The Location Managers Guild International (LMGI) is the largest organization of Location Managers and Location Scouts in the motion picture, television, commercial and print production industries. Their membership plays a vital role in the creativ
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6 • LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2026 CONTRIBUTORS Diane Friedman/LMGI Diane grew up in New York and, with a background in art and photography, began her career in San Francisco working in cable and broadcast television. As a Los Angeles-based Local 399 location manager and scout for almost 30 years, she is proud to be a founding Board member of the Guild. For the past several years, she has been the Co-chair of the LMGI Awards Committee for Television and is a co-editor on the LMGI Compass magazine. She treasures all the friendships and working relationships she has had over the years and values every opportunity to promote the work we do. Jill Naumann/LMGI LA native Jill Naumann considers filmmaking to be an integral part of her cultural heritage. Training on the streets of Los Angeles during the '90s filming boom, Naumann worked with directors such as Ron Howard, Mick Jackson and William Friedkin. In 2003, she received a COLA for Location Professional of the Year—Television for 44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out. In 2013, she was honored with a second COLA for the Best Reality Series Top Hooker. Her photography has been showcased in AFCI's Locations Magazine and many California county brochures distributed by tourism boards. In her downtime, she enjoys using multi-sport vacations to scout California's small towns, and donates her time on the festival circuit to promote filming. Sasha Alvarez Denisoff/ LMGI Sasha Alvarez Denisoff is a Los Angeles-based location professional with more than 10 years of extensive work in episodic television. Her credits include Spider-Noir, Animal Kingdom, Presumed Innocent and Shameless. In addition to the LMGI, she is a proud member of Hollywood Teamsters Local 399 and the Television Academy. In 2022, she was honored by the California On Locations Awards and 399 Steering Committee with the Assistant of the Year Award for her work as a KALM on Loot. She holds degrees in writing from Pratt Institute (BFA) and Columbia University (MFA), and enjoys contributing her knowledge of the creative process, with a deep understanding of how what is in the imagination gets translated to the page, and later the screen. In her spare time, she enjoys gardening, hiking, beaches, travel and meandering road trips. Rachel Llewellyn Rachel Llewellyn is a media journalist, editor and corporate writer from Bakersfield, California—home of Jack Nicholson's freeway piano performance in Five Easy Pieces and near the site of the iconic plane chase in North by Northwest. She's written about arts and culture since college, when she got hooked on movie production after visiting a Tremors exhibit at the Museum of Western Film History. She's written for Girlfriends and Curve magazines, worked as a news producer, and is currently ghost- editing novels, copywriting for C-suiters, and contributing to Book & Film Globe. Shaun O'Banion Shaun O'Banion is a Gotham Award-winning producer currently living and working in Prague, Czech Republic. He has written articles for MovieMaker Magazine, Filmmaker Magazine and is a regular contributor on Stage32.com