India

Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival), and won six international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media Fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India Fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018), and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen and other journals.

Rintu Thomas is an award-winning director-producer from India whose work is supported by the Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, IDFA, SFF Film Fund, Doc Society, Tribeca Institute, Finnish Film Foundation and Bertha Foundation, among others. Over the last 10 years, Rintu’s films have been used as advocacy tools for social impact, included in the curriculum of universities and exhibited globally in spaces such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference and The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts – becoming catalysts for new conversations. A Sundance and Japan Foundation fellow, Rintu lives between New Delhi and a quaint mountain-town in North India.

Rintu Thomas is an award-winning director-producer from India whose work is supported by the Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, IDFA, SFF Film Fund, Doc Society, Tribeca Institute, Finnish Film Foundation and Bertha Foundation, among others. Over the last 10 years, Rintu’s films have been used as advocacy tools for social impact, included in the curriculum of universities and exhibited globally in spaces such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference and The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts – becoming catalysts for new conversations. A Sundance and Japan Foundation fellow, Rintu lives between New Delhi and a quaint mountain-town in North India.

Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda is an engineer-turned-filmmaker from India. He is currently studying and practicing film at the University of Texas at Austin, as part of their MFA program in Film & Media Production. His short documentary The Bubbleman premiered at SXSW Denius Longhorn Showcase in 2019, and has played at many festivals. He strives to tell stories that demand an urgent conversation and seeks to engage with people, places and communities that are slowly disappearing. Through cinema, he aims to affirm their existence by preserving their lives and memories. He is a recipient of the prestigious President's Award for Global Learning for his upcoming Untitled VR Thesis Film. He is also a recipient of the Austin Film Society Grant, and a nominee of the Kodak Cinematography Grant for his pre-thesis film, Testimony of Ana.

Akshaya Sawant is a multimedia artist from Mumbai, India, who focuses on the human experience as knitted in the web of gender, culture and traditions. She has a bachelor's degree in fine arts, with a major in painting. She is a Dean's Fellow and received her MFA from Emerson College, Boston, in May 2019. Her first feature documentary, Talking To The Wind, received the Virgin Unite Social Impact Film Fund (2017, 2018), and won the Platinum Remi Award in the social/economic films category at the 53rd WorldFest Houston International Film Festival.

Ramesh Holbole studied Marathi Literature at Fergusson College, in Pune, India. He was the editor of the literary magazine, Aksharvel. He currently studies directing and scriptwriting at the Film & Television Institute of India.

Jimmy Goldblum began his career as an interactive director and producer. In 2008, Goldblum won the Emmy for "New Approaches to Documentary" for Live Hope Love, an interactive documentary he produced for the Pulitzer Center. Goldblum also wrote, filmed, and produced “The Institute for Human Continuity”, an online narrative for Sony Pictures’ film 2012, which is widely considered one of the most successful transmedia campaigns of all time. Additionally, CNN called his first interactive documentary, “Yearbook 2006”, “so special…the best of the best” of all Hurricane Katrina documentaries. Goldblum's projects have won an Emmy, a Webby for Best Art Project, and have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, and USA Today.