Oscar-Nominated and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Tom Neff has over twenty-five years experience in the film industry with over 25 national and international awards, including an Oscar nomination, an Emmy win, and an Emmy nomination, with awards from such distant countries as China, Switzerland, and New Zealand. An MFA graduate of the highly regarded USC School of Cinema/Television, Tom’s films have ranged widely in subject and format, and he has worked in every film format from HD to 35mm to IMAX. He is a member of both the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Television Academy. Neff founded the Documentary Channel™ (DOC; www.documentarychannel.com), the nation’s first 24/7 channel dedicated exclusively to showing independent documentaries,l which today airs on DISH and DirecTV to over 25 million viewers nationally. Neff created the DOC brand, the original programming schedule, and the Channel’s seven signature ongoing series DocTalk, Treasures of the Academy, From the Vault, Doc-U, Oscar’s Picks, Soundcheck, and the recent African American showcase, Black Documentary Cinema. Neff Executive Produced all original documentary films and product created by the Channel, including the feature lengths, notably the Emmy-winning Shake Hands with the Devil; TVA: Built for the People, Johnny Berlin 2; the 4-hour jazz series Icons Among Us for DonQ; the shorter EmPOWered for the EPA, and Speed Dreams for Exxon. Neff worked with the Academy of Motion Pictures in restoration, helping to restore three signature John Huston WWII documentaries which debuted at a special Academy screening event, as well as the seminal 1968 documentary on race relations, A Time For Burning and others. Neff teaches film production, media, documentary history, management, marketing and communication as Assistant Professor at MTSU (Middle TN State University). He has led for the past three years students to Florence, Italy, Paris, France, and Athens, Greece to produce short documentaries. Three teams of four students each shoot and finish a ten-minute documentary; the documentaries have won national prizes and will air on PBS. Neff’s films have been featured in special screenings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Whitney, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Academy of Motion Pictures, the Director’s Guild, the NYC Paley Center, Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, PBS’s “American Masters,” USC, UCLA, and many other venues. He has been a guest speaker or given master classes at festivals and schools such as Sundance, Hot Docs, Lincoln Jazz Center, Real Screeen, Hollywood Black Film Festival, International Documentary Association, USC, NYU, Hot Springs Documentary Festival, Westdoc, National Educational Media Network, and many others. A pioneer in High Definition production, Tom produced and directed the nation’s first HDTV art documentary production with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Japanese broadcaster NHK, Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days. Many of Neff’s films revolve around artists, from a visually stunning approach to Dada artist and ceramicist Beatrice Wood: Mama of Dada, to a 35mm documentary on the artistry of musical legend Herb Alpert. Neff produced, directed and wrote the seminal 6 hours TBS series on country music, America’s Music: The Roots of Country, the most extensive history on country music ever produced. Tom is an expert in late 19th and early 20th century American art and history, with films such as the IMAX production Our Country, which traced 20th Century American history through country music songs of each decade. His recent feature-length documentary, Chances: The Women of Magdalene, on struggling and recovered prostitutes, won the Audience Award at the Nashville Film Festival, the Tennessee Spirit Award for the best film of the year by a Tennessean, the Governor’s Award, and a Prism Award Nomination. For more information, go to www.tomneff.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Neff.