The Creative Team - Coming Home
Matia Karrell
Matia Karrell
Director and Producer
Karrell directed and produced the 1989 Academy Award Nominated short film Cadillac Dreams. She directed, co-wrote, and produced her award-winning first feature-length film, Behind the Red Door. Karrell's television credits include The West Wing and Army Wives. Her documentary production work includes Big Mountain’79, which became Broken Rainbow 1985 government's Navajo relocation program. OscarWinner - Best Documentary Feature. The award-winning Making Waves: The hidden power of sound in cinema (2019). Now in post-production, Karrell directed her documentary TWILIGHT: Los Angeles, 1992, LA County High School for the Arts ‘All Girl’ piece a multi-racial, multi-gender collaborative production of Anna Deavere Smith’s documentary-theater piece. TWILIGHT: L.A. Karrell is a recipient of a Fulbright to Paris, the American Film Institute (AFI) Women Director's Fellowship. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America and a Graduate Film Instructor at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.
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Hilary Prentice
Hilary Prentice
Producer
Prentice is also producing Karrell’s dramatic television series about the WASP, FlyGirls. Prentice worked on the Emmy-nominated HBO film, The Tale, and award-winning animation director Fabrice Joubert's film, Safety. Prentice produced writer/director Jim MacDonald’s award-winning first film, Heavy Lifting. Prentice has also written, directed, and produced educational shorts for nonprofits including the award-winning start-up Magic Links. An Academic All-American graduating with honors from Dartmouth College, Prentice was also the recipient of Dartmouth’s prestigious Louis Morton History prize and a Sloane-Dicky fellow.
Sharon Wood
Sharon Wood
Writer
Wood, a longtime documentary filmmaker, has served as a writer on Oscar nominees Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, and Super Chief: The Life and Legacy of Earl Warren, along with the Peabody and Columbia-Dupont award-winning The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175. Between 2003-11, she was a producer/writer for Lucasfilm’s documentary department and co-authored The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making along with Oscar winners Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, published by Praeger-ABC Clio in 2012.
Molly Merryman, Ph.D.
Molly Merryman, Ph.D.
Consulting Producer
Merryman is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and Associate Professor, at the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State University. She is the author of Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the WASP of World War II, first published in 1997 and recently selected for a 2020 re-release in the New York University Press “Classics” collection. She has directed and produced nine documentaries that have been broadcast in the United States and the United Kingdom and have screened at academic meetings, museums, and universities around the world.
Charissa Threat, Ph.D.
Charissa Threat, Ph.D.
Advisor
CHARISSA THREAT, Ph.D. is a Consulting Producer on Coming Home and the author of Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (University of Illinois Press, 2015), won the 2017 Lavinia L. Dock Book Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing for outstanding research and writing on the history of nursing. Charissa Threat is an Associate Professor of History at Chapman University where she teaches courses in United States and African American history.
John Kafka
John Kafka
Animation Producer
JOHN KAFKA has been in animation for years as an animator, producer, and director. He has animated TV commercials for sugar-coated breakfast cereals of many flavors and on forgotten TV shows. He has directed various TV series, among them Ninja Turtles, a DVD with a Disney Princess, and a CG film starring kids and dinosaurs. As a producer, he brought you music videos and TV series such as Spawn and others with assorted action heroes. He has worked in various capacities and in various countries on shows including Curious George, Rugrats, Land Before Time, Puppy Dog Pals, Amazing Stories, and in VFX and for a theme park development company.
Shilin Sun
Shilin Sun
Post-Production Supervisor
Shilin Sun is a producer and cinematographer based in Los Angeles. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Shilin started as assistant editor on the PBS Documentary-series Veterans Coming Home. Shilin shot and co-produced the MTV documentary Finding Yingying, an official selection for 22 major festivals including DOC NYC and winner for the Special Jury Award at 2020 SXSW Film Festival. Most recently, he is also producing a documentary about workers at the frontline of Covid-19 with Emmy winning director Lixin Fan.
Humanities Scholars and Advisors
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Charissa Threat - Ph.D., Associate Professor of History at Chapman University, and an author.
- Jennifer Keene - Ph.D., Professor of History, Chapman University, and a co-editor.
- Karissa Haufenberg - Ph.D., Associate Professor of History at Tulane University, and a co-editor.
- Coll Beth Behn - MA, Ph.D., Executive Officer of the United States Army Deputy Chief of Staff G-8, commander, 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary).
- Richard Kohn - Professor Emeritus of History, Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill, Chief of Air Force History, and Chief Historian.
- Linda K. Kerber - Professor of history, Emerita; Lecturer in the Law University of Iowa, political intellectual historian, educator, and co-editor.
- Antonia Chayes - Professor at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
- Robert Arnold - Retired in Sonoma Valley, grandson of General Hap Arnold, and currently writing a biography on his grandfather.
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Katie Hafner - Executive Producer and host of Lost Women of Science Initiative, American journalist, and author.