Ann Bennett is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, multimedia producer, and teaching artist who has devoted her career to telling diverse stories through film, television, interactive projects, museum installations, and live events. She produced the NAACP Image Award–winning documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, as well as the multiplatform community engagement initiative “Digital Diaspora Family Reunion.”' Ann is currently producer on the feature-length documentary RAZING LIBERTY SQUARE about Climate Gentrification in Miami, Florida. Bennett’s past film credits include Citizen King and Fisk Jubilee Singers for the PBS series American Experience, Hymn for Alvin Ailey for Dance in America and the award-winning PBS miniseries Africans in America. Bennett holds a master’s degree from the Columbia Journalism School and graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies. She has won several fellowships, including a Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, an Impact Partners Documentary Producers Fellowship, Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship and is currently a 2021/22 Sundance Institute Producing Fellow. Bennett’s multiplatform projects explore the nexus of history, culture, and technology within multicultural communities.

PROJECT: LINEAGE LAUNCHPAD © - ANCESTORS’ TONIC

LINEAGE LAUNCHPAD© 2022 Black Utopian Fellowship Project

LINEAGE LAUNCHPAD© Ancestor’s Tonic is an Augmented Reality/AR platform where African American Ancestors from the past appear at selected New York historical sites, in-person and virtually, to share their words of wisdom, strategic advice and calming assurances which collectively can serve as a 'Tonic' for modern New Yorkers (and the rest of the world) who are in the midst of a very challenging moment in history for everyone but especially for People-of-Color.

The LINEAGE LAUNCHPAD© Ancestor’s Tonic stories are told on the Augmented Reality/AR interactive platform because “AR” has seemingly limitless potential self-directed deep dives into historical moments that are created by looking through the camera lens of a mobile device or tablet which reveals layers of recreated historical personas, artificial objects and access to contextual information adding multiple layers of designs and data to the space that you are occupying in the real world. When in-person or virtual visitors interact with the people and places that are part of the LINEAGE LAUNCHPAD© historical universe, the user is experiencing real-time feedback to their actions, which then determine the path their story takes.