USA

Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary film director. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Her documentary, Banaz: A Love Story (2012), chronicles the life and death of a young, British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honor killing. Khan's second film, Jihad, involved two years of filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Khan has also produced a number of critically-acclaimed albums, including Listen to the Banned, a compilation that brought together musicians from around the world who have been subject to persecution, censorship and imprisonment.

Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary film director. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Her documentary, Banaz: A Love Story (2012), chronicles the life and death of a young, British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honor killing. Khan's second film, Jihad, involved two years of filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Khan has also produced a number of critically-acclaimed albums, including Listen to the Banned, a compilation that brought together musicians from around the world who have been subject to persecution, censorship and imprisonment.

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922, in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. He and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis in 1944 to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the war he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949, the UN Refugee Organization brought Jonas and Adolfas to New York City, where they settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two months after his arrival in New York, he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon became deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he started his legendary “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice. He founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1962, and two years later, in 1964, the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives—one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema. During this time he continued to write poetry and make films. He published more than 20 books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His Lithuanian poetry is now considered classic Lithuanian literature, and his films can be found in leading museums around the world. He is largely credited for developing the diarist form of cinema. Mekas has also been active as an academic, teaching at the New School for Social Research, the International Center for Photography, Cooper Union, New York University and MIT.

Bing Liu is a Chicago-based director and cinematographer. His 2018 documentary Minding the Gap has earned several award recognitions since its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. He is a segment director on America To Me, a documentary series examining racial inequities in the US education system. He was a member of the International Cinematographers Guild for seven years. Liu holds a BA in Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Stephen Maing is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and visual journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. His filmmaking merges an interest in underrepresented individuals and communities, and the evolving considerations of identity, visual language and narrative structure. Stephen has directed films for the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Nation, The Intercept and Field of Vision. He is a fellow of the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program, and recipient of the International Documentary Association's inaugural Enterprise Investigative Journalism grant. He is an adjunct at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston where he teaches summer courses in documentary filmmaking.

Stephen Loveridge is a digital artist and filmmaker from London. MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. is his first documentary feature.

Liza Mandelup is a film director from New York currently residing in Los Angeles. She has published two photo books and has shown her work in numerous exhibitions. She has been a longtime collaborator with many online platforms, such as Vogue, Nowness, i-D, and Dazed. Mandelup was featured on Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2017”, and recently won the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker.

Georgy Molodtsov is an award-winning director and producer who specializes in production of 360/VR content, as well as organizing cinematic VR events as part of film festivals that showcase 360 content. He is the co-founder of the VRability social project and Russian VR Seasons initiative. He is also the curator of the goEast film festival’s Open Frame Award and VR Scientific Festival in Sweden.

Heather White is the founder and former president (1995–2005) of www.verite.org, an award-winning non-profit organization recognized for its groundbreaking leadership in the areas of global supply chain monitoring and factory social audits. From 2011–2014 she was a Network Fellow at Edmond Safra Center for Ethics, at Harvard University. Complicit is her first documentary feature.

Rupert Russell holds a PhD from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He is currently working on a series of animated short films, How the World Went Mad, about the rise of political insanity, for the documentary streaming platform, Yaddo. Freedom For The Wolf is his first feature documentary.