recent films include ANOTHER BODY (SXSW Special Jury Award, Sundance Catalyst), YOU RESEMBLE ME (Venice Film Festival, executive produced by Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, Alma Har’el, Riz Ahmed) and ON THE DIVIDE (Tribeca Film Festival, POV on PBS). Other notable projects include Netflix’s THE GREAT HACK (Academy Award shortlist, Emmy nominee, BAFTA nominee, Sundance Film Festival), HBO’s hit series THE VOW: A NXIVM STORY (New York Times Best TV Shows of 2020), a VR experience PERSUASION MACHINES (Sundance New Frontier, SXSW). Elizabeth’s films have been supported by Sundance Institute, Impact Partners, Chicken and Egg, Film Independent, Field of Vision, The Gotham, New York Foundation for the Arts, the International Documentary Association, among others. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations Young Professionals Group, the Documentary Producers Alliance, and the Frontline Club.

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Maria Marrone - Co-Writer and Editor

MARIA MARRONE is a documentary filmmaker and photographer. She received her undergraduate degree from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and her master's from the London School of Oriental & African Studies. Her cinematography, editing, and co-direction in her first film, The Ritual to Beauty, won the Grand Jury prize at Slamdance and received nominations at BlackStar Film Festival, HotDocs, and BFI London Film Festival. She has been part of the editing team for award-winning films and has dedicated much of her work to films that promote social change, most notably for the Muslim, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx diaspora. She has used her talents to create moving pieces for charities working out of Palestine and Iraqi Kurdistan. Her photo work has been featured in a series of publications including VICE, DazedDigital, and Latina Magazine.

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Virginie Danglades - Story Consultant/Consulting Editor

Virginie Danglades is a seasoned film & television editor who works on strong story and character-driven films, verité-style documentary features and shorts, as well as TV series for broadcast and streamers. The Barber of Little Rock, a recent short film she co-edited, was nominated for an Oscar in 2024.  She edited No Farewells (“Sans Adieu”) a French documentary feature which opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 and Wine Crush, an immersive film exploring a summer harvest and the winemaking process, which opened at DOCNYC. Virginie also edited episodes for PBS Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Netflix Harry and Meghan and The Principles of Pleasure, and was a regular editor on CNN's long-running investigative series “This is Life with Lisa Ling.” Across many projects and genres, Virginie is committed to editing stories and films that will help further understand our complicated world.

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Lisa Remington Consulting Producer 

Emmy-nominated filmmaker, LISA REMINGTON has produced over two dozen documentaries including Nathaniel Kahn's art world exploration The Price of Everything (Sundance 2018), Johanna Demetrakas’ inspiring Netflix Original Feminists: What Were They Thinking?, and Mark Jonathan Harris’ myth-busting look at the Los Angeles foster care system Foster (AFI Docs 2018, HBO). Other projects include Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mother Ethel (Sundance 2012, HBO); Davis Guggenheim’s Obama campaign short The Road We’ve Traveled; and Jessica Yu’s short about net neutrality, made for the Ford Foundation,foreveryone.net. Lisa co-produced Sam Feder’s Disclosure (Sundance 2020), Richard Ray Perez and Lorena Parlee’s Cesar’s Last Fast (Sundance 2014), and Lucy Walker’s Countdown to Zero (Sundance 2010). She also collaborated with Robert Greenwald on Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers and on The Freedom Files series for PBS. Lisa mentors for Sundance Institute’s Creative Producing Program and is a member of the Producers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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Beret Strong, Ph.D., M.F.A. - Consulting Producer 

Beret E. Strong has been making documentary films since 1995 and owns Landlocked Films.She is also a researcher, writer, and educator. Her films have shown on PBS stations across the U.S. and Canada and won CINE Golden Eagles, the NAFDMA Insight Award for Excellence, an IDA/ABC News Videosource Award nomination, and various best director and best feature documentary film festival awards.  Festival screenings include Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Yamagata International Film Festival, Cine las Americas Film Festival, the Boulder International Film Festival, Denver International Film Festival, and the Pan African Film Festival. Her most recent films are This is [Not] Who We Are about racism and Now Matter What, about addiction, incarceration, and recovery. Beret cares about amplifying people’s voices, social justice and equity, the global community, and the health of our planet.

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Kathy Leichter - Consulting Producer/Engment Strategist

Kathy Leichter is an award-winning documentary producer, director, engagement strategist, and impact producer with over thirty years of working in film and television. Her most recent film, HERE ONE DAY,about mental illness and suicide in Leichter’s family, premiered at IDFA, won Best Documentary and the Jury Prize at the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, and is now the centerpiece of a national screening initiative that Leichter designed and currently directs. Previously, Leichter directed and produced A DAY’S WORK, A DAY’S PAY, in association with ITVS, which follows three welfare recipients fighting for economic justice in New York City, and designed and directed the film’s 5-year audience engagement campaign.  She has produced numerous independent documentaries including LIKE ANY OTHER KID by Victoria Mills and SPIT IT OUT by Jeff Shames. Leichter has extensive experience designing and implementing successful audience engagement campaigns and has produced over 1500 impact events (in-person and virtual) across the country on issues including racial and economic justice, the climate crisis, mental health, women, policing, civil discourse, juvenile justice, and Jewish identity

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Tracy Dundon – Assistant Producer and Outreach Coordinator 

Tracy Dundon is deeply committed to amplifying the voices of our youth and is a dedicated advocate for justice, fostering positive change through her involvement in volunteering, legislation, film, and community engagement campaigns. She currently serves as the Chair of the Advocacy Committee and on the Board of Directors for the YWCA of Boulder County, an organization devoted to empowering women, eliminating racism, and promoting peace, freedom, and dignity for all. As a founding member of the Boulder Valley School District's Title IX Stakeholder Council, Tracy collaborates to create systems and policies that go beyond mere Title IX compliance, focusing on prevention, inclusion, and equity. Drawing on her background in business and personal experience, Tracy actively contributes to marketing, fundraising, and community engagement when promoting projects through her extensive networking and outreach efforts.