Bonnie Waltch

Director, Producer, and Writer

Bonnie has been involved in numerous PBS science series, including The Secret of Life (NOVA/BBC), Scientific American Frontiers, Out of the Past, and The Ring of Truth, as well as programs for the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. She directed and wrote Super Reefs: The Future of Coral for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and has produced exhibit media for museums around the U.S., including Niagara Falls Visitor Center, Pikes Peak Visitor Center, the Tennessee State Museum, the Nebraska State Museum, the Mob Museum, and the National World War II Museum. Bonnie has a BA in Semiotics from Brown University.

She is the award-winning senior producer and writer of the one-hour international broadcast documentary, Earth Emergency, and series of five short films, Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops, which was launched in January 2021 with a virtual event featuring the Dalai Lama and Greta Thunberg and attended by over one million viewers globally. The films have been featured in more than 50 film festivals worldwide.

Earth Emergency, the one-hour version, is being broadcast and streamed globally. The one-hour broadcast version, Earth Emergency, aired on national PBS in December 2021 and April 2022, and has been sold to broadcasters around the globe, including Australia, France, Italy, Mongolia, Latin America, Poland, and Sweden.

Sara Schley

Co-Producer, Co-Writer, Author of the Memoir "BrainStorm"

Sara is a business consultant, social change entrepreneur, speaker, and author who has led systemic transformation at renowned companies around the world. She is a mother, grandmother, community leader, and has been married for twenty-six years. She also has a bipolar II brain on the bipolar spectrum. Sara has kept this mostly secret for four decades. Until now. In her memoir, BrainStorm: From Broken to Blessed on the Bipolar Spectrum, the inspiration for BrainStorm the film, she tells her riveting story to save lives, end the stigma, and maximize healing. Sara has a BA from Brown University and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts.

Holly A. Swartz, MD

Dr. Swartz is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, President of the the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, and Director of the Center for Advanced Psychotherapy at Western Psychiatric Hospital. With Dr. Trisha Suppes, she is co-editor of Bipolar II Disorder: Recognition, Understanding, and Treatment from APA Publishing. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychotherapy.

Jim Phelps, MD

Dr. Phelps is an emeritus member of the faculty for the psychiatry residency program in his hospital system; and founder of PsychEducation.org, a highly acclaimed website with detailed information on the mood spectrum and bipolar disorders for patients and families. His books include Why Am I Still Depressed? and A Spectrum Approach to Mood Disorders, the latter intended for professionals and highly interested laypeople. Dr. Phelps focused his practice on complex mood disorders for over 20 years. In addition to full-time patient care, from which he is now mostly retired, he has published multiple articles on bipolar disorders and the “Collaborative Care Model,” a system of psychiatric consultation in primary care. He currently serves as Research Editor for the Psychopharmacology Institute.