who we are
SoundLight Media is a creative collaboration between filmmaker Amanda Kowalski and audio producer Samantha Broun. They met in 2006 at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine and have been working together ever since — crafting intimate, visually rich, and emotionally resonant stories that amplify the voices of people and organizations making a difference.
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Director/CinematographerAmanda Kowalski is an independent photographer, cinematographer, and director whose work spans environments as varied as the Greenland Sea and rural Sichuan Province. Her projects range from a three-month film and multimedia expedition documenting climate science in the Arctic, to an intimate portrait of an Orthodox Jewish dairy farmer.
Her photography has appeared in publications such as The New York Times and Oxford American, and her cinematography has screened at festivals across the U.S. and Europe, including Raindance.
In 2025, Amanda released her first feature documentary, The Alliance, which received multiple awards, including Best Cinematography at the Toronto Women’s Film Festival.
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Director/ProducerSamantha Broun an audio producer living in Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized with a duPont-Columbia Award, a Third Coast International Audio Festival Award, a Dart Award and was a finalist for a Peabody. She was a 2021 Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University and served as the managing editor for the radio storytelling website Transom.org for 14 years. She is currently working on Small True Things, a project that records stories about the small true things in the lives of students in a school and then shares those stories back with the student and their wider community. Prior to her career in radio, Sam worked with young people in mentoring and after school programs and at an alternative, public high school in Providence, RI.