Team
Grace Kahng | Founder
As an investigative journalist reporting on social justice issues for three decades, Kahng has been recognized with journalism’s highest honors including numerous National Emmy Awards, The Robert F. Kennedy Award for International Broadcast, George Foster Peabody Awards, The Sidney Hillman Award for Social Justice and the Amnesty International Journalism Award. She has produced and reported for the leading women in broadcast journalism: Judy Woodruff, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, Maria Shriver, Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira and Natalie Morales. From PBS NewsHour to Primetime Live, Harpo, Dateline, 60 Minutes and the Today Show Kahng has dedicated her career to investigating human rights abuses domestically and abroad.
She has also edited two WSJ best-selling books on leadership, including BETTER TOGETHER: 8 Ways Working With Women Creates Extraordinary Products and Profits.
Her groundbreaking investigative reporting from Iran Contra to the heroics of United Flight #93 on 9/11 has led to monumental shifts in policy and reform at the highest level of government.
Career highlights include exposing U.S government malfeasance in the rape and torture of an American nun in Guatemala, the illegal dumping of military toxic waste by the Pentagon, and the ’92 groundbreaking reporting on the largest case of priest pedophilia and cover-up by the Catholic church. In 2005, Santoki Productions began its human trafficking series Sex Slaves in America, with a mission to raise awareness and expose the explosion of the black market sale of sex based on the enslavement of women and children in the U.S.
Raised by Korean pioneers in West Central Minnesota, Kahng studied at Medill and received her degree in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. In 1993, The University of Chicago awarded her a William Benton Fellowship. She lives in San Francisco with two sons who attend Middlebury College and UC Berkeley, and their dog, Archie.
Bill Ward | Director
Bill Ward has 25 years of experience in film and video production. Since graduating from Northwestern University in 1987, he has photographed and edited hundreds of projects including music videos, short comedy films and documentaries for broadcast television. In the mid-90's, he directed, shot and edited music videos for labels such as Atlantic, Sony, Capitol and Warner Brothers. His work frequently aired on MTV's Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation and, most importantly, Beavis and Butthead. Ward completed seven seasons as a primary editor and secondary photographer for the Emmy-nominated Cold Case Files series on A&E. And in February 2008, Conviction, a short documentary film that Ward co-directed, won Best Short Film at the Big Sky Film Festival. Currently based out of Chicago, Ward lives with his wife Amy, daughter Meghan and Molly, the family dog.
Bob Calo |
Executive Editor
Bob Calo began his television career at KQED in San Francisco, where he produced news and documentaries over a 10 year period. He spent another 10 years in New York, first producing for ABC News Primetime Live, and then for NBC's Dateline. He has produced stories throughout the US and a dozen foreign countries, including Pakistan, Croatia, Kenya and Somalia. His work has been honored with Emmy, IRE and National Headliner Awards, among others. Calo joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley in 2001, and currently serves as National Coordinator of News21, a collaborative experiment of 12 graduate journalism schools seeking to produce innovative web-based reporting.
Addison McNaughton |
Production Manager
Addison began his television production career after graduating from the University of Arizona in 2010 with a degree in Film/TV Production. Immediately after completing an internship with KPIX’s “Eye on the Bay” production staff, Addison joined the team at Santoki Productions. Since then, he’s helped manage several projects for the “Sex Slaves in America” series. Additionally, Addison has spent much of his spare time developing short and full-length action sports videos for DVD and Internet distribution, long before the days of YouTube and Vimeo.
Bob Kahng |
Chief Financial Officer
Bob Kahng brings a Corporate Finance background from IBM and Walgreens to Santoki Productions. When Bob isn't crunching numbers, he enjoys the outdoors and volunteering. Thanks to his Minnesota upbringing, Bob enjoys all types of water and snow sports and Minnesota sports teams. Bob graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Economics and received his MBA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Mark Oltmanns |
Producer/Shooter/Editor
Mark is a producer, shooter and editor based in the Bay Area. He received a master's degree from UC-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism in 2012 with a focus in broadcast television and documentary filmmaking. Mark grew up in Chicago, completed his undergraduate degree at UW-Madison in 2006 and then lived and worked in Southeast Asia (Thailand and Cambodia) for six years before moving to the Bay Area. Mark is the French-speaking member of the team that is particularly helpful on sting operations involving native French-speaking John's who try to feign a lack of knowledge about American laws and language.
Izzy Fleming | Associate Producer
Izzy started working with Santoki Productions in 2017. She first joined the team as the researcher for the WSJ best-selling book, BETTER TOGETHER: 8 Ways Working With Women Creates Extraordinary Products and Profits. Since then, she has assisted on a variety of investigative projects. Most recently, she is credited on Final Justice: The Stanford Murders as an associate producer. Izzy has experience across TV, audio and film production – from New York, California, and London. You can find her teetering between roles in story development, research, casting, and production coordination. She is a graduate of Middlebury College and currently lives across the pond in London.
David Prichard |
Writer
David Prichard is a Mississippi-born writer who now makes his home in migratory circulation between San Francisco, Colorado, and Vermont. He studied Creative Writing at The New School, and is now an MFA student of poetry at the Bennington Writers Seminars. He’s an avid meditation practitioner, and can often be found at Shambhala Meditation Centers – when unreachable by phone. He has been with Santoki in many capacities since 2009, and is always ‘on-call’ for the problem solving of projects great and small.
Loi Ameera Almeron | Web Producer
Loi is an investigative producer and editor of award-winning documentaries in the United States and the Philippines. She has worked on at least 35 documentaries and features of diverse topics for national and international broadcast, including the update to the Emmy-nominated film Rape on the Night Shift; PBS Frontline’s Trafficked in America, a 2019 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting finalist; HBO's Agents of Chaos, a 2021 Writers Guild Awardee; and Hale, the Student Academy Gold Awardee for Documentary in 2017.
Madison Kaplan |
Researcher
Madison graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2020, where she double majored in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Film & Media Studies. Finding an interest in documentaries, Madison has worked as an intern and production assistant in the past. Based in New York, Madison joined The Stanford Murders project as a researcher.
Sophia Vahanvaty | Intern
Sophia is a first-year undergraduate at Stanford University studying International Relations and Journalism. She brings reporting experience from The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi and American Purpose magazine. Her enthusiasm for developing investigative skills led her to join Santoki on The Stanford Murders project.
Willow Taylor Yang | Intern
Willow is a high school senior at The Nueva High School in San Mateo, CA, where she is Editor-in-Chief of her school newspaper, which was recently named a Pacemaker Finalist. She has been published by Ms. Magazine and was a senior project reporter for The Since Parkland Project, a data-driven effort by 200 student journalists, the Trace, and the Miami Herald to document the lives of the 1,200+ minors who lost their lives in the year after the Parkland shooting. The project won the 2019 Global Youth and News Media Award and the Pro-Am Student Journalism Prize.
Craig Goris |
Production Assistant
Santoki Productions unexpectedly lost their friend, colleague and resident zen master, Craig Goris, to Ewings Sarcoma on May 1, 2008. Craig was that rare creature for whom production was effortless and joyful. His sunny spirit and booming laugh will live in our hearts always. He is survived by his loving parents Donna and Greg, and his sister Jean.