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About

Mission Statement

Agency, Depth & Voice

Distance Media finds agency, depth and voice to empower ideas impacted by polarization. We utilize creative pathways to interweave dialogues, storytelling, accountability and research to produce documentary films and emerging story forms.
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Value Statement

Space for surprise

Distance Media is a creative engine committed to a posture of fluid resilience through evolving outcomes. When societal norms go wrong we’re working together to close distance, thereby creating space for surprise and substantive debate.
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WRITER | DIRECTOR | CREATIVE PRODUCER

Aaron Peirano Garrison

Aaron Peirano Garrison is the founder of Distance Media LLC. His work explores new and traditional story forms in film and media. He is fascinated by how story-telling through images creates connections inter-culturally and across time. His globally minded practice is informed by a life-long passion for social and cross-cultural engagement and by his prior background in international humanitarian fieldwork in South East Asia, Central and South America.

MORE About Aaron

His work aims to create visual interventions inspired by imperative questions and to explore artistic forms in a collaborative fashion. Aaron received his B.A. in Art with a concentration in Film from Yale, where he was an Eli Whitney scholar and a CCAM fellow. His documentaries and media installations have been shown at the Whitney Humanities Center, New Haven Docs Film Festival, Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, Forte Festival at the University of Alabama, Providence College and more. A work-in-progress screening of “Questions of Justice” was Yale Policy Lab’s event of the year, now being developed as a series in collaboration with Trevite Willis and Keero Birla. His documentary, “Spectacular Body” screened at Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, is also now in development as a Series with Keero Birla. His documentary, “The Wisdom in Fashion ”, screened by invitation at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.

PRODUCER

Keero Birla

Keero Birla is an award-winning producer of factual documentaries, television series and Imax films with entertaining and artistic themes that promote lifelong learning and engagement.

MORE About Keero

He is known for “Tiger Tiger,” directed by George Butler, which was awarded the Warner Prize at the Environment Film Festival. His filmography includes “The Age of AI with Robert Downey Jr.” (YouTube Premium), “The Holy Traveller” (BYUTV) and several Imax documentaries, including “India: Kingdom of the Tiger,” “Flight Without Wings” and “Dinosaurs Alive 3D.” As director and writer of 150+ hours of factual and lifestyle television, his work can be seen on “Brave New Worlds with Stephen Hawking” (Discovery), “The Big Decision” (CBC), “Property Shop” (HGTV) as well as all five seasons of the Gemini-nominated “Chuck’s Day Off” and the international hit series “Eat Street” (Food Network), among others.

EDITOR

Evan Johnson

Evan Johnson discovered his passion for documentary film while studying at New York University’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. Soon after, he was learning hands-on as an assistant editor for HBO’s Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All and Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge.

MORE About Evan

He helped craft Hulu’s And We Go Green, a film about electric-racecar drivers, PBS’s The Oratorio, Martin Scorsese’s “love letter to music,” and Disney’s Afterward, which follows an Israeli-American psychoanalyst as she probes the traumas of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He just completed editing The King of In Between, a documentary about singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys, and is currently assembling a film about women’s wrestling.

Advisors

ADVISOR

Kalfani Ture

Kalfani Ture is a practicing urban ethnographer and assistant professor of Criminal Justice and African American Studies with a background as a law enforcement officer. Kalfani has appeared in Peirano Garrison’s work and he continues to bring expert advice, authenticity, understanding and guidance.
FILM ADVISOR

Julie Mallozzi

Julie Mallozzi is a documentary filmmaker, a faculty member at Harvard, AFVS the administrative director of the Film Studies Center at Harvard University. Her generosity as an advisor with Peirano Garrison stems originally from their work together at Harvard and helps guide projects in various stages.
ADVISOR

Andrew Papachristos

Andrew Papachristos is a Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research, and the Faculty Director of Corners: the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science. Andrew has supported development and hosted screenings for Peirano Garrison’s projects from the beginning. His support and guidance at key moments offers vital accountability and stabilizes projects at their most fragile stages
ADVISOR

Irene Peirano Garrison

Irene Peirano Garrison Is a senior professor of Classics at Harvard University where she works on Roman poetry and its relation to rhetoric, literary criticism and scholarship, both ancient and modern. Irene is a regular story consultant assisting Distance Media’s vision to pursue imperative stories.
FILM ADVISOR

Robb Moss

Robb Moss is a documentary filmmaker. He has been a creative advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Doc Edit Labs since their inception in 2004, worked as a festival juror at Sundance, San Francisco, Denver, Camden, Seattle, Chicago, New England, and Ann Arbor, served eight years as a Board Director for ITVS, and has taught filmmaking at Harvard for the past thirty years where he is currently a Harvard College Professor. As an Advisor and mentor to Peirano Garrison, Robb brings his vast film and industry experience to Distance Media projects beginning at the foundational level.
ADVISOR

Bonnie Talbert

Bonnie Talbert is a faculty member in social studies at Harvard University and interim director of the women’s center. She taught Contemporary Civilization at Columbia, and has also taught courses on existentialism, applied ethics, logic, the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of psychology, effective altruism, friendship, and restorative justice. In 2022 she became a member of the Cambridge Peace Commission. Her research interests include philosophy of psychology, other minds, and interpersonal knowledge. As an advisor with Distance Media, Bonnie’s on and off screen work focuses on ethics, cultural sensitivity and themes of restorative justice. She also partners in the process of story development.

Contact

For more information about a screening or to be in touch about a Distance Media project contact us below.
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