About the filmmakers
Leslie Buchbinder
Director, Writer, & Producer
Leslie Buchbinder is a Chicago-based writer, director, and founder/Artistic Director of Pentimenti Productions, an arts non-profit dedicated to producing, supporting, and exhibiting films about art and artists. Prior to film-making, Buchbinder was a professional dancer in companies in Chicago and San Francisco, then pivoted to a career in international arts public relations in NYC and Chicago, where she established her own company working with local and international museums. Her directorial debut was the award-winning, critically acclaimed Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, a 2014 documentary chronicling the history and impact of an iconoclastic group of young artists from the School of the Art Institute, often referred to as Chicago’s answer to Pop Art. Buchbinder’s second feature, Westermann: Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea, is being released in 2023.
Caryn Capotosto
Executive Producer
Caryn Capotosto is an Emmy award-winning producer known for Won’t You Be My Neighbor? a feature documentary about Mister Rogers that won a 2019 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary, a Producers Guild Award and a 2018 Critics’ Choice Award for Best Documentary. She received a 2016 News and Documentary Emmy Award for her role as co-producer on Best of Enemies as well as a 2021 News and Documentary Emmy for her role as Executive Producer on the 2021 short doc, The Love Bugs. She contributed to the Academy Award and Grammy Award-winning documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom (Associate Producer 2013). Recent projects include the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Ugly Delicious and Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. (Executive Producer 2019-2020) and the Emmy Award-winning documentary Feels Good Man (Producer 2021). Most recently she produced The Thief Collector, an art heist documentary that will be released in 2022.
KAWS
Executive Producer
Pentimenti is honored to have the internationally acclaimed artist KAWS as an Executive Producer of Westermann. As an avid collector of H.C. Westermann’s art, KAWS is a champion and steward of Westermann’s legacy.
KAWS (b.1974) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, graphic and product design, and large-scale sculpture. KAWS has shown solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), High Museum of Art (Georgia), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MI), National Gallery of Victoria (AUS), Brooklyn Museum (NY), Mori Arts Center Gallery (Tokyo), & Serpentine Gallery (UK). KAWS is represented by Skarstedt Gallery, (NY, London, Paris).
Brian Ashby
Producer & Editor
Brian Ashby is a Chicago-based filmmaker, known for his contributions to documentary projects including The Area, Scrappers, Central Standard: On Education, and Accident, MD. Brian joined the Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists team after meeting director Leslie Buchbinder at the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in 2008, and helped in the creation of Pentimenti as a non-profit in 2010. He wore many hats on Hairy Who as co-producer, a member of the scriptwriting team, a contributing cinematographer, and an archival researcher and music supervisor. Brian joined the Westermann project again as co-producer, and led efforts to compile 1,400 of the artist's letters, from which he worked with writer/director Buchbinder to create the film's script. After working as a member of the 3-D stereography team on shoots across the country, and assistant-directing the film's larger staged productions, Brian has been Westermann's editor since 2020.
Harrison Sherrod
Producer
Harrison Sherrod is the Executive Director of Pentimenti Productions and a producer on the Westermann project. He oversees all day-to-day operations of the company, and is responsible for Pentimenti’s expansion in public programming and educational initiatives. As an educator, he has regularly taught classes at the Newberry Library and Hyde Park Art Center, and has delivered talks on film & philosophy at the School of the Art Institute, University of Chicago, Stony Island Arts Bank, and more. Harrison is also an accomplished film programmer and critic. He is the co-chair of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Associate Producers board, and holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA from the University of Chicago.
Pentimenti is working in close cooperation with the families and heirs of H.C. Westermann and Joanna Beall Westermann and with the H.C. Westermann Study Collection based at the Smart Museum of Art and the University of Chicago. Pentimenti is in consultation with noted Westermann scholars, including David McCarthy (Rhodes College, Memphis), Lynne Warren (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago), and Michael Rooks (High Museum of Art, Atlanta).