Staff, Board & Advisors

The Board of Directors of Northeast Historic Film currently consists of ten members. The bylaws allow for as few as three (which is where NHF started in 1986), and as many as 15 board members, each elected for a three-year term. The Board holds four meetings a year, with additional committee meetings as needed.

Ward Briggs – Bangor, ME
Senior Property Manager at the Stapleton Development Corporation, a quasi-governmental non-profit entity tasked with redeveloping the decommissioned airport in downtown Denver. He retired in 2009 and returned home to Maine in 2013 where he purchased his first home in Bangor and continued his love of perennial gardening. He has been active in supporting local mountain bike chapters, land trusts, trail advocacy groups and other environmental organizations.

Sian Evans – Veazie, ME
Consulting Producer for documentaries on science, nature and history including Discovery HD Theater, National Geographic, PBS.  Twenty-seven years of experience, working nationally and internationally. Family roots in Kingman, Macwahoc, and Millinocket, Maine.

Michael Grillo– Penobscot, ME.
Director of the Film / Video minor, and Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Maine. Teaching and research foci in Late Italian Medieval painting, and theory and history of cinema and photography. Former long term involvement in the Points North Institute, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, and Cornell Cinema. Served on Maine Film Commission. Cornell University, PhD, History of Art. Grew up in a projection booth.


Founder and managing partner, The Wildheart Group, media production. Writer, producer and on air at WERU, Maine community radio. Family member of Hiram Percy Maxim, founder of the Amateur Cinema League. NYZS/The Wildlife Conservation Society, National Manager, Annual Support, and an executive producer, The Wildlife Concert with John Denver.

Andrea McCarty President – Middletown, CT
Yale University Library, Head of Media Preservation. Masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum. Formerly Director of Archives and Asset Management at HBO and project archivist at WGBH. Manager of the Alamo Theatre and archivist at Northeast Historic Film from 1999–2002.

Mark Neumann, Ph.D. – Flagstaff, AZ

Professor, School of Communication, Northern Arizona University. Teaches cultural and media studies, visual culture, and documentary. Author of Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience, On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon, and a variety of essays on amateur film published in academic journals and edited collections.

Ron Russell, Treasurer – Verona Island, ME
Former Director of Bangor/Augusta Operations, Darling’s Corp., Brewer, Maine.  Native of Castine, Maine; graduate University of Pennsylvania, 1971. In early 1970s worked in advertising film production in Boston with many of the same people as NHF co-founder David Weiss.

Charles Stanhope, Clerk – Southwest Harbor, ME
Chair, Maine Arts Commission. Board member, Maine Historical Society and the Southwest Harbor Public Library. Library of Congress assistant chief operating officer, retired. Portland, Maine native.  Graduate, University of Maine.  Catholic University of America master’s degree in library science.

Courtney Stephens,  Los Angeles, CA
An independent filmmaker whose most recent film is Terra Femme, (2021), a live
documentary feature.  An essay film comprised of amateur travelogues filmed by women in the 1920s-1950s, and includes footage from NHF’s collections.  Also in 2021, she released Lesser Choices, a documentary, and Perfect Fifths, an experimental short. In 2022 she received
a Guggenheim fellowship, a Sloan Foundation grant, and a Martin Adoyan prize. <br)

Pamela Wintle – Washington, D.C.
Founder, Smithsonian Institution Human Studies Film Archives. Member, National Film Preservation Board. Founding chair, Association of Moving Image Archivists’ amateur film group, Inédits. Family roots in Skowhegan, Maine.