Toni A. Bell

Toni Bell is the Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures. Her work entails designing impact strategies, building, and creaAng partnerships, and managing impact iniAaAves 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

representaAve at fesAvals and events such as Good Pitch Local, Hot Doc, Sheffield, Korea CommunicaAons Agency, Big Sky Documentary Film FesAval, 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 operaAons 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 wriAng and ediAng the newsleCer for the Black AssociaAon of Documentary Filmmakers – West. This led to her first gig as a producAon assistant and then an archival researcher for the film, Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Poli>cs of Race, which aired naAonally 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 CreaAve WriAng from Naropa University, and a cerAficate in professional screenwriAng from UCLA.