Team Bios

Ben Powell holds a BFA in Film, Animation, and Video from the Rhode Island School of Design and received artist grants from the Austin Film Society and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Powell’s assignments as a cinematographer have taken him to communities all over the world, while his documentary films as director have focused on landscapes near and dear. His documentary BARGE focuses on the culture of towboat workers on the Mississippi River. After premiering at SXSW, BARGE won Best Documentary Feature prizes at Indie Memphis and the Dallas International Film Festival. In 2020, Powell moved back to the Mississippi Delta and formed a creative consultancy called Broken Arm Studio.

Glenn Payne is an award-winning filmmaker and artist, as well as an improvisational and film actor. He has produced and directed over 70 short films, feature length movies, commercials, and music videos. Payne considers film the most influential art form our world has ever seen. It combines painting, music, dancing, performing, and writing to create a powerful form of artistic expression that has the ability to reach the masses in a way that nothing else can match.

Ted Fisher is an Assistant Professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. He currently teaches Fundamentals of Digital Video, Intermediate Digital Video, Advanced Digital Video, Fundamentals of Lighting, Cinema Studio, and Special Topics in Art: Documentary Filmmaking.  Fisher earned an M.F.A. in Photography from Claremont Graduate University in 2003, a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies from The New School in 2007, and an M.F.A. in Film Directing from the University of Edinburgh in 2019.  His documentaries have screened at over fifty film festivals around the world and have been broadcast widely. His documentary photography projects have also shown in galleries and museums. He was Curator of Digital Media at U.C. Riverside’s California Museum of Photography for five years. His writing on documentary pedagogy has been published in Frames Cinema Journal and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.