Toni Bell

Toni Bell is the creator and host of the What's Up with Docs Podcast. She was the Impact Producer for Abigal Disneys The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales and Fruits of Labor. She is the Impact Producer for Re-Present Medias The Power of Personal Documentary Films, the Impact Partnerships Strategist for Odyssey Impact, and the Impact Producer for A Woman on the Outside. She serves on the advisory board of the Southeast European Film Festival. Her foray into documentary film began when she wrote and edited the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers West newsletter. 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 researched archival for several films and television shows, including Centric's "Being" and Behind the Music. She has worked as an Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures and the Hartley Media Impact Initiative. She has been a speaker, panelist, mentor, and juror at documentary film festivals and labs such as NALIP, Dok Leipzig, HotDocs, IFPWeek, European Film Market, Outfest, Docs by the Sea, and the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She teaches courses on impact and media at Saybrook University. Toni was part of the inaugural cohort of Art Equity's BIPOC Leadership Circle. She is the former Filmmaker Services Manager at the International Documentary Association, where she was responsible for handling the day-to-day operations of the fiscal sponsorship program. Toni also curated the DocuClub work-in-progress screening series. She holds a MAT-TESOL and an MA in Visual Anthropology from USC, an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in professional screenwriting from UCLA.