A.RAY.tv (Amy Kalafa & Alejandro Crawford)
Business Unusual
From her early days at CBS News to her more recent work as an award-winning documentary filmmaker, AMY KALAFA has been focused on telling stories that motivate people to take action. Specializing in documentary-style filming and editing, Amy is known for her work in nutrition, mental health and environmental advocacy. She holds a Lectureship in Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, a B.A. with Honors in Semiotics and Film from Brown University and an MBA in Sustainability from Bard’s Graduate Programs.
One of her best-known works, the award-winning independent documentary, Two Angry Moms, sparked a school food revolution. The film has been honored at festivals around the US, and been featured in major national media including Good Morning America, NPR, the New York Times and the cover of USA Today.
Amy also created and Executive Produced the groundbreaking primetime series, “Inside the Criminal Mind,” featured on Court TV’s Crime Stories. With her partner Alex Gunuey, she produced, directed, and edited “From the Deep Grapevine”, a documentary about the French roots of Cajun and Creole culture that was nationally distributed on PBS. Amy has won film festival awards, Telly Awards, the Connecticut Vision Award and has been nominated for Peabody, Emmy and Cable Ace awards.
Amy has owned and operated A-Ray for thirty years – first in New York City and now in the woods of Connecticut. Her clients include all of the major networks as well as the Reiner Foundation, Yale University and the United Nations Development Project.
ALEJANDRO CRAWFORD writes and speaks regularly on how to release the potential of regular people not only to imagine but also to launch a different world. As CEO or RebelBase and professor of entrepreneurship at the Bard MBA in Sustainability, he enables people who see a better way to make it real. Business Unusual was born at Bard, and RebelBase is a software platform that powers and equips everyday people competing on Business Unusual to solve problems the way entrepreneurs do — no business background required. As a global facilitator, Alejandro creates workshops and keynotes international conferences like Toward Collaborative Practice, and facilitates creative platforms for change like Disrupt to Sustain. His dedication to the power of unleashed creativity derives from his work crossing between entrepreneurship, media, and poetry. His poems and spoken word pieces have appeared in journals such as Juked and Other Rooms Press and featured in the Synesthesia Anthology and the Two Cities Review podcast. He relies on poetry to re-inflate the cartoon hero, flattened by a falling piano – and pop him back into his world, or else through to another one. He earned his BA from Cornell University and his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Business Unusual
Business Unusual harnesses the entertaining format of a reality competition series to make social entrepreneurship aspirational and accessible to anyone with a great idea.
