WHO WE ARE

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Jerri was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1948. Her family left in 1949, going first to a refugee camp in Germany, then settling in Norway. The family moved to Canada in 1954, where she grew up. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography in 1974 from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. From 1974-1980 she directed several community photography programs in Chicago, notably the Public Art Workshop on Chicago’s westside and the Community Arts Center of the Uptown Center Hull House. There she worked as arts administrator, teacher, and director of a special photography program for the hearing impaired. In 1981 her article 'Creative Observations: Photography with Hearing Impaired Children' was published in Teaching Photography (Univ. of Colorado Press). She is a past President of the Midwest region of the Society for Photographic Education.

Since 1980 she has been a partner in The Collected Image, exhibiting vintage and contemporary photography. She has received numerous grants for her own photography and to fund community programs. She has had group and one-person exhibitions of her work since 1972. Subjects include a documentation of a Cree village in Fort George, Quebec; a group of Laotian Hmong refugees in Chicago; and most recently she chronicled a month-long trip to India.

Jerri was a consultant to WTTW, Chicago Public Television on the series The Other Side of Europe. Most recently, Jerri directed and produced an award winning half hour documentary film: Never Turning Back, The World of Peggy Lipschutz. Both In the Shadow of Memory and Never Turning Back have been screened at film festivals around the world, winning numerous awards. She has also worked as post-production manager on two additional documentary films: Picture Man, the Poetry of Photographer Milton Rogovin, and Be Filled With the Spirit.

In 2013-2014, with the support of a Fulbright grant, she and Alan spent 5 months in India exploring the origins of a box of photos made in West Bengal in 1945 by an unknown American serviceman. The project involved research as well as the participation of contemporary Indian artists who used the old photos as catalysts for the creation of new artworks.  For more information on that project: Following the Box.

Alan is a second generation photographer, who began making pictures as a child. He studied photography at Indiana University while never completing a Ph.D. In Anthropology. After leaving graduate school, Alan founded the Inner-City Photo Workshop, a store-front center for high-school drop-outs on Chicago's westside. Later, he directed several projects for the Illinois Arts Council that resulted in the book 'Photography in the Classroom.' He and Jerri Zbiral started The Collected Image, providing photographs to collectors and museums and appraising photographic collections. Alan became photographic researcher for Chicago's Field Museum, responsible for the images in the permanent Eskimo and Northwest Coast Indian exhibit. At the Field, Alan also taught classes on the history of photography and on the photograph as an anthropological document.

Alan founded Teller Madsen, a museum exhibit planning and design company that has developed over 100 exhibits nationwide, including the Zell Holocaust Memorial of the Spertus Museum; the permanent exhibits for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library; the Library of Congress' Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition at the Newberry Library and Vivian Maier's Chicago. He has given over 60 lectures at conferences and institutions in the United States and Canada and has written some 20 reviews and articles for photographic publications. He has received numerous grants for community photography projects, and arts and social issues programs.

Alan has taught photography at Columbia College, Purdue University and the School of the Art Institute. At Lake Forest College, he taught in both the History and Art departments, offering courses on photography and anthropology, as well as on museums and exhibits. Most recently, he served as Executive Director of the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy, where in addition to developing public programs he also designed a permanent exhibit on the life of the presidential candidate. Alan has exhibited his own photography since the 1970s, with work in many private collections as well as in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, the Jerusalem Museum and others. He is a recipient of a 2012 Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist's Grant and a 2013-2014 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar award for 'Following the Box,' a project he and Jerri have developed based on a box of anonymous photographs made in India at the end of WWII.  Please see the Following the Box website for more information.

Jacky has worked for over 30 years in the film and video industries of the United States, Germany and Israel, specializing in the production of documentary and educational films and videos about social issues, history, art, science, and ethics. He is committed to humane, empathic and compassionate filmmaking.

Jacky Comforty is the founder and president of Comforty Media Concepts. He is an internationally acclaimed independent filmmaker and media creator. He commands multiple genres and has created comedy, documentaries, drama, and multimedia programs for educational, general, and universal audiences. He is a visionary media artist and a popular speaker on a wide variety of subjects. Fluent in 4 languages, he is at home in 4 different cultures and 3 different continents. Comforty Media Concepts' clients include educational publishers and museums, universities, school systems, social service agencies, and not-for-profit organizations.

Jacky's film on the Bulgarian Jewish community during the Holocaust, The Optimists, has been recognized internationally and has been featured at numerous prestigious film festivals. It was awarded the Peace Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival; First Prize at the Jerusalem International Film Festival; and the CINE Golden Eagle Award.

Jacky's film credits include the 8 DVD Inclusion Series (which won the Gold Hugo Award and the IL Tash Media Award; Through a Glass Lightly, winner of the American Association of Museum's MUSE Award.

Sharon has been editing and producing documentaries for over thirty years. She was a founding member of Kartemquin Films, producer of the Oscar and Emmy nominated Hoop Dreams, among many others. At Kartemquin, she edited the Emmy-nominated Silent Pioneers, and the Chicago Film Festival/ Silver Hugo award winner The Chicago Maternity Center Story. She was an editor on NBC's Vietnam: Long Time Coming, which was chosen as the best documentary of 1998 by the Directors Guild of America, and won an Emmy that same year.

She founded her own company, Media Monster, in 1993, and works with a wide range of companies, from not-for-profit organizations to museums, hospitals, corporations and independent producers.

A few of her editing credits include: Saving The Sphinx for TLC; Lost Cities of the Rain Forest for A&E; and The Return of Navajo Boy. That film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000 and won the Best Documentary Award at the Aboriginal Voices Film Festival in Toronto, Canada. She produced Voices of the Geniza for the Spertus Museum of Judaic Studies. The American Association of Museums awarded this film their prestigious MUSE Award for best video production. She edited The Innocent, as well as Burnt Oranges in 2005, which won the CINE Golden Eagle award that year.

She has edited Shared Decisions; A Conversation On Moral Intuition; When We are Asked; and Dance for Joy.
; Never Turning Back, The World of Peggy Lipschutz; Picture Man: The Poetry of Photographer Milton Rogovin; Be Filled With the Spirit; Forever Whole; Standing Silent Nation. She is currently working on her own film, documenting her parent’s escape from war torn Europe.