East Providence native Levi C. Maaia’s first documentary feature, “Pathways to Invention” which garnered numerous “best of” awards on the film festival circuit, premieres on PBS stations across the country in May as a one-hour special and is available to stream in the PBS app.

The program offers an in-depth exploration of the world of entrepreneurial inventors, spotlighting a range of inventive minds working in fields as diverse as biotech, sustainable agriculture, and software development.

"Pathways to Invention" was honored with the award for Best Documentary Feature at both the Southern California Independent Film Festival and the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival Awards (LAIFFA). At the LAIFFA, the film also garnered additional accolades: Mark and Maaia were named Best Producers, Maaia received the award for Best Director of a Documentary Feature, and the composers Michael Mark and Jon Cobert were recognized for their Best Original Musical Score.

Maaia was a student in the East Providence School Department and graduated from Moses Brown School and later Boston University and Emerson College. He began his media career at Full Channel (now i3 Broadband) in Warren where he became fascinated by the potential for technology to educate, and open a window on the world. From 2008-2015 he developed and taught a high school STEM program in Santa Barbara, Calif. while earning a Ph.D. in education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The film journeys through the workshops, garages, laboratories and offices of these accomplished inventors/entrepreneurs is narrated by David Moinina Sengeh, Chief Minister and Chief Innovation Officer for the Government of Sierra Leone. The inventor profiles are woven together through thematic pods that connect common traits including: perseverance, resilience, utilizing and becoming mentors, being open to collaboration, and understanding the impact of “nature versus nurture” on one's own pathway.

The featured inventors include:
● David Moinina Sengeh, Chief Innovation Officer and Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education for the Government of Sierra Leone, who witnessed those around him struggle with ill-fitting prosthetics that were uncomfortable to wear, and designed next generation wearable mechanical interfaces that improve comfort for amputees.
● Nicole Black, a materials scientist whose experience growing up as a little girl grappling with hearing loss due to a perforated eardrum led to the groundbreaking formulation of a 3D-printed material – a near-perfect scaffold for the regrowth of human eardrum tissue.
● A Fulbright Scholar visiting Uganda, Paige Balcom was inspired to develop a small-scale community recycling process in Gulu employing street-connected, at-risk youth. This supposedly “impossible” initiative was the genesis of Takataka Plastics, where Paige now serves as co-founder and is currently working to expand to five towns across Uganda, and eventually scale to other developing countries.
● Since becoming obsessed during college with the programmability of living things at a microscopic level, Geoff von Maltzahn has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to date to fund groundbreaking biotech and life sciences research. Through the management of microbes and the DNA programming of organisms big and small, Geoff and his colleagues are focused on eliminating plant pesticides, creating drought tolerant crops, sequestering carbon, and eliminating disease.