Who we are
Picturing Health does not have any salaried staff. We put together teams to make the films on a project by project basis. If possible we work with people based in the country where we are filming. To make small budgets stretch, filming is often done by a single camera operator working with health staff from project partners.
Where possible we also try to offer “on the job” training for local film makers, as a way of building up local capacity to make films.
The charity is administered on a voluntary basis by Tom Gibb, who has also been involved, to a lesser or greater extent, in making most of the films on this site. Enquiries should be directed to him at info@picturinghealth.org or tomgibb10@gmail.com.
The trustees, who are all volunteers, collectively have huge experience in development work; health research, communication and eduction; and running charities. All of them have also been involved in the film projects carried out by Picturing Health.
People who make films and art
Tom Gibb
Tom worked for 20 years as a BBC correspondent mostly in Latin America. He spent 8 years covering El Salvador’s civil war, 4 years in Havana and 6 in Brasil. During that time he learned to film and edit short films for BBC World and other outlets, as well as working on documentaries. He also wrote regularly for other publications, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR and The Economist.
Read more...
He started making health related films in 2008, in Uganda. He lived for three years in Malawi, developing and filming many of the films on this site. He is Picturing Health’s executive director.
Mary Garvey – Project Manager
Mary brings decades of experience in development and charity work. She worked as a regional director for VSO in the 1990s and then with HIV awareness in Botswana in the difficult years before treatment was available in Africa. She worked with the Alzheimer’s Society for six years in the UK.
Read more...
She then became the UK Chief Executive of BRAC, the world’s largest Charity, based in Bangladesh, which has spearheaded the use of continuous evaluation to improve community health programs. She is now a consultant for charities in the UK. Mary has also spent many years working with Tibetan communities in India, in both education and health projects.
Nadine Ammon
As a nurse lecturer from Germany, Nadine first worked as a volunteer in Africa on the Ivory coast. She went to Malawi with VSO to teach at the Malawi College of Health Sciences, Zomba, where she worked for five years. She has a masters in public health and now works for the Malawi Nurses and Midwives council and GIZ, developing training programs.
Read more...
For the last four years she been medical director of all the films shot in Malawi, including the case study films, films for ETAT training and the films for WHO about the inspire studies.
Ernest M’banga
Malawian film-maker Ernest is based in Zomba. For a period of four years, he worked full time on many of the films on this site. Living next to Zomba hospital, he shot a good deal of the material used in the case study videos made in Malawi, the films about CPAP and ETAT, and others. But he also works on other projects apart from health films.
Danny Germain
Danny is a Puerto Rican/British, 26 year old HIV+ filmmaker. After leaving university with a degree in the UK in Wildlife Conservation, Danny set out to pursue a career in film production. He has 5 years experience working across a wide range of content types, from feature documentary to short film and live sports broadcasting to natural history television.
Read more...
He made a documentary about his own journey from growing up in secrecy with HIV to his decision to live openly. In the final scene he filled up a theatre with friends and family to view the film….and in this way reveal his HIV status to them for the first time. Danny uses a camera with an artist’s eye, and has worked with Picturing Health as film maker, camera operator and editor documenting the work of the Medical Research Council and WHO in Malawi and Zimbabwe.
Ariel Peña
Ariel is from El Salvador and grew up during the country’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. Half way through the conflict she joined the guerillas as a teenager but then defected before the end of the war. She went on to study at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico and Central St Martin’s in London.
Read more...
Over the next two decades she used art in a very personal journey to come to terms with her wartime experience. She worked with civilians returning to areas of conflict in El Salvador helping them tell their stories through art, and with young Native Americans on parole in New Mexico. She also worked for many years as a freelance camera operator and producer for BBC in Cuba, Brazil and other Latin American countries. More recently she has used art to help HIV positive teenagers in Malawi build self knowledge and explore the difficulties of adhering to treatment.
She is now in El Salvador, collaborating at the mental health unit of a big public hospital, the Hospital San Rafael, which has included working with survivors from the Mozote massacre in the civil war, as well as teenage widows from gang violence. Apart from using art as therapy, she films and does graphics for Picturing Health, making the film about TB in Tibet.
