Sonya Childress

Sonya Childress is a cultural strategist and impact producer. She believes in the power of film to support social justice movement-building. Sonya serves as Senior Fellow with the Perspective Fund, a philanthropic resource for documentary film and impact campaigns, where she conducts field-building research, writing and initiatives. Sonya previously served as the Director of Partnerships and Engagement for Firelight Media, where she led impact campaigns for director Stanley Nelson’s films, including Freedom Summer, Freedom Riders, Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and created a fellowship for impact producers of color. Sonya has worked with Active Voice, California Newsreel, Kartemquin Films, ITVS and Working Films, and has advised countless filmmakers on their impact strategies; including Yance Ford (Strong Island), Peter Bratt (Dolores), Steve James (The Interrupters), Cristina Ibarra & Alex Rivera (The Infiltrators), Byron Hurt (Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes) and Jeff Zimbalist (Favela Rising). She is a trustee of The Whitman Institute, a member of the Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and a facilitator of the Global Impact Producers group. Sonya proudly reps her hometown of LA, her African American and Puerto Rican heritage, and her two children.

Nadia Hallgren

Nadia Hallgren is an award-winning filmmaker from The Bronx, New York. She directed the emmy-nominated documentary BECOMING and academy-award shortlisted short documentary After Maria. She is the recipient of the special jury prize at SXSW for She’s the Ticket and a Webby for Public Service and Activism for her film Gavin Grimm vs. Nadia is a leading documentary cinematographer, credits including Sundance award-winner Motherland and Academy Award-nominated Trouble the Water. Nadia is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and an alum of the International Center of Photography.

Anna Har

Anna Har began working in the field of human rights and films after she studied film and anthropology. She has vast experience in training and producing films with different grassroots communities in South East Asia and pioneered community filmmaking for organising and activism in Malaysia in the 1990s. She led and directed a multiple award-winning TV magazine series for young women's empowerment, and is behind many of the films produced by civil society on community and human rights issues in Malaysia. She is one of the founders of FreedomFilmFest, Malaysia’s own international human rights documentary film festival and currently serves as the executive director of Freedom Film Network, an organisation dedicated to producing and using films for social impact.

Mai Masri

Mai Masri is a Palestinian filmmaker who grew up in Beirut and studied film at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley, USA. She founded Nour Productions with her late husband, filmmaker Jean Chamoun, and directed and produced a number of films that were screened in over 100 countries. Her work earned international recognition and won over 90 awards, including the Trailblazer Award at MIPDoc, Cannes (2009); the First Prize at the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards (2007); and the lifetime Achievement Award at El Gouna International Film Festival (2019). Mai wrote and directed her feature narrative film, 3000 Nights (2015), which had its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival, and was screened in several major festivals where it received over 28 international awards.

Mai’s filmography includes Children of Fire (1990), Hanan Ashrawi: A Woman of Her Time (1995), Children of Shatila (1998), Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), Beirut Diaries (2006), and 33 Days (2007). She also co-directed with her late husband Jean Chamoun, Under the Rubble (1983), Wild Flowers (1986), War Generation – Beirut (1988), and Suspended Dreams (1992). She produced, Hostage of Time (1994), In the Shadows of the City (2000), Women Beyond Borders (2004), and Lanterns of Memory (2009).

Barbara McCullough

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana to a family of traditional and contemporary jazz musicians, Barbara McCullough has spent most of her life in southern California. A graduate of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), she received a BA in communication studies, MFA in film and television production and is a part of UCLA film school graduates termed, "The LA Rebellion." Her goal as an artist is to tap the spirit and richness of her community expelling stereotypes, all with an eye befitting the stature and uniqueness of her subjects.

Before documentaries, experimental film and video were her first love. Her projects include: Water Ritual An Urban Rite of Purification, Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflection on Ritual Space, Fragments and The World Saxophone Quartet. Her most recent project, HORACE TAPSCOTT: MUSICAL GRIOT is a documentary film on musical genius, community activist, and jazz musician, the late Horace Tapscott. Ms. McCullough aims to continue the storytelling tradition of Zora Neale Huston and generations of story collectors and myth makers—only her platform is visual. Dedicated to the preservation of the heritage of the African American artist/cultural worker, she documents and shares their personal stories and art processes.

Her projects are screened/exhibited in universities, galleries, museums and film festivals in the United States and abroad. A partial list includes: the Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, Biennale du Rennes, Museum of Art Sao Paulo, Lenbachhaus Museum, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, British Film Institute, Irish Film Institute, California African American Museum, Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art, Williams College Museum of Art, Art & Practice, Sprueth Magers Gallery, Roberts & Tilton Gallery and the Anthology Film Archive. Festivals include: Metakino Essay, Houston Arts, New Orleans, Black Star, Pan African, African Movie Academy Awards and African Diaspora International Film Festival.

A twenty-five year veteran of the film industry in special visual effects production, Ms. McCullough has been a professor and chair of visual effects at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). The experimental film Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification was awarded an Avant Garde Masters Grant by the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2010.

Luiza Medeleanu

Luiza Medeleanu is PhD student in the field of Cultural Studies at the Multidisciplinary Doctoral School "Space, Image, Text, Territory,” Center of Excellence in Image Study (CESI), Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest with the doctoral thesis: "The Roma image in cinematography and cultural media. Ethics of fictionality and cultural identity.” In this paper she aims to analyze the Roma image in the cinematographic and multimedia art in Europe. The question from which she starts is whether the representation of Roma in films and TV series influences the formation of their cultural identity and how Roma are perceived by others in society. She graduated Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest and Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, the Rromani-English department, and has a Master in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest and one in Anthropology from SNSPA. Since 2010, she has worked in the Roma non-governmental field. In 2019, she was a scientific consultant on Roma culture in the docu-drama short film Letter of Forgiveness, directed by the Roma actress and director, Alina Șerban. This docu-drama is the first short film about Roma slavery from an inside perspective, Alina Șerban being a Roma actress. She currently works as an educational expert at the Roma Education Fund Foundation, where she coordinates educational activities with an intercultural character, but also developed intercultural training methodologies for teachers, for children and parents.

Shiko Njoroge

Shiko Njoroge is a rising Senior at Swarthmore College, majoring in Sociology and double minoring in Film and Media Studies and Black Studies. Her dream career is to write and direct films that bring a spotlight to marginalized communities and is truthful and authentic in their representation particularly in the Black community and other BIPOC communities. Her most recent work is a short experimental film titled Blackskin. In it, she uses the non-narrative genre to combat false anti-Blackness ideas on the inferiority of Black femme and non-binary folk. Using the poetry from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the film showcases the motifs of Black power, strength resilience, beauty and justified rage to expose the pain and trauma caused by a racist society but also Black joy and contentment- the beautiful strength of loving yourself in spite of anti-Black oppression. She is excited to be a part of Smile4Kime and believes wholeheartedly in its ability to explore the importance of mental health awareness in the Black community and the BIPOC community at large.

Régine Romain

Régine Romain is a Haitian-American artist, educator, visual anthropologist and equity coach living in Brooklyn, NY. She has 20+ years of teaching, training, and supporting diverse communities on issues of race, culture and representation through participatory and reflective learning practices. As a storyteller and cultural producer, she uses photographs/film/performance as mixed-media tools to ignite critical consciousness and radical change.

Régine is the author of Nou Pap Bliye: A Haitian Coloring Book (2020) and the founder/director of the WaWaWa Diaspora Centre. She is also the director/producer of the award winning short film and podcast Brooklyn to Benin: A Vodou Pilgrimage (2016) and Vodou Roots: A Love Story Musical (2018). Régine received her BS in International Studies from Bowie State University and MA in Photography and Urban Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Gisela Rosario Ramos

Gisela Rosario Ramos is Macha Colón, an un-disciplined artist currently based in Puerto Rico. She studied Black and Puerto Rican Studies and Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, NYC, where she also worked as a documentary editor and was part of Eduardo Alegria’s performance shows in PS 122. Upon returning to Puerto Rico, she worked as Artistic and Programming Director at Casa de Cultura Ruth Hernández, organizing cultural events while continuing to edit and direct films. Her award-winning short documentary El Hijo de Ruby has been shown in international festivals. She performs rock/pop music with her band Macha Colón y Los Okapi in alternative venues since 2008. They released their first album Tanquecito de amor (Little Tank of Love) in 2016 and performed in NYC at the Loisaida Festival, La Marqueta Retoña in El Barrio and the New New Museum. Recently, she won an international documentary competition to film Love Letters to an Iconess, a documentary about a Puerto Rican queer diva who’s now in her seventies. She’s an Art Matters Foundation and NALAC grantee and received the first Resiliency Award through the Arts from the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture in Chicago. In 2020, received the inaugural William Greaves Fund for mid-career filmmakers from Firelight Media. Also, she is a 2021 USA Artist Fellowship recipient. She’s in post-production of her first feature film, Perfume de Gardenias,which has received funds from Ibermedia and Tribeca Film Institute to be released in 2021.

Karen Rossi

Karen Rossi (Puerto Rico, 1974) has worked in the film industry since 1998. She’s the producer, director, and editor of Isla Chatarra (Scrap Island, 2007) which was sponsored by the first edition of DocTV Iberoamérica and obtained an Emmy (Suncoast) for Best Cultural Documentary. She directed the short documentary film Something More (2009) for the television series Zona Franca (Open Spaces), and is the producer of the shorts series It’s your right. Defend it. (2014), also awarded with an Emmy (Suncoast). In 2018 she premiered her first feature-length documentary film Ser Grande (When I grow up) with her production company Aurora Docs. Early in her career, Karen was assistant editor in Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mamá También.

Alina Șerban

Alina Șerban is the winner of Best Actress Award at the German Actors Guild Awards 2020 for her leading role in Gipsy Queen, a nominee for Best Actress of the German Film Awards 2020 and the representative of Romania at The Cannes International Film Festival 2018 for her leading role in Alone at My Wedding. The first one in her family to graduate high-school, she succeeded to graduate the Tisch School of the Arts in New York and obtained a master’s from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, becoming an award-winning actress and the first Roma woman theatre and film director of Romania. For her first leading role in cinema, Serban stars in Marta Bergman’s feature film Alone at My Wedding, which premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2018 and earned her several Best Actress awards. She also stars as a boxer in Huseyin Tabak’s Gipsy Queen, a German-Austrian production. For this performance, she won the Best Actress award at POFF Black Nights Film Festival Tallinn 2019, the Best Actress award at The German Actors Guild Awards was nominated for the German Film Academy Award - LOLA. As a playwright, Serban pioneered Roma feminist political theatre, with three plays to her name by the age of 29, becoming the first Roma woman director to have a play included in the permanent repertoire of a state theatre in Romania in 2018. In 2020, Serban made her debut as a filmmaker with Bilet de iertare/Letter of Forgiveness - the first film about the Roma slavery written and directed from a Roma perspective.

Lisa Smith

Lisa Smith has an MA in Education and is Youth Editor at Travellers’ Times a national magazine for Roma and Travellers. She supports young people through journalism, media and training programmes. She has worked with the BBC as a researcher and consultant and is currently a creative producer specialising in drama and documentary-based shorts. Her debut short film Hotchi was created in collaboration with Channel 4 and Arts Council England.

Cybee Bloss

Cybee is a nonbinary producer and animator who tells surreal stories of intimacy, friendