QAYAQ
STORIES

Producer | Director | Photographer

Mark Blaine

Blaine is an award-winning writer, investigative reporter and editor who has 25 years’ experience working at the intersection of communication, science and technology. He has worked with partners and researchers on storytelling projects from a range of institutions, including the U.S. Forest Service, Vision Maker Media, the Institute for Sustainable Environment, and the Prince William Sound Science Center, as well as researchers from the University of Washington and Oregon State University.

Producer | Archaeologist | Photographer

Sven Haakanson, PhD

Sven Haakanson is a leader in the documentation, preservation, and revival of indigenous culture, including his own native Alaskan Sugpiaq traditions. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2007), the Museums Alaska Award for Excellence (2008), the ATALM Guardians of Culture and Lifeways Leadership Award (2012), and his work on the Angyaaq led it to be inducted into the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame (2020). He was Executive Director of the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository (2000-2013 Kodiak, AK), and joined the University of Washington as an associate professor of Anthropology and curator of Native American collections at the Burke Museum in 2013.

Prodcuer | Director | Director of Photography

Torsten Kjellstrand

As a journalist, Kjellstrand has tried to tell stories that go beyond and challenge stereotyping in rural, Native American, and immigrant communities.He cut his narrative teeth as an English major at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to study comparative literature at Uppsala University in Sweden. He spent a year as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2003-04 studying links between ethnicity, language, landscape, and storytelling. He then worked as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in New York City before moving to Eugene, Oregon, in 2013.