Filmmakers
Aiyana Elliott - Director/Producer
Aiyana Elliott is an award winning filmmaker, selected by Variety as one of the top ten Digital Video directors to watch. Her feature film, The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack was awarded The Special Jury Prize for Artistic Achievement at the Sundance Film Festival and she was awarded the IFP Anthony Radziwill Documentary Achievement Award. Aiyana Elliott directed and produced a short film entitled Tough, which was broadcast on Bravo and IFC. She directed and produced Blackfire – Res Rock The Vote, which followed a Navajo punk band’s efforts to get out the youth vote on the Big Mountain reservation in Arizona. Blackfire was broadcast on PBS In 2005. In 2006 she directed a documentary feature entitled Raw, in which six people journey to a raw food center to undergo a radical diet in the hope of curing their diabetes. Raw premiered at the Newport International Film Festival. She is producing a documentary about a recent cross-country tour of the acclaimed 'Freak Folker' Devendra Banhart.
Dan Partland - Producer
Dan Partland is a producer/director of both fiction and documentary films and television. Partland is currently the Executive Producer/Showrunner of the 2009 Emmy-award winning documentary television show Intervention. In 2006 he created, produced and directed Driving Force, a reality series about the life and work of drag-racing legend John Force. In 2001, Partland, as Supervising Producer and Director won an Emmy for Best Non-Fiction Program for his work on the 13-part documentary series American High. The critically acclaimed show aired first on Fox and then was re-broadcast on PBS. Partland also co-produced the feature-doc, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, directed by Aiyana Elliott; Naked States, a feature-doc about artist Spencer Tunick’s cross-country photo-trek, which premiered on HBO; Welcome to the Dollhouse; and A Perfect Candidate, detailing the behind-the-scenes story of Oliver North’s failed bid for U.S. Senate, released theatrically to critical acclaim.
Jerry Kay – Producer
Jerry Kay, is a former Ash Grove employee, who in 1969 filmed a series of video recordings back stage at the Ash Grove. Inspired by Ash Grove performances of Luis Valdez's El Teatro Campesino, Kay spent six years as a full-time organizer for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Worker's Union. For five years, he co-produced and hosted a live music radio show on Santa Cruz, California's NPR station, KUSP, featuring many California and national touring bands and performers. Kay co-produced a recording of Hawaiian songs, The Tau Moe Family with Bob Brozman, designated an outstanding folk recording by the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center.
Taylor Hackford – Creative Consultant
A graduate of USC film school, Hackford credits the Ash Grove as an early inspiration and hangout. He filmed some of his earliest KCET music documentaries through his connection with the Ash Grove. He is an Academy-Award winning producer and director for films including Ray, An Officer and a Gentleman, Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll, When We Were Kings, La Bamba and Dolores Claiborne.