Sandy Cannon-Brown, founder (1985) and president (1985-present) of VideoTakes, Inc., is an award-winning environmental filmmaker whose work has taken her from the Chesapeake Bay to Central and South America, West Africa, the Northern Great Plains of Montana, and the Everglades.

She also taught at American University where she was named AU’s Adjunct Professor of the Year in 2011.  She was a founding associate director for AU’s Center for Environmental Filmmaking and honored as CEF’s first senior scholar in 2013.

Among her many other honors, Women in Film & Video DC honored Cannon-Brown as a Woman of Vision in 1998. She served as WIFV’s president 2011-12.  The Chesapeake Film Festival awarded her its first Woman of Impact Award in 2022.

For the past decade, Cannon-Brown’s work has focused on the Chesapeake Bay. With Writer Tom Horton and Photographer/Cinematographer Dave Harp, she produced eight environmental films for Bay Journal Media.  Cannon-Brown was the editor and a producer of the films, all of which were official selections of the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (DCEFF), the Chesapeake Film Festival, aired on Maryland Public Television and other PBS stations and screened and discussed at dozens of venues.

In 2025, this team was awarded the Bay Heritage Award by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum for their work.

Cannon-Brown teamed with Harp to produce films for the YMCA, ShoreRivers and Upstream Alliance.  She also independently produced films for the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, MD, where she and her husband, Omer Brown, had a house for 20 years.  The couple, and their dog Asta, moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 2020. Her first independent film focusing on Martha’s Vineyard, One Bad Crab, premiered at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in 2015.

Her career with VideoTakes includes 15 years as producer/director of the local Children’s Miracle Network broadcast on WUSA-TV9 in Washington, DC, which aired over an entire weekend each June to benefit Children’s National Medical Center. Other long-term projects included 12 years as the producer of PSAs honoring outstanding African-Americans, which aired on more than 200 stations during Black History month, and 20 years as the producer, writer and director of films for the U.S. Department of Energy and non-profit organizations about renewable energy initiatives.

Feature-length documentaries produced by Cannon-Brown and her VideoTakes team include Henry A. Wallace, An Uncommon Man, directed by Wallace’s granddaughter Joan Murray; Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives: The Environmental Footprint of War, directed by Alice and Lincoln Day; a four-part series on renewable energy for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and several half-hour TV specials about Children’s National Medical Center.

On the Vineyard, she is a member of the Board and treasurer of Tisbury Waterways, Inc., and a member of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center and Martha’s Vineyard Museum.