Gene Pack, Arts and Culture Producer

Gene has been at KUER since it went on the air in 1960. In fact, he was around a few years before that--helping get the station established! He says he must have "just been in the right place at the right time," because he loves what he does and feels lucky to be a part of KUER. Outside the station, Gene enjoys acting, and has been involved in hundreds of productions all over Utah. Look closely the next time you watch "Footloose," Gene's sitting right next to John Lithgow in the town council scene--honest

Contemporary filmmaking, with its high demand for many different locations such as A Voice from the Dust: Journey to the Promised Land requires exceptional logistics in the movement of people and equipment to accommodate a strict schedule. Padovich's extensive experience has put him in a variety of demanding locations, and includes transportation work on: Amistad, Waterworld, Vegas Vacation, Monkey Bone, Inventing the Abbotts, The Insider, The Magnificent Seven, Blackwood, and The X Files.

Clint Palmer graduated with a Bachelors in Fine Arts from Utah State University in 1997, and then interned at the prestigious Maine State Music Theatre Company. Clint has been working for over ten years performing in the theatre and in film, having worked with many directors including Anne Bogart and Danny Glover. From 1998 to 2002 he was a member of the Actor's Gang in Salt Lake City, Utah. Clint has performed in local and national advertising for companies, including a national ad campaign for Sprint. Clint has been working full time as an actor since November 2001 and is currently starring as Curtis Clemens in Ryan Williams' film, ABBY SINGER, which will be premiering at Slamdance 2003 Film Festival. In 2002, he worked at the Sundance Filmmaker's Lab with Robert Redford and John Turteltaub. Clint is also a screenwriter and has written several scripts for the Wembly Hall Theatre Company including: DUPLICITY, BODY ART, and SHAKESPEARE MURDERS, all co-written with Ryan Williams. Clint has also taught acting at a local talent agency and was an instructor with the Actor's Gang. Clint helped finance and produce ABBY SINGER and EDGE RUNNING.

Elias Pate, 21, the third and final founding member of Shinebox Motion Pictures has been a capable artist in all mediums since his hands could hold a pencil. He's been involved in writing projects with Bryan since 1997 and then the two penned their first feature together, and then co-directed it when they were just 18 years old. He lives in Orem, Utah with his wife, Michelle, and his two children, Olivia Amidala and Vincent.

Brian Patrick holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Ohio University School of Film. He has been producing films and videos for over 30 years, several of which have won major festival awards and have seen national television distribution.

Professor Patrick has taught film/video production at five universities including the University of Utah for over 20 years. During this period, he developed and taught couses in film/video production, film history survey (documentary, experimental, animation), and film directing. He is currently producing a feature-length documentary about the legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre---a historical event that took place in Southern Utah in 1857.

I carry a background in marketing and public relations yet I have always had a passion for photography. I continually have a desire to learn and push myself in the photographic field. I have narrowed my field of study over the years to commercial product and people photography as well as more recently television and film production photography.

My clients have included Iomega, Microsoft, Novell, Intel, Ask Jeeves.com, CBS Television, NBC Olympics Inc, AMC Networks, Caroline Film Productions, William Morris Agency, the Ford Agency, and numerous national and international publications and magazines.

Cinco Paul was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1986 with a degree in English. He moved to Southern California in 1991 and received a fellowship grant to attend the screenwriting program at USC. Prior to writing "Bubble Boy", he worked on the Warner Bros. animated film "Cats Don't Dance" [as a writer of additional screenplay material].

Mr. Paul and his wife are the parents of three children. They live in the Los Angeles area.

After graduating from high school, Paulos earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Southern California in Film Production and Communication. While living in Los Angeles, Paulos made sixteen student films on Super 8, 16mm and video. Two of his first student films earned a position in the "Best Of" reel for USC 's Film Department in 1999 and Paulos was given an Honor's Internship with Miramax Studios. This internship led to a fulltime assistant position for Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender at A Band Apart Productions. Here, Paulos was involved in several productions, including "Anna and The King", "Knock Around Guys", "The Mexican", "Traffic" and more. Paulos gained experience in making commercials and music videos while working at Moxie Pictures, an L.A.-based production company. Here he worked with directors such as Todd Phillips, Dan Levinson and Paulostopher Guest, making commercials for McDonald's, Virgin, Kinko's, Pepe Jeans and Cheez-its.

