Mariah McBride, Helen Quinn Pasin, and Travis Wilkinson.
By Laurie Casey
Join us in welcoming three new young leaders who will be helping to promote our March and April film festivals. They’ll be helping to write the One Earth newsletters you receive in your inbox, the film descriptions you see on our website, the social media posts you enjoy in your feeds and much more.
Mariah McBride, Marketing Coordinator
Mariah was born and raised in The Windy City. Later she traded the breezes of Lake Michigan for the cornfields in central Illinois. There she advised first-year students, wrote for a campus magazine and studied print and broadcast journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She graduated from UIUC before returning to Chicago and becoming an Arts and Culture reporter at The Real Chi, a learning newsroom dedicated to improving media coverage on the West and South Sides of Chicago.
In June of 2020, she became an Environmental Health and Wellness Editor and Program Assistant at The Real Chi after being selected as a 2020-2021 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism fellow. Mariah is committed to improving media representation and elevating voices. She now joins the One Earth Film Fest team as a Marketing Coordinator in hopes of connecting more people to films that highlight environmental issues such as environmental inequity. She will be reporting to Laurie Casey, marketing director.
Helen Quinn Pasin, Public Relations Assistant
Helen Quinn Pasin is an Oak Park native who is passionate about using her creative communication skills to expose social injustices and push for positive social change.
Over the last year, she produced a documentary film that looks at food insecurity on Chicago’s West Side for her master’s in journalism project. The documentary, “Feed ‘Em All,” has been accepted to screen in three film festivals across the country in Virginia, Oregon, and Los Angeles. The film recently won the Virginia Dares Cinematic Arts Award for Decolonizing/Re-Indigenizing Media.
Before attending graduate school at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Quinn Pasin, ran social media for the victorious campaign of Maura McMahon Zeller for Cook County Circuit Court judge and worked in Marketing at Radio Flyer Inc. She earned a bachelor’s in communications and Italian Studies from Santa Clara University in 2018 and her master’s from Medill in 2021. Helen will be working closely with Cassandra West on the festival's public relations plans.
Travis Wilkinson, Marketing Coordinator
Travis has had a long-standing interest in film and environmental issues. He started making videos with his friends in sixth grade. On his weekends, you could catch Travis filming his outdoor activities, such as skiing, hiking, biking, or coming up with and acting out other film ideas. As Travis got older, he took environmental courses and became more interested in the power film has to create change. He feels films' powerful messages and their accessibility can generate extensive change and thinks that the right movie can change a person's life. Travis experienced this in eleventh grade when his class watched Food Inc. After the viewing, many of his classmates, including Travis himself, became vegetarian.
Travis studied Ecology and Economics at Quest University Canada and wrote a thesis on local currencies as an alternative economic system. He continued to take what he learned in his studies and integrate it into his film and professional life. The videos Travis produced highlighted society's imbalance with nature. He took on a role with The Nature Conservancy and worked on Paulette Jorden's Idaho gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns in the hopes of creating a more sustainable future for all. He believes that we need to act now, both on an individual and societal level, to ensure a healthy future for this planet. Travis will be reporting to Laurie Casey, marketing director.