Creative Team
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Karla Murthy
Director & Editor (she/her/hers)
Read the Director’s Statement
Karla is an Emmy-nominated producer and has been working on news documentaries for over 15 years as a producer, shooter and correspondent for several PBS news programs. Her award-winning work was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as “compelling, informative and compassionate.”
Her directorial debut, the feature documentary The Place That Makes Us screened at numerous film festivals including DOC NYC, was one of the top ten films at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, received an Emerging Documentary Director Award, and Best of the Fest at Arlington Film Festival. The film premiered nationally on the acclaimed documentary television series “America ReFramed” and on PBS platforms.
Karla grew up in Texas and is of Filipino and South Asian descent. She graduated from Oberlin College, is an alum of the Third World Newsreel Workshop, the Documentary Institute at Antioch College in Ohio, is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Film Fatales.
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Andrew Fredericks
Producer & Director of Photography (he/him/his)
Andrew is a veteran film and television director, producer, editor and cinematographer. He has worked with preeminent journalist Bill Moyers on a host of documentaries and conversations, as well as collaborations with Alex Gibney, Abigail Disney, and pioneering documentarian, Tom Spain. He edited the award winning, I Came To Testify, from the PBS Women War and Peace series and edited and wrote Looks Like Laury, Sounds Like Laury, named one of the top ten television documentaries of 2015 by the New York Times. More recently, Andrew edited Abigail Disney's Emmy Award winning Armor of Light, John Leguizamo’s Road to Broadway, and produced and edited the award-winning documentary, 3212 Un-Redacted.
His current projects include an exclusive embed with the journalist at the local, independent newspaper in Uvalde,TX, and Last Kid Picked, a feature documentary on the revolutionary gay artist, Bernard Perlin.
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Zackary Drucker
Executive Producer (she/her/hers)
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent.
She directed the 2023 Hulu documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl and co-directed two recent projects: the 2023 documentary The Stroll which premiered at Sundance and 2022’s documentary series The Lady and the Dale, both released on Max. She is a producer on Biosphere, an upcoming IFC theatrical film to be released in July 2023.
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Andrew Yee
Composer (she/they)
GRAMMY Award winning cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet. They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance.
Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them.
They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.
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Ruby Walsh
Associate Producer (she/her/hers)
Ruby is an audio producer and writer. In 2019, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a First Class Honors degree in English Literature.
Since then, she has acted as associate producer on various podcasts and films, such as Bill Moyers’ podcast Moyers on Democracy, Vin Liota’s documentary Objects, and an up-coming documentary produced by the same team behind the award-winning documentary The Pollinators.
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Karina Grudnikov
Strategic Advisor (she/her/hers)
Karina Grudnikov is a copywriter, marketer, and creative strategist with a passion for powerful storytelling.
Informed by a unique background in journalism and psychology, she has spent the last twelve years helping individuals and brands grow and engage their audiences.
Her work includes New York magazine and its verticals, Harry Walker Agency, Gotham Ghostwriters, Onassis Foundation, and more.
Film Advisors
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Katherine Vockins
Founder and Director of Rehabilitation Through the Arts
Katherine founded RTA in 1996 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and now operates in 6 New York State facilities. RTA‘s mission is to help people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment. RTA Katherine has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by SUNY Purchase for her prison work, was named Huffington Post Person of the Day and Westchester County (NY) Thought Leader.
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Suzette Ermler
Defense and Mitigation Specialist
Suzette Ermler is a Licensed Master Social Worker who currently works as a mitigation specialist for the Federal Public Defender in Texas.
She has also worked as a defense investigator in Louisiana and Texas. Her role is to help ensure that our filmmaking actions will not negatively affect Jamie Diaz while she is incarcerated.
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Nell Gaither
President, Trans Pride Initiative
In 2011, Nell helped found Trans Pride Initiative (TPI), a nonprofit organization working to support and advance transgender justice issues across Texas. Much of TPI's current work involves addressing housing safety, healthcare access, and violence in Texas prisons. Nell has served on the Ryan White Planning Council of the Dallas Area, the Dallas LGBT Task Force, the Dallas Domestic Violence Task Force.
Karla Murthy
I first heard about Jamie Diaz from my Producer, Andrew Fredericks, who had learned the basics of her story and passed them on to me. And while I was certainly amazed by the quality of art she was creating under the harsh conditions of incarceration, it was when I read one of Jamie’s letters and experienced the intimacy and honesty of her voice, that a vision of a film emerged. So last April, Andrew and I reached out to Gabriel Joffe, Jamie’s friend and advocate in Boston and proposed the idea of making a short documentary. Gabriel brought the idea to Jamie, and upon getting the pair’s blessings, we headed up to Massachusetts and started filming.
One of the first challenges for me is that I am a heterosexual, cisgender woman who wanted to tell a trans centered story. To do that, I enlisted people from the LGBTQ+ community to join our core creative and advisory team, to help steer us away from the pitfalls, clichés and tropes that often accompany stories about trans folks told by people outside the community. I also felt it would be essential that the filmmaking process be fully transparent and collaborative with Jamie and Gabriel, the main participants of the film. We shared language used on the website, fundraising appeals and cuts of the film as it evolved. We devised a way to send Jamie a transcript and still frames from the film to her in prison for her review and approval. Welcoming their feedback and openly discussing the filmmaking process with them taught me to be more communicative, collaborative, and vulnerable. It was a beautiful and valuable experience for me.
Another essential consideration was to protect Jamie from any potential negative consequences that could arise from the film while she remains incarcerated. For that all important task, we worked with an expert in trans related prison issues and a defense investigator both based in Texas and very familiar with the state’s opaque corrections system.
I also felt a personal connection to Jamie because we both grew up in Houston. My performing arts high school was in the city’s historic gay neighborhood; the very same neighborhood where Jamie spent much of her own youth. I kept imagining that we might have passed each other all those years ago; two people from different worlds, never imagining that our lives would intersect again in this unlikely and most intimate of ways.
As the attack on trans people escalates every day, we want to offer this film as a celebration of life and resiliency and dignity. This is a story about a beautiful friendship, creating one’s chosen family and the restorative power of art. Jamie says it best, “I believe it is important to shed as much light as possible on inequality as well as show the integrity, courage, beauty, and love of our people.”
It has been an honor to make this film with her.
Director’s Statement