USA

Shengze Zhu (born in 1987, in China) is a documentary filmmaker and producer. Her directorial feature debut, Out of Focus (2014), premiered at Cinéma du Réel. Her second feature documentary, Another Year (2016), received the Best Film Award at Visions du Réel, and the Grand Prize at Montreal. Zhu co-founded the production company, Burn The Film, with director and visual artist, Yang Zhengfan, and has also served as producer for Yang's films.

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.

Eszter Hajdú is a film director, scriptwriter and producer based in Portugal and Hungary. She regularly lectures at universities, and holds workshops and masterclasses for film students and human rights activists. Her films cover social and political taboos.

David France is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, bestselling author, and award-winning investigative journalist. His directorial debut, How To Survive a Plague, has been hailed as an innovative and influential piece of storytelling. It is regularly screened in university classrooms, and by community groups and AIDS service organizations. The film also garnered Academy Award and Emmy nominations, as well as a Peabody Award. His 2017 film, The Death & Life of Marsha P. Johnson, received rave reviews and won numerous festival prizes. 

Naziha Arebi is a Libyan/British artist and filmmaker who returned to Libya during the revolution. Naziha works at the intersection of art and activism, and is co-founder of the film collective HuNa. Alongside her first feature Freedom Fields, she is currently producing the documentary feature After a Revolution, and has a fiction film in development. Naziha is a Hot Docs-Blue Ice and Sundance Lab fellow, a WEF Global Shaper and part of the Lumiere d'Afrique collective. Her artwork has been published extensively in print and exhibited globally.

Davy Rothbart is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, bestselling author and journalist, frequent contributor to public radio's "This American Life", and the creator of Found Magazine. Rothbart previously directed two documentaries about the activist band Rise Against. A separate short film featuring Rise Against's song "Make It Stop" was created for Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project and later won an MTV Music Video Award.

Technology executive-turned-filmmaker Hao Wu takes a raw and human approach to storytelling in an era when culture evolves online. Wu previously held management roles at Alibaba, TripAdvisor and Excite@Home. His award-winning films have received support from JustFilms/Ford Foundation, ITVS, Sundance, Tribeca and international broadcasters. His 2018 documentary film People's Republic of Desire was screened at the 16th Verzió in the Media the 4th Estate section.

This local reporter in Wuhan wishes to remain anonymous to protect his identity. On assignment to take photos for his employer at different Wuhan hospitals during the lockdown, he started shooting videos for the first time, for himself.

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.