Nancy Sue Brink

Nancy is the Community Enterprise Director at EPA.net, as well as an independent media artist and writer. She has worked as an independent writer and filmmaker for more than 20 years, starting out on 16mm film and now wholeheartedly embracing the digital world.

For Nancy, making movies was a way to combine the many things she loves – storytelling, poetry, music, art, working with people, and digging in to big challenges. She believes in the power of storytelling — no matter the medium — to play a transformative role in the world.

Through her independent production company, Present Tense Productions, she has created films, videos, and multi-media projects for clients in the arts, nonprofits, business, science, and education. Her clients have included the Tech Museum of Innovation, the Children’s Discovery Museum, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory.

She started working on her first film in East Palo Alto in 1984, and frequently finds herself back in the community. Her first EPA-based film, No Hunger in My Home (1988) won a student Academy Award. She was writer and editor for Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto. She designed and produced Get Fit EPA’s City on the Move social marketing program, which included youth-led web design and video components and laid the groundwork for EPA.net's Apprentice-to-Professional program.

Around the turn of the last century, she began dedicating a good part of her time to working with young people. She developed media programs for Upward Bound and the National Hispanic University in East San Jose, helping students to learn filmmaking skills, develop writing and inquiry skills, and to develop their first student publication, an online magazine, Abriendo Fronteras. In 2007, she completed a full-year high school curriculum package, Filmmaking in the Age of Digital Video, for the Bermuda Ministry of Education, Stanford Schools of Education and Engineering, and the Bermuda Technology Education Collaborative.

Nancy’s first creative love has always been poetry; recently two of her poems were published in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine Hong Kingston. In her spare time, she likes to get outdoors, hiking, kayaking, and watching birds. For more than a decade, she’s been a dedicated volunteer at the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, leading a team that bands and studies migrating raptors. She is also an instructor at her local YMCA, focusing on balance and strength training for older adults.

Nancy has a degree in Communication/Documentary Film from Stanford (1988), and a BA in Political Science and German from Tufts University (1980). She attended Eberhard-Karls Universität, in Tübingen, Germany, on a Rotary International Award for International Understanding.