Spy Hop Productions lured Paulos away from Los Angeles in 2001. Since then he was worn several hats including that of an instructor, Director of Outreach and Distribution, Director of Film and Video Production and Director of Apprenticeship Program. He teaches all advanced level film production courses and manages the majority of film and video projects at Spy Hop Media Studios. When not making films, Paulos enjoys the outdoors, reading, the occasional video game and restoring vintage automobiles.

Producer the Dalai Lama's Utah Lecture (presumably meaning he produced the video of the event). Producer/director of the short film "Expression" and the feature film "The Job." Website: http://www.spyhopproductions.org

I've been married to Tryn (maiden name Peterson) for eight years and we have two exasperatingly charming boys: Robbie (Robert III) age 4, and Morgan (20 months). I am the second of 12 children and my father was a career Army officer. In fact, he blessed me at church and then returned to Vietnam. I was born in Granger Utah (now West Valley City), and have lived in Arlington, VA; San Antonio, TX (twice); Salt Lake City; Augsburg, Germany; Yuma, AZ; and in and around Killeen, TX. I also spent one summer in Northern California, on the East Bay, selling insulation. I went to BYU for a year, then served a mission to Belgium, Brussels, spending most of my time in France, then back to BYU, where I majored in English with a foot constantly in the theatre department. We married just before our Senior year, during which I took a playwriting class from Tim Slover and determined to pursue a career in playwriting. I was accepted to the MFA program at UNLV, but opted to stay at BYU for an additional year so that Tryn could earn an MA in English. I was able to tailor a program to my interests, so I also picked up an MA during that year. Then we moved to Las Vegas for three years, where her MA allowed her to teach at UNLV and provided me reduced tuition and fees. At UNLV, under the tutelage of Jerry Crawford and Davey Marlin-Jones, I began exploring overtly LDS material in my plays. Both professors initially encouraged me to resist that tendency, worrying I would waste my talents writing the "official" Church line. Jerry finally decided I had to write what was inside me, and Davey directed my thesis play What Wondrous Things, a comic treatment of Nephi going back for the brass plates. It went over well, though some critics indicated they couldn't identify whether it was supportive of or critical of the source material.

In the summer of 1992 I wrote and performed a one man show called Brother Joseph, and was subsequently commissioned by Doug Stewart and the Heritage Arts Foundation to write the original play UTAH! After graduation we moved to St. George, where I accepted a job as Director of Theatre Programs for the Tuacahn Center for the Arts. In 1995, with the gala opening of the facilities, I directed the Mormon Arts Symposium, which gathered over 200 LDS artists in various disciplines for two days, and inaugurated the annual Mormon Arts Festival.

A year ago, after spending more time doing accounting than art, and out of concern for the future of the festival, Doug and I both resigned from the Heritage Arts Festival and created the Mormon Arts Foundation to sponsor the annual festival. Since then I have drawn a part-time salary as Director of the Mormon Arts Festival, and supplemented it with outside writing, directing, and acting.

I write out of a sense of enjoyment and mission, and I write plays and screenplays because I tend to see stories in a dramatic form, though there are some stories I want to eventually tell which demand a prose format. I direct plays out of economic necessity and because I enjoy it. Some plays beg me to direct them and others to perform in them. I perform out of pure passion for the boards. And I occasionally read dramatic theory and history out of curiosity and love of the art form.

This summer I produced and directed a show in Northern Utah, wrote a commissioned work about Geronimo, and am now directing a production of Doug Stewart's Star Child as an independent project. My other plays include Heir to the Covenant, about the introduction of polygamy in Nauvoo, which was read in the 1995 Utah Shakespearean Festival new plays series; a Lyman Dayton film called "Second Chance"; a one-act published in Inscape (1991) called "A Sense of Things"; Fair Play, which placed in the Mayhew playwriting contest in 1990; and several other miscellaneous, negligible, or in-progress works.

Born in Provo to a couple of folk singers and raised in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains, Sam Payne's earliest childhood memories include falling asleep in his attic bedroom to the strumming of his dad's guitar and the bowing of his mom's fiddle downstairs. He grew up to study jazz and theater in college, which took him to stages from West Coast Universities to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. He is an accomplished actor, and has authored plays for children and adults. Payne currently writes and performs with a number of projects, including the locally acclaimed Sam Payne Trio, a hot Jazz quintet appropriately entitled "The Utah Jazz," and as a solo folk act. Mr. Payne is married to his high-school sweetheart, Kristie Lott, and together with their three sons, Skyler, Caleb, and Seth (along with Pete the beagle), the couple resides in the shadow of the Red Hill, in the heart of St. George's historic district, one good sniff away from the Pizza Factory.

The press has said of Sam Payne's music: "Payne is one of those few musicians who can successfully combine both songwriting and stage performing. He can write poignant and meaningful lyrics, combine them with a melodic hook, and perform them in a voice that makes you want to close your eyes and drift away."

Carol Lynn Pearson is a well-known writer in a variety of genres. The unlikely area of poetry provided her first major success. Well over 250,000 copies of her poetry books have been sold and poems have appeared in literature books as well as Ann Lander's column. A book that brought major recognition in a different way is "Goodbye, I Love You", the story of her life with her husband, a homosexual man struggling with the conflicts this brought to his life and marriage. After twelve years and four children, the couple ended their marriage and vowed to remain good friends. Six years later, in Carol Lynn's home, where she was taking care of him, Gerald died of AIDS. Believing their story could help many others, Ms. Pearson decided to tell it. The book made her a popular guest on such shows as "Good Morning, America," "Oprah," "Sally Jesse Raphael," and was featured in "People" magazine and "Woman's Day." She has also written educational motion pictures and children's plays, two commissioned by Robert Redford's Sundance Theatre, "Don't Count Your Chickens Before They Cry Wolf" and " I Believe In Make Believe." Her most recent project is a one-woman play which she wrote and performs, "Mother Wove The Morning," in which she portrays sixteen women throughout history in search for the female face of God. Ms. Pearson received her BA and MA degrees in Theater at Brigham Young University in Utah, where she twice received the "Best Actress" award. She lives and works in Walnut Creek, California.

Brad Pelo has made a career out of envisioning and then launching successful ideas. While still a teenager, Pelo launched his first successful business and was labeled a "teen tycoon" in stories appearing in many national publications, including The New York Times, Success, and McCalls. He founded and led both Folio Corporation and NextPage, Inc. and has headed a multimedia publishing company. In 1994, Pelo received a Telly Award for writing and producing Information Democracy, a short film featuring the award-winning actor James Earl Jones. Two production companies call Brad founder, and in recent years he has teamed up with leading filmmakers to bring audiences both educational and entertainment productions.

Steven Kapp Perry is a songwriter and playwright whose musical adventures include everything from singing the National Anthem at Wrigley Field for the Cubs to leading the music in LDS General Conference and singing Mozart from atop the altar in Notre Dame in Paris.

As part of Peace Mountain MediaWorks, he helped create "The Scripture Scouts," "Alexander's Amazing Adventures," and "The Allabouts" with his co-writers Marvin Payne and Roger & Melanie Hoffman. He has written projects for National Geographic, Prime Recordings, Deseret Book, and other companies.

He is also a volunteer for Reach the Children, a non-profit organization providing education, nutrition, and vocational training. Learn more at reachthechildren.org.

His 9 albums of original music are: Newlight, Message In Motion, Far Into the Heart, From Cumorah's Hill, Polly--a One-Woman Musical, Come to the House of the Lord, This Is Jesus, The Trail of Dreams, Reason to Sing -- The Best of Steven Kapp Perry. And the most recently released: Another Testament -- the Book of Mormon Witnesses of Jesus Christ.

Steve loves music, cream cheese on bagels, his wife Johanne, and whichever of their four children slept through the night.

Peterson brings his expertise in marketing and product development to the core management team. With an MBA in product innovation, he has pioneered extremely profitable marketing and distribution systems for artistic products in niche markets. Peterson's proven business acumen and artistic sensibilities will be brought to bear on the logistical innovations necessary to create and distribute the epic great motion picture A Voice from the Dust: Journey to the Promised Land.

Forrest B. Peterson is an award-winning writer and movie producer. In 1990 his Trouble in Oz won five Crystal Reel prizes from the Florida Film Festival. His church duties have included elders quorum president and gospel doctrine teacher.

Joan Peterson has been in the film industry in Salt Lake for the last five years. Joan is a former talent agent and has worked with a variety of talent representing them to producers and directors for work in films, television shows, and commercials both locally and nationally. You will find some of her talent in projects such as "Testaments", "Touched By An Angel", and most recently, many of her talent star in the film "Charly."

Joan left the agency side of the film industry to open up her own casting company "Starlight Creative Media" working with companies such as Bonneville Productions, Motivfilms, and Comsic Pictures.

Although Joan spends most of her time behind the camera, she can be found playing the role of The Judge in the soon to be released movie "Day Of Defense". Joan is also the afternoon host of Utah's top Sunday radio show "Sounds of the Sabbath" on KOSY106.5.

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Web page created 7 June 2002. Last modified 4 March 2005.