About the Producers

Betsy Bayha
Associate Producer
Betsy Bayha has more than 15 years of journalism experience with an emphasis on public broadcasting for National Public Radio and PBS. She has worked as a producer, director, writer, and associate producer for a number of video productions. She is also a reporter and writer for print and new media. Coming to the Working Group in December 1999, Bayha worked on "Night Shift."

Carol Cantwell
Business Manager
Cantwell has over five years experience in nonprofit finance. She has trained board members from a variety of nonprofit settings how to read and make better use of financial statements as planning tools. Cantwell is currently pursuing a degree in economics and is a co-author of "A Reader in Black Political Economy: Study Guide." She also serves on the board of The Agape Foundation, a fund for nonviolent social change.

Katrina Friedman
Associate Producer
Katrina Friedman joined Livelyhood as a research associate for "Chipping Off the Old Block" and then as an associate producer for "Carpool to Nirvana." Before joining the show, she produced a half hour documentary about orphans in Cambodia, "The Mystery of Rath Pohl," which won an Andrew Stern Award from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is airing this summer on local PBS stations. She is currently working as a content strategist for a web consulting firm in San Francisco.

David Holley
Web Producer
David Holley is the newest addition to The Working Group. He has a M.S. in Instructional Technology and a B.A. in Radio/Television communications. David has worked as a television/new media producer for Black Entertainment Television, Tech-TV, WTNH-8, and WBNE-59 in New Haven Connecticut. David hopes to retire early and snowboard.

Matthew Huerta
Administrative Manager
Matthew takes care of distribution, administration, networking, and is the voice you'll hear when you call The Working Group. Prior to TWG he worked in public health for four and a half years, his last job being a research assistant at Children and the Environment, a planning project for The California Wellness Foundation.

Jon Halperin
Producer
Jon Halperin has been a producer, associate producer, director, and editor on a wide range of award-winning documentaries and shorts for PBS, MTV, and independent distribution. Credits include: The American Promise; Cadillac Desert; Easy Money; Frontline; and The Minors. He is currently working on two pieces of his own, Nobel's Briefcase and City on the Hill.

Bob Laird
Producer / Editor

Bob Laird has been a writer/producer/editor for 25 years. He has contributed his work to over thirty documentaries and television specials with The Working Group since the company formed in 1988. Bob edited the Eddie Izzard comedy special "Dress to Kill" which recently won an Emmy for Home Box Office.

From 1975 to 1985 Bob owned a production company in Oregon, which produced over 100 commercials and television programs. PM and Evening Magazine, National Geographic, Chevron, Georgia Pacific, and the British Broadcasting Corporation were just a few clients. From 1988 to 1996 Bob was chief editor and facilities manager at Monaco Film and Video in San Francisco. Regular clients included Universal Studios, Fantasy Films, and Lucasfilm, as well as many independent documentary and film producers. Bob was also video editor for "In The Shadow of The Stars" which won the 1992 Academy Award for best documentary film.

Heather Blackwell Love
Production Coordinator
Heather has been part of the Livelyhood (or The Working Group) team for nearly two years, seeing three shows transition from conception to completion. Originally from Minneapolis, MN, she has worked in TV/Film for 7 years juggling the behind-the-scenes details for commercials, feature films and public television specials. When she's not working, you can find Heather walking around Lake Merritt, kickboxing her way to Thailand or shopping at Ikea.

Sean McGinn
Associate Producer/ Co-Segment Producer
Sean McGinn worked as part of the Livelyhood team from the series' inception in 1997 until 2000. Prior to Livelyhood, he was the media assistant for the General Program of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, Illinois. In his spare time, McGinn writes bad short stories and struggles with wanting to be an actor and having money in his pocket.

Rhian Miller
Producer
Rhian Miller has been a producer with The Working Group since 1990, co-producing the award-winning series, We Do The Work, and Not In Our Town. Before joining TWG, Miller produced and directed the award-winning film Strikestory, about the 1934 San Francisco general strike, and was the film editor for Jerry Barrish's internationally acclaimed feature film, Shuttlecock.

Miller is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Chicago International Film and Video Festival Gold Plaque and the National Educational Film and Video Festival Gold Apple. Her work has been featured at the Women in the Director's Chair, Women In Film, and Leipzig International film festivals.

Angela Morgenstern
Associate Producer
Morgenstern produced the Singapore segment for "WorldWide Work." Before that she traveled with Livelyhood associate producing "Our Towns," "Chipping Off the Old Block," and "Carpool to Nirvana." She also produced a number of the Livelyhood Web sites. Morgenstern came to The Working Group from the PBS Democracy Project and can now be found at KQED/San Francisco where she reports for "Springboard."

Sara Needham
Associate Producer
Sara Needham joined Livelyhood as an associate producer for "Planet Work" in January. Before joining the show, she directed, produced and edited her Masters thesis film "Changing Habits" at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. The half-hour documentary about the life of a Gregorian friar who lives and works in San Francisco's Castro District has screened at film festivals around the country, including the Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema in San Francisco. Sara has worked for the top-rated local news station KTVU, the American Communications Foundation, which produces pieces for the Osgood File, and on a PBS special about gun violence.

Cathleen O'Connell
Line Producer
Cathleen O'Connell joined the Livelyhood team during the 2001 season. She has worked in public television for the past 10 years on a variety of national programs and series including: "Rock & Roll," "The Mississippi: A River of Song," "Many Faces, Many Voices," and "Welcome To The Club: The Women of Rockabilly." She also produced the independent documentary "Time Capsule: Message In A Bottle" which is currently in educational distribution.

Patrice O'Neill
Executive Producer/Livelyhood Program Producer
Patrice O'Neill, has been playing with the art of documentary television for over 15 years. As co-founder of The Working Group, O'Neill has overseen the nonprofit media company's growth from a shoestring operation to a nationally-recognized, award-winning production company that is today the largest distributor of documentaries on workplace issues in the country.

Her interest in the stories of "extraordinary, ordinary" people informed her work as executive producer of The Working Group's long-running series, We Do the Work. O'Neill and Rhian Miller produced , Not In Our Town (Parts I & II), the PBS specials that helped mobilize national awareness and community action against hate crimes. She was co-creator with Will Durst of The Durst Amendment, a topical comedy show for KQED-TV and is currently working with Durst on an off-beat exploration of the elections called "The Citizen Durst Project."

Linda Peckham
Post Production Supervisor
Linda Peckham is Livelyhood's video editor and post production supervisor. For most of her eight years with The Working Group, Peckham has been an associate producer and was also the primary editor for We Do The Work.

She served as editor on KQED's award winning series, Green Means. Peckham studied with acclaimed feminist filmmaker Yvonne Rainer at the Whitney Museum program in New York. She worked as an editor and research assistant with award-winning independent filmmakers Trinh T. Minh-ha, Leslie Thornton, and Jim Culp. She has written about media and cultural politics for Discourse, Motion Picture, and FrameWorks.

Heather Searles
Associate Producer
Searles was an associate producer for "Night Shift" and was The Working Group's Not In Our Town Campaign Coordinator for 1999. Searles TV credits include, MTV's The Real World San Francisco, Eddie Murpy's Metro, Heart Mountain--Three Years in a Relocation Center (PBS), and We Came To Grow (PBS). She has a bachelor's degree from Concordia University in Communication Studies and a master's degree in Broadcast & Electronic Communications from San Francisco State University. Searles is currently an associate producer for the Bayard Rustin Documentary Film Project, and if all goes well, her next gig will be a children's television series in New York. Searles' real life night shift job--back in 1994-95--was as a master control operator at Sutro Tower in San Francisco.

Sandy Strehlou
Development Director
Sandy Strehlou comes to Livelyhood with twenty years of community and labor organizing. Prior to assuming the role of development director, Sandy spent her Livelyhood days doing promotion and outreach for the series. Regretfully, her dog, Jasper, has not yet made it into a Livelyhood episode--though she continues to pitch story ideas.

Joanne Shen
Associate Producer
In the past, Joanne Shen has worked as a journalist in Hong Kong as well as produced and directed several award-winning short documentaries. Her last documentary, Cricket Outta Compton, about an American cricket team has aired on PBS and won first prize in the Black Maria Film Festival. You can read more about her work at www.joanneshen.com

Karin Wanless
Web Producer
Karin Wanless is the Web producer for "Night Shift." At the University of California at Santa Cruz, she studied journalism and Latin American and Latino Studies. This is her third nonprofit Web site she has produced.

Kelly Whalen
Kelly Whalen has worked on the Livelyhood production team since the series inception in 1997. For the last five episodes of the series, she has worked as a segment producer. Ms. Whalen has also assistant produced special project series for Marketplace Radio, airing on National Public Radio, and for The California Report, produced out of KQED-FM. She received her master's in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where she recently produced and photographed her first independent documentary, "The Reverend and The Loft King," about the work of a preacher and a real estate developer in a neighborhood experiencing the pressures of the dot-com economy.