Toni Achebe Bell

Toni Bell is the creator and host of the What's Up with Docs Podcast. She was the Impact Producer for Abigal Disney’s The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales and Fruits of Labor. She is the Impact Producer for the Award-winning PBSWorld documentary film A Woman on the Outside and teaches classes on media and impact at Saybrook University. She most recently worked as an impact strategist for Represent Justice [Kemba, Songs From the Hole] & Odyssey Impact Partners [All I See is the Future, Second Shot, Long Line of Ladies, Descended From the Promised Land, and Breaking Silence.  She developed the impact campaign of the RePresent Media initiative  “The Power of  Personal Documentary Films,” and she is a former advisory board member of the Southeast European Film Festival. Her foray into documentary film began when she wrote and edited the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers – West newsletter. This led to her first gig as a production assistant and then an archival researcher for the film Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, which aired nationally on PBS. Since then, she has researched archival for several movies and television shows, including Centric's 'Being' and “Behind the Music.”  She has worked as an Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures and the Hartley Media Impact Initiative. She has worked as a facilitator and mentor for Doc Society’s Good Pitch Local. She has been a speaker, panelist, mentor, and juror at documentary film festivals and labs such as NALIP, Dok Leipzig, HotDocs, IFPWeek, European Film Market, Outfest, Docs by the Sea, and the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Toni has been a grant reviewer for Firelight Media’s William Greaves Fund and impact Funds, California Humanities, the Jerome Foundation, and many others. She teaches courses on impact and media at Saybrook University. Toni was part of the inaugural cohort of Art Equity's BIPOC Leadership Circle. She is the former Filmmaker Services Manager at the International Documentary Association, where she was responsible for handling the day-to-day operations of the fiscal sponsorship program. Toni also curated the DocuClub work-in-progress screening series. She holds a MAT-TESOL and an MA in Visual Anthropology from USC, an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in professional screenwriting from UCLA.