Sabine Anton is the Principal and Founder of Sabine Anton Productions, in New York City.

Sabine, born in East Berlin, remembers a happy childhood until her West German relationships were used to block her admission to college. She asked for permission to leave the country legally, but was denied. Her many attempts ended in an 18 months sentence spent in the notorious Bautzen prison. She was accused of violating the law by distributing information that could ruin the global reputation of East Germany!

Sabine was eventually freed in 1987 by efforts of the United Nations, and she moved to West Berlin, where she studied Design. After living in Asia for 4 years, and arriving in New York City in 1995, Sabine found her way into reporting.

Her very first TV interview was with Richard Branson. Her next segment was for a 60 Minute-type German TV program about psychopath research that she produced for Europe’s largest TV network, RTL. This was the beginning of her prominent role as a freelance producer/reporter for RTL Television.

Sabine’s thirst for knowledge and a can-do-anything attitude has helped her to build a very successful production company in New York City. She extended her portfolio beyond working for RTL TV and now also produces biography, charity, and business films. www.sabineantonproductions.com

Italy, Ridotto
FPA Member since 1992
Mario Fratti is a drama critic and a playwright. He was born in Italy but has been living in New York City since 1963. His many plays – amongst them Cage, Refrigerators, Victims, Lovers and Passionate Women – have been performed in more than 600 theaters in 19 languages. The musical Nine (his adaptation of Fellini’s film 8 ½ ) won numerous awards, among them the O’Neill Selection Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, 8 Drama Desk Awards and 5 Tony Awards.

Gabriel Ariel Levicky was born in the former Czechoslovakia into the family of Holocaust survivors. After ‘mastering’ the indoctrinated education system, he soon joined the ranks of many skeptics.

This ‘protective coat’ allowed him to see a troubled and confused society from the different point of view and as a result, he became involved in a dissident movement Charter 77.

As a young poet, inspired by the American Beat and music, he embarked on his own search and clandestinely published his first book of poetry Neznáma Poézia (The Unknown Poetry, 1977) in Bratislava, Slovakia. Even under heavy Orwellian watch-dog society, he managed to organize series of street performances and ran alternative lectures “The Flying University” at different, secret locations, inviting the former lecturers and professors, persecuted by the communist regime.

He was also briefly involved in the underground theater activities as a writer and a director of short, 1-act absurd sketches.

In 1979 he decided to escape the persecution by the omnipresent and omnipotent State Security apparatus and via number of neighboring countries fled to Italy and to the US.

After a brief sting in NYC, he left for California and settled in San Francisco where he ran a series of poetry readings, got involved with a renewed Beat magazine publication Beatitude and published his second book of poetry The Unknown Poetry # 2, directly linking it to his first Slovak publication.

After so-called Velvet Revolution in his native country in 1989, he has returned and for a short period worked as deputy editor-in-chief of the Prague Czecho-Slovak bi-weekly Mosty newspaper.

Returning to New York where he lives ever since, he again got involved in many poetry projects and reading. He is published in numerous publications nationally and worldwide.

His latest poetry collection B(lack) & W(hite) Wet Paint Poems, encompassing his NY experience, was published and released by Xlibris (available on the Web via: Xlibris, Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble).

He is also an author (as Emir Gabpashaberger, the founder and destroyer of Jews For Jihad, orgasmization) of a sporadic, weekly farce/lampoon, illuminating these trying & often hilarious times, hammering at almost everything and everybody. In his spare time – he draws cartoons and constructs hand-made collages, called GabLevages®.

He is also a free-lance correspondent for various Czech and Slovak magazines and papers – Tyzden, Listy, Eurabia.

Claus Mueller is the author of books, articles and presentations on communications and recipient of numerous grants and awards including two Fulbrights. Apart from serving as a professor teaching media research and sociology at Hunter College, he directs the non-profit International Film and Television Exchange, Inc., and is responsible for annual issue-oriented screening seminars arranged for policy and opinion makers.  His other current positions include that of a New York media correspondent for print and electronic publications in France and the United States.

He has advised international film festivals and served on juries for television and film as well as a guest curator for several film festivals. Among his television production credits are innovative series for public access channels and the documentary American Eunuchs acquired by the Sundance Channel. His work ranges from research on minority issues in Germany and the impact of documentaries to the analysis of international upscale niche tourism with results presented at conferences in Korea and India and to the UN’s World Tourism Organization.

A current research project  which has taken him to Cambodia covers the tourist attraction of death and torture sites. He has served on the board of the New York Film and Video Council ,  the executive committee of the New York Foreign Press Association and was appointed to the advisory board of the Humanity-Without-Borders Foundation and the L.A. based Glocal Salad, a global content aggregation company. He received his education at the University of Cologne, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques  and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and the New School for Social Research.

He is listed  in the current edition of Marquis Who’s Who in America.   University contact: 212 772 5647; e-mail cmueller@hunter.cuny.edu or filmexchange@gmail.com.

Sebastian Piras is New York based Journalist, photographer and filmmaker. His main photographic subject matter has been portraiture. “Artists Exposed”, published in 1996, is a partial collection of captivating portraits of known and unknown artists and players in the international arts scene, including Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein.  David Ross, former Director of the Whitney Museum, wrote the introduction for the book, heralding Piras’ photos as:” …probing and extraordinarily beautiful portraits of artists…that ultimately produces winners at both ends of the camera.” A new artists portraits book consisting of some 120 artists portraits, A Pocketful of Contemporary Artists Portraits was published 2 years ago, the Australian publisher  Images Publishing.  Piras has directed several documentaries, including ” Taylor Mead Unleashed”, which also featured some of the last footage shot of the late beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

Piras has also done extensive work both in tv broadcasting (producer of promos and opening title sequences for such prime time shows as Martha Stewart’s Martha, NBC’s The Apprentice with Donald Trump,  and several other shows ) and on feature films  as a photographer, director and producer. He is currently photographing and co-producing a video profile on the architect Richard Meier and has just wrapped post-production on a short film he has produced and directed titled “FOG”.

Some of his works can be seen on his sites

www.SebastianPiras.com and www.visualproductionsnyc.com

also

He contributes regularly both as a photographer and as a writer for European and US publications.

India, The Statesman
FPA Member since 2003
Anjali Sharma is a freelance writer based in New York City. Anjali was born in New Delhi and attended school there. She graduated from Delhi University in 1993. She began her career in broadcasting, working for Indira Gandhi National University, communications division. She also worked for NDTV and Home Television/BBC Hindi Services (now Sahara TV) in New Delhi. She moved to the U.S. in 1997 to attend the master’s degree program in fine arts at Ohio University. She moved to New York in 2000 to work for News India Times as a reporter, covering local politics, arts and culture. She is currently working at the Statesman.

FPA Member since 2008
Kinue Imai Weinstein is a reporter and a photographer for Shukan NY Seikatsu, a Japanese-language weekly newspaper in New York City and works on a freelance basis as a reporter and a photographer for Japion, a Japanese-language weekly magazine in New York City, Fujinnotomo, a national-based women’s monthly magazine in Tokyo, and The Jerusalem Post in Israel. She covers a wide range of events including fashion, education, food, and travel.

She published a book, Japanese Kosher Cooking, in November 2007 in New Jersey.  In the past, she worked as an education columnist and a news writer at OCS News and Yomiuri America and as a TV researcher at NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) in NYC.  In the 1970s in Israel, she contributed articles about Asian visitors for the Jerusalem Post and about politics in the Middle East for Tokyo Shimbun.
She graduated from the Osaka University of Foreign Studies with a BA in Asian Studies and MA in Corporate Communication from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Greece, Paralaxi
FPA Member Since 1991
Dina Pinos has been both a staff and Freelance Writer for business & cultural reviews, corporate newsletters, investment opportunities, tourism reports, personality profiles for publications – Travel SmartNewsletter.com, Sumitomo Corporation of America Newsletter, CNNfn, People Magazine, Food & Wine, Journal of Commerce, The National Herald, Focus Magazine, PARALAXI, The Athens News, Kerdos Financial Daily, Agora Financial Magazine, Odyssey, The European (UK), The Greek Business Review and EL SOL de Atenas.

Since 2001, she has also worked as a Television & Radio Producer, Camera Girl for RAI TV Corporation, producing daily new stories for the TV & Radio coverage from the US to the parent company RAI, the Italian Public TV and supporting Italian journalists and local correspondents in providing daily news, weekly specials, live broadcasts from NY offices, the entire US & Canada. She continues to freelance for Greek television productions.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from CUNY, a Certificate of Political Studies from Institute of Political Science in Paris, France and a Masters of Communications from University of Hawaii, as a East-West Center full scholarship recipient.