WINSLOW ELIOT
Writer, teacher, editor, coach, and mentor, Winslow Eliot’s novels have been translated into eleven languages and published in twenty countries. She is a contributing author to the Illustrated Atlas of Native American History (Saraband 1999) and the author of numerous magazine articles. For many years she was a copy editor and proofreader for legal publishers Clark Boardman in New York City. She also was a reader for the Independent Film Project in New York City, and she co-founded the celebrated Saturn Series Weekly Poetry Readings in New York City, now in its thirteenth year.
Winslow teaches English, writing skills, and history classes and seminars to middle and high school students. Some of the seminars she’s taught include: History through Language, American Literature, World Literature, The Odyssey, Parzival, The Romantics, Shakespeare, World Religions, History through Poetry, and a wide variety of creative and expository writing classes.
She is the coach and editor of a high school newsletter, The Globe, and she offers classes on all aspects of journalism writing, editing, publishing, and production. She has edited masters’ degree theses, college essays, and college application essays. Her journalism background includes editorial positions at Graphic Arts Monthly, Fortune Magazine, and Area, the Oriental Rug Magazine. She also offers one-on-one tutorial sessions to students seeking to improve their English language skills, or who would like to hone their creative and expository writing skills. She also offers individual mentoring for adults. Her clients include poets, screenwriters, novelists, and students.
SAMANTHA STIER
Writer and filmmaker, Samantha Stier has interned with a producer at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles and with a Director of Photography at Pacific Focus in Honolulu, and worked for a filmmaker in Hawaii on various projects, including commercials, shorts, features, editing and screenwriting. Her writer, director, cinematographer, and editor credits include many film projects, including features, shorts, commercials, public service announcements, school projects, music videos, documentaries, and reels.
She is fluent in all Final Cut Pro editing software, she is also knowledgeable in all computer systems and graphics software, including InDesign and Adobe Photoshop. She has written two complete film screenplays, several treatments, and three novels.
She conducted a three-month research project for AWSNA’s alumni networking site. The project involved contacting and interviewing alums of different age groups, researching alumni websites, systems and databases, and compiling information in a comprehensive report (available upon request). While working for a prominent filmmaker in Honolulu, Hawaii, her responsibilities included contacting actors, making call sheets, helping with equipment and craft service on shoots, uploading footage, assisting in artistic direction, creating website for film, editing various projects in Final Cut Pro and creating graphics in Motion. She also met with clients and worked on scripts.
She has previously worked as an assistant to Retirement Coach Jeff White in Honolulu, Hawaii. In this position she was responsible for writing up procedures, filing, inputting data, address changes, mailing documents, updating system to accommodate new clients, using Quicken to update finance management, and converting client files into electronic files.
She has experience in tutoring sixth, seventh and eighth graders in Spanish and English literature, spelling and grammar, as well as study skills and basic math. She was the editor, contributor, and production manager of the high school newspaper, The Globe, and she has edited college essays and college application essays.
She is currently working on obtaining her film degree from California State University, Long Beach.
JEFFERSON ELIOT
As CEO and Creative Director of JECD, Jefferson Eliot has developed concepts for theme parks, urban entertainment centers, attractions, and restaurants. He’s worked on projects for Golden Harvest Films in Singapore and Hong Kong. He developed show concepts and a masterplan for a Sesame Street theme park For Children’s Television Workshop. Other clients include Universal Studios (for various attraction concepts) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (for an indoor waterpark). He co-designed (with David Kellen Architect) Shanghai & Mein, a Chinese restaurant at Universal Citywalk. For the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, he wrote and designed (for Technifex inc.) a short computer animated movie that tells the story of the Cherokee creation myth. He designed and wrote an attraction for the German pavilion at Expo Hanover 2000 (for Technifex) that amusingly dramatizes ideas for change in the German economy using pepper’s ghost technology and computer animated characters.
In corporate communications, JECD designed trade show booths for Ricoh (in Tokyo), FedEx, Cineon (a division of Kodak), and Technifex (which won ‘Best of Show’ at the 1999 IAAPA, the international theme park convention. He has also designed sets and effects for various Cisco conferences (produced by Brainstorm Creative).
Prior to incorporating JECD, Eliot worked with Landmark Entertainment Group as Chief Concept Designer and Executive Art Director. His responsibilities ranged from site planning, architectural design, show design and scripting to leading design teams, production and on-site art direction, interior and furniture design. He designed attractions, major theme park concepts and mixed-use developments, including a masterplan for a multi-billion dollar park for Warner Brothers and another for Coney Island. He art-directed a $40 million redesign of a streamline modern riverboat on the Mississippi river, leading a design team that included HOK. He founded Myriad Shows inc. to produce a Cabaret show independently for the riverboat.
He designed and art directed extensively in Japan on two theme parks for Sanrio: PuroLand and HarmonyLand. Eliot designed the staging and visual effects (large pepper’s ghost) for the Ghostbusters show at Universal Studios, Florida.
Eliot started in theme park design at Walt Disney Imagineering, working on Tokyo Disneyland and the Horizons pavilion at Epcot.
Eliot was Creative Director at Activision, where he designed and produced the art and animation for edutainment games for McGraw Hill Home Interactive. He also worked as Production Designer on Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, a groundbreaking Showtime cable series, and Director of Visual Effects on Captain Power & The Soldiers of the Future, the world’s first interactive TV series (1988).
Eliot grew up in Europe and studied theater at Pomona College, specializing in Kabuki Theater. He did further studies at Oxford University, Harvard, and New York University.
KENDELL SHAFFER
Kendell Shaffer has had a multifaceted career in entertainment, most recently working in VFX (visual effects) on ‘Knight and Day,’ a 20th Century Fox film due out in June. During the shoot she traveled with the film to Boston, Salzburg, Austria and Seville, Spain.
In 2007 she joined the WGA when she sold a TV pilot, ‘Downtown’ to ABC Studios and a TV movie, ‘Team Julia’ to Lifetime Television, both of which she wrote with her writing partner, Jefferson Eliot. In 2009, Kendell and Jefferson turned their TV pilot, ‘Affairs of State’ about interns on Capitol Hill, into a stage play, which was performed at Electric Lodge to sold-out houses.
She has been teaching screenwriting for the Writer’s Guild Foundation in their High School Screen Writing workshop, bringing screen writing into inner city schools throughout Los Angeles. Her work with teens inspired her to write a YA novel, which she has just finished. It is the first of a series set in Venice, California.
Kendell has been Associate Producer on the movie ‘Sirens’ for Showtime; ‘King of the World’ for ABC; ‘Nash Bridges,’ ‘Orleans,’ and ‘Texarkana’ for CBS. She’s worked as Graphics Supervisor on ‘CSI:NY,’ and Visual Effects Supervisor on ‘VR.5,’ ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,’ and ‘Titanic,’ the CBS mini-series. She put in her time with Roger Corman in the art department on four Concorde-New Horizon movies, and was set decorator for various music videos and commercials. She is a voting member of the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences and an annual judge the Scriptwriters Network Screenwriting Competition.
In addition to spending time with her family, she is co-founder of Garage Band Venice, a musical jam where kids learn to play music together in individual bands.
Kendell is a graduate of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. She is a former dancer and grew up in Baltimore, the daughter of two ballet dancers.
TOM STIER
Tom Stier has been designing, hosting, and developing web sites nationally since 1997.
His customers include manufacturers, writers, designers, cartoonists, educational institutions, to name a few. He believes that everyone should have a website, and it should reflect each person’s individuality and purpose.
Born in Cambridge, Mass, and with an education background attending fine arts programs at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and University of Massachusetts, Tom was waiting for the web to happen. He spent twenty years in New York City working as a contractor and designer before moving with his family to Great Barrington in 1996.