Joe Njagu
A film-maker from Zimbabwe, Joe has co-directed several feature films which have won awards at the Zimbabwe International film festival. He won Best Director Foreign Language Film at the American International Film Festival 2012 for the movie “The Gentlemen”. Married to a doctor who is involved in paediatric HIV research, he has also made films around health issues.
Read more...
He co-directed Chiedza’s Song: Growing up with HIV in Zimbabwe, which is now being shown in Zimbabwean schools.
Picturing Health Trustees
Professor Elizabeth Molyneux, OBE – Chair of the Trustees
Professor Molyneux spent more than 40 years working and teaching in Malawi, where she was head of paediatrics at the College of Medicine and at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre. She has chaired the Trial Steering committees of a number of ground-breaking paediatric trials funded by the UK Medical Research Council.
Read more...
She has played an central role in developing children’s emergency services with the WHO and is strategic advisor for East and West Africa for the International Board of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She has recently played a central part in a project to roll out low cost CPAP machines across Africa for which we made the training videos. She received an OBE for her work with children’s medicine in Africa.
Professor Peter Mugyenyi
As Director and Co-founder of Uganda’s Joint Clinical Research Centre, Prof Mugyenyione is one of Africa’s leading HIV experts. He played a central part in bringing HIV treatment to Africa. He defied patent laws to bring generics to Uganda and then played an advisory role in the start of the US PEPFAR program.
Read more...
He has been a Principal investigator on a number of important HIV trials and has written two books about the early years of the HIV epidemic in Africa. His is now Chancellor of Uganda’s Mbarara University and an independent director of CIPLA, the Indian pharmaceutical company which supplies low cost ARVs to Africa. He appears in a number of the research films.
Professor Ann-Louise Kinmonth CBE
Professor Kinmonth is Emeritus professor of General Practice in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge. She has practiced and taught medicine for 40 years. Her specialist field is in the prevention and management of long term conditions, especially diabetes and cardiovascular disease through patient-centred care.
Read more...
She has conducted a range of trials to evaluate ways of changing physical activity, diet and the relationship between doctors and patients in preventing, and limiting the progress of long term conditions like diabetes, heart disease and depression. She is specialist collaborator on the Department of Health Policy Unit; The Behaviour and Health Research Unit, which contributes evidence to international efforts to achieve sustained change in the four sets of behaviour – smoking, excessive consumption of food and alcohol, and physical inactivity which are major determinants of non-communicable diseases. She also acts as chair of a number of trial steering committees including trials of early life interventions.
Ann-Louise has an active commitment to social justice and is currently co-leading an interdisciplinary project on new approaches to policy making to reduce inequalities in health and teaching family medicine in Palestine. She has also done medical charity work in Tibet and Africa. She was awarded a CBE for her services to research in Primary Care.
Professor Sir Ian Weller
Prof Sir Ian Weller began his research career as a UK Medical Research Council Training Fellow at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He continued as a Wellcome Trust Senior Lecturer in Infectious Diseases, then as Professor of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and now Professor Emeritus, at University College London continuing a special interest in international research in HIV and hepatitis.
Read more...
He is and has been a chair and member of steering and data and safety monitoring committees in a large number of international trials and studies in HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis. He is also on the advisory boards of other international studies particularly in Africa
He is the chair of the board of trustees of the HIV Research Trust, which supports scholars from resource-poor countries in short-term capacity-building attachments. He was a member and then chair of the board of the Terence Higgins Trust and Vice-Chair of the UK’s Commission on Human Medicines, chairing numerous advisory groups on drug safety issues. He was a member, vice-chair and chair of the European Medicines Agency’s Specialist Advisory Group on HIV and Viral Diseases, Chair of the UK’s Tripartite Working Group on HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis reviewing the management of health care workers infected with blood-borne viruses, and Chair of a large observational HIV epidemiological research cohort in Europe. He was a member and deputy chair of a National Health Service ethics committee for 10 years.
Annabelle South
Annabelle is the Policy and Research Impact Co-ordinator at the Medical Research Council, based in the Clinical Trials Unit. She has long experience in communicating the results of major clinical trials and their significance to both a wide audience through the press and also to policymakers and medical professionals.
Read more...
She has masters in both Public Health and Development and has worked on projects and events in Africa, Asia and South America. Previously she worked for four years at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as Program Administration and Communications Manager. She has made and presented films about research for the MRC and has a great deal of experience commissioning films.