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, was released in 2023.

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, 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 a MA from the University of Chicago.

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.