LIGHT ASSEMBLY

Founder

Amman Abbasi is a Pakistani-American writer-director, editor, and composer from Little Rock, Arkansas. Filmmaker Magazine listed him among the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. His debut feature film DAYVEON premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, was an Official Selection of the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, and went on to get two Film Independent Spirit Award nominations in 2018, including in the coveted Someone to Watch category. His follow up, YASMEEN’S ELEMENT recently premiered at SXSW 2024 with IndieWire including it on their “Best of the Fest” list.

Prior to narrative films, Abbasi had worked in documentary, traveling the world and discovering undocumented stories. In 2011, while working with the Renaud Brothers, Abbasi traveled to Haiti to cover the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake for The New York Times for a documentary piece, which went on to win the prestigious duPont Award. Abbasi has spoken at the roundtable seminar at 2019 Cannes Film Festival and also guest lectured at Columbia University. As an editor, Abbasi worked on LAST CHANCE HIGH, which received an Emmy nomination for outstanding editing as well as a Peabody. As a music composer, Abbasi’s music compositions have appeared in several commercials, films, and documentaries, including scores for the DANIELS and the recent score for THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER.

Founder

Jeffrey E. Stern is an award-winning journalist and the author of four books, including The 15:17 to Paris, which was adapted as a major motion picture by Clint Eastwood and Warner Brothers, and The Last Thousand: One School’s Promise in a Nation at War, an honorable mention for best book of the year by Library Journal. Stern co-wrote and produced the award-winning independent film Yasmeen’s Element, which premiered at the SXSW film festival and was named a “best of the fest.” He has been named a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation and a grantee of the Pulitzer Center Fellow for Crisis Reporting. Stern’s reporting has appeared in magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.

Stern has appeared on PBS NewsHour, The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN, NPR’s Morning Edition, and MSNBC's Morning Joe. He has received the Overseas Press Club award for best human rights reporting in any medium, the Amnesty International award for foreign reporting, and was part of The New York Times team that won the 2019 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in international journalism for coverage of the war in Yemen. He is a founding board member of The 30 Birds Foundation (https://www.30birdsfoundation.org/) and The Bamyan Foundation (https://bamyanfoundation.org/).