BADWest Member
Story Consultant, Archival Producer, Impact Producer, Filmmaker Mentor, & Podcaster
Toni Bell is the Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures. Her work entails designing impact strategies, building, and creating partnerships, and managing impact initiatives and events. She’s worked on films such as Councilwoman, Building the American Dream, And She Could Be Next, Through the Night, And So I Stayed, and Dear Homeland. She has been a featured panelist, speaker, pitch mentor, and industry representative at festivals and events such as Good Pitch Local, Hot Doc, Sheffield, Korea Communications Agency, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Seen Films (Egypt), Berlinale, DokFest Munich, CPH: Dox, Caribbean Film Academy and many more. She is the former Filmmaker Services Manager at the IDA where she was responsible for operations of the fiscal sponsorship program, the largest documentary focused program in the industry. She also curated IDA’s DocuClub Work-in-Progress Screening Series.
Her foray into documentary film began when she started writing and editing the newsletter for the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers – West. This led to her first gig as a production assistant and then an archival researcher for the film, Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, which aired nationally on PBS. Since then, she has done archival research for several documentaries and television shows including Centric’s Being and Behind the Music. She is currently doing archival research on Byron Hurt's latest film Hazing and Maurice Simmons project on the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority. Lastly, she is the creator and host of the “What’s Up with Docs Podcast.” She holds a MAT-TESOL and an M.A. in Visual Anthropology from USC, an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in professional screenwriting from UCLA.
Website: What’s Up with Docs Podcast www.whatsupwdocs.com
Email: info@whatsupwdocs.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whatsupwdocs
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whatsupwdocs
