CHRISTOPHER ALLEN
director and producer

Christopher Allen grew up in many different places but has lived and worked in New York City for the last 10 years. After graduating from Columbia University and studying at the Samuel Beckett School at Trinity College in Dublin, he has worked as a director, creative entrepreneur, and new media artist. Christopher is always looking for new stories and new means of expressing them.

As founding partner of the innovation-focused start-up, Counts Media, which Newsweek Magazine wrote “is making inroads and attracting international attention,” Christopher played a leading role in the invention and execution of many new entertainment concepts. Find descriptions of this work and his resume here.

Christopher was also one of the inventors of Yellow Arrow a place-based storytelling platform which incorporates tagging culture, mobile phones, and online collaboration. Originally launched as an experiment in 2004, the project has grown to include thousands of participants in over 35 countries whose work has been exhibited by galleries, at festivals and in museums all around the world.

From 2001- 2005, Christopher was a host of the radio show “Art Attack” on WKCR FMNY. This journalistic activity led to a growing passion for documentary work, which he now pursues through a non-profit organization he founded in 2005 called UnionDocs.

LAMA KARMA (JUSTIN WALL)
collaborator and sound operator

Karma spent the first eighteen years of his life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Inspired there by his teachers at the Jesuit all-boys Marquette University High School, he left for Columbia University where he graduated with degrees in English Literature and Religious Studies. He worked primarily in the fields of literary theory and Indo-Tibetan philosophy and wrote an honors thesis on hermeneutics in the interweaving of Madhyamaka Dialectics, Post-modern literary theory, and Buddhist tantra.

Immediately after graduating he pursued a year of meditation retreats and pilgrimage through the Western United States, Central America, Nepal, Northern India, Berlin, Ireland, and New York. In 2003 he met Lama Norlha Rinpoche at Kagyu Thubten Choling Monastery and entered the traditional three-year, three-month retreat in the practices of Vajrayana Buddhism as transmitted by the Karma Kagyu lineage.

LAMA JAMDRON (SUSAN SKOLNICK)
associate producer and translator

Jamdron began her study of Tibetan Buddhism in 1984, soon after graduating from Vassar College. In 1986 she entered the traditional Tibetan Buddhist three-year meditation retreat under the guidance of renowned retreat master Lama Norlha Rinpoche. Participants in such a retreat study original Tibetan texts and practice a graduated path of meditations that introduces them to the entire scope of Tibetan Buddhist teachings. Since 1991, she has acted as assistant teacher and translator to five subsequent three-year retreats.

Lama Jamdron has lived at Kagyu Thubten Choling Monastery since 1985, acting as translator and personal secretary for Lama Norlha Rinpoche, along with working in the monastery office. She has accompanied Rinpoche on teaching tours all over the world, and recently returned from her fourth trip to Tibet, where she assisted Lama Norlha in his efforts to establish and maintain monasteries for monks and nuns, and schools and medical programs for the public.