Planet Story Lab Mentors
Jerry Henry is a Houston native, LA-based DP with a MFA degree from UCLA’s prestigious Production Program with an emphasis on Documentary and Cinematography.
His award-winning short documentary I Promise Africa premiered in over 100 film festivals worldwide and won many prestigious awards, among them a Directors Guild of America Student Award. Jerry's visual talents can be seen in the Oscar nominated documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop directed by Banksy. He lent his cinematic eye to the Grammy Award winning HBO doc ground-breaking series The Defiant Ones which chronicles the life and work of Dr. Dre and Jimmy lovine. He served as DP for the Emmy award winning Hulu series The 1619 Project with the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones for Hulu/ABC/Disney for which he was also nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography for A Nonfiction Program for The 1619 Project. Jerry recently shot The Makings of Curtis Mayfield by the directorial debut of the artist H.E.R. at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival.
Laura Nix is a Peabody award-winning, Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose work includes the feature length documentaries Democracy Under Siege, Inventing Tomorrow,The Yes Men Are Revolting, andThe Light In Her Eyes, as well as the short Walk Run Cha-Cha. Her work has premiered at Sundance, Toronto, and Berlinale, appeared at hundreds of film festivals worldwide, and has been released theatrically and on television in the US and multiple international territories. Her work in environmental storytelling garnered the 2017 Sundance Discovery Impact award. In 2018 she was named a Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker, honoring excellence in women documentary directors.
In addition to her directing credits, she has served as Executive Producer on several award-winning documentaries including Yanuni, Sea of Shadows, and Delikado. She is also a sought-after non-fiction story consultant and mentor, serving as an adviser to the Sundance Institute, Film Independent Global Media Makers, the Hot Docs Blue Ice Fund, East Africa’s Docubox, CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum, and as a film expert for the U.S. State Department’s American Film Showcase. Nix is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is based in Los Angeles, CA, where she runs her company Felt Films.
Bipasha Shom is one of six LA recipients of the 2023-2024 Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship. She is currently editing a short for PBS American Masters In the Making. Her documentary feature, "I Love You More Than My Life," about a daughter struggling with her aging mother is currently in post production. Bipasha's editing career began in commercials and music videos. Her work spans narrative as well as documentary shorts and features. She edited the indie fiction feature, Dahmer, which was nominated for three Independent Spirit awards and introduced Jeremy Renner. More recently she edited the docuseries SupaGirlz about a Miami High School dance teacher and also the documentary feature Fatal Distraction, which won the Atlanta Docufest Audience Award. Bipasha Shom studied Cultural Anthropology at Cornell University and was granted a full scholarship for an MA in Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mentor