Meet our spring 2020 mentees

The CBC Doc Mentorship Program is an ongoing professional development initiative that teams veteran documentary makers/editors with emerging producers to bring fresh and innovative stories to life. We regularly review applications from CBC producers, audio storytellers, and radio freelancers hoping to participate in the program. Congratulations to our most recent round of successful applicants — we look forward to hearing your stories come to life!

Heidi Atter is a multimedia journalist with a passion for character-driven storytelling. She started her career at CBC Saskatchewan through an internship and now has been a web writer, reporter, video journalist, associate producer for The Morning Edition, and The Afternoon Edition, and is currently in a permanent role as a reporter, Assigned to digital. Heidi has been photographing for almost a decade, has travelled to nine countries to photograph and has reported from Latvia for CBC's The World This Weekend. 

Heidi is excited to work with Sara Tate from Now or Never to tell the story of a northern community actively working to capture their traditional fiddling songs before the last elder who is fiddling in the community passes. The youth of the community want to learn and the community wants to hear their songs. Now, they're at a pivotal moment to capture the music before it's gone. 

Jolene Banning is an Anishinaabe-kwe journalist. Her storytelling explores Anishinaabe resilience and culture, and how these push back against settler colonialism in northwestern Ontario. Her previous experience includes over a decade working at CBC Radio in Thunder Bay, where she established a weekly arts and entertainment column. Her work has also appeared in APTN National News, the Globe and Mail, and Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.  She lives on her traditional territory of Fort William First Nation.

Jolene brings the Sugarbush family — a collective of community and family members that tap sugar maples — to Mount McKay, 10 minutes from Thunder Bay, to tap maples, reckon with colonial violence, and unsettle the white narrative told of our experiences.

Lenard Monkman is Anishinaabe from Lake Manitoba First Nation. He is a proud father of two and has been with the CBC's Indigenous unit for just over four years now. 

"My documentary will focus on my search for my biological dad and brother who are both Vietnamese. I know very little about the culture or what it means to be Vietnamese, and my son has never had the opportunity to meet them. I would like to include my son in the doc, to talk about his identity as someone who has been culturally raised as First Nations (like myself), how he relates to looking Vietnamese despite not knowing anything about it, and looking for more answers about what it means to be both First Nations and Vietnamese."

Eva Voinigescu is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and producer. Her stories in publications like the Toronto Star, CBC Life, and University Affairs cover science, health, and culture topics and often incorporate aspects of personal narrative.

She will work with Alison Cook to share the story of her grandparents' burial plans, which have been in the works for the past 30 years.

This is common in Romania, where they live. In the meantime, her parents, who immigrated to Canada with Eva and her brother in the early '90s, don't even have wills. Through the moments of darkly absurdist humour, familial closeness and catharsis that arise out of these different cultural practices, she'll explore why their two approaches are so different and how they have made her reconsider how we think, talk and feel about death.

Lisa Xing has been a reporter and host for more than a decade. She has worked across the country from Edmonton to Halifax, and internationally from London, U.K. to Seoul, Korea. She loves sharing the personal stories of people who we may never otherwise meet, especially through the use of sound. She's also a creative writer and photographer, with photos published in The Wall Street Journal and THIS magazine. 

Lisa is thrilled to work with Alison Cook to share the story of her cousin-in-law and his family-owned garage nestled in rural southern Ontario that's under threat of closure due to advancements in technology and because few people want to move to the countryside.