November 26, 2006
Here is another profile of a successful Hispanic making a difference:
Vanessa Arteaga, a ten-year film industry veteran has worked in the world of content development and distribution. Arteaga is currently the Executive Producer of Latin America for Jaman – an online film community for people passionate about world cinema – where she is charged with online audience development, content integration, marketing and community outreach.
Prior to Jaman, Ms. Arteaga served as a senior development executive with Wellspring Media, a leading theatrical film, television and video distribution company with an acclaimed independent film library, which was sold to the The Weinstein Co., in early 2006. This allowed Arteaga to immediately segue as a consultant for LIME Media, A Revolution Co., in an Acquisitions and Development capacity until signing on with Jaman in Fall of 2006.
Arteaga, has been invited to speak at major conferences and institutions such as the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, The New York Latino International Film Festival, The Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, The Tribeca Film Festival, Hot Docs, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, True/False Film Festival, SilverDocs Film Festival, The RealScreen Summit, The Global Entertainment and Media Summit, The Caribbean Media Summit, The Institute of Spiritual Entertainment, The Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and New York University. She has recently been invited to participate as a panelist at the San Francisco Latino International Film Festival taking place November 2007 and is also slated for an interview on Viva Voz, the flagship interview program on the V-me broadcast network.
She served as Executive Producer on such projects as the documentary Unknown White Male (theatrically released in 2006), a film that chronicles the mesmerizing journey of a man who spontaneously loses his memory and has no recollection of his past. The film was chosen as one of the fifteen Academy Award finalists for Best Documentary with recent coverage in the New York Times hailing it as a ‘thought-stirring documentary… that gets you to thinking about how our lives are built from wisps of memory and markers of memory like photographs’. She also served as an Executive Producer on the feature-length documentary film Tarnation securing it as a co-production for the company. The film went on to receive worldwide acclaim, including the award for Best Documentary by the National Society of Film Critics; the award for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival; the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival, and the Emerging Filmmaker Award by the International Documentary Association. Tarnation was also nominated for Best Documentary of the year for both the IFP Gotham Awards and the IFP Spirit Awards. Arteaga managed the company’s content development strand, tracking documentaries and lifestyle programming in the production/post-production phase, ultimately securing and packaging them as a co-production properties for distribution through Wellspring’s theatrical, television and home entertainment channels.
Prior projects include Devil’s Playground, and Fashion Victim: The Killing of Gianni Versace for Cinemax, Mama Africa for PBS, Muddy Waters: Can’t Be Satisfied for American Masters, Who is Alan Smithee? for AMC, Howard Hughes: His Movies and His Women for TCM and several pledge programs for PBS.
Arteaga served as a judge on this year’s News & Documentary Awards and currently sits on the Board of Women Make Movies as well as on the Advisory Board of the Florida Media Market. She is an active member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), the International Documentary Association (IDA), and has served on the selection committee for Tribeca All Access – a program of the Tribeca Film Festival specifically designed to promote industry resources to filmmakers and producers of color.
