Meet the Filmmakers

Deia Schlosberg

co-creator, director, cinematography, editing

Deia (she/they) made national news in October, 2016, when she was arrested and charged with 45 years’ worth of felonies for filming the #ShutItDown pipeline protest in North Dakota.

Deia’s directorial debut, THE STORY OF PLASTIC (Mill Valley/Discovery) won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Documentary in 2021. Previously, Deia produced Josh Fox’s climate change film, HOW TO LET GO OF THE WORLD... (2016, Sundance/HBO), and co-produced AWAKE, A DREAM FROM STANDING ROCK (2017, Tribeca/Netflix), and THE RELUCTANT RADICAL (2018, PBS, dir. Lindsey Grayzel). Deia earned an MFA in Science & Natural History Filmmaking at Montana State University in Bozeman, where she directed and produced BACKYARD, which looks at the human cost of fracking and won two student Emmys.

She was named one of DOC NYC’s 40 under 40 in 2019, and a Film Independent Fellow in 2021.

Deia’s background is in Earth science and visual communications, as well as expeditioning, having been awarded a 2009 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award for a two-year, 7800-mile through-hike of the Andes Mountains.

Deia is currently directing the docuseries Bootstraps, which follows eleven households for two and a half years while each individual receives a basic income as part of a groundbreaking UBI experiment.

Conrad Shaw

Co-creator, UBI trial manager, field producer, writing

Conrad (he/him) is a researcher, producer, writer, and activist in the UBI space.

He earned a BS from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Mechanical Engineering and gained several years experience as a top secret clearance level stress analyst and design engineer before pursuing a dramatic career shift in 2008, moving to NYC to study filmmaking, writing, and acting.

In 2016, he launched into full-time UBI work when he teamed up with his now wife and partner Deia Schlosberg on the Bootstraps project.

During his time working on Bootstraps, Conrad also created UBIcalculator.com as a tool for the movement and penned multiple essays on different facets of UBI. Once the UBI program and film production aspects of Bootstraps were complete, Conrad joined the team of Comingle, a startup web platform building an online solidarity community around UBI-style mutual aid, as a co-founder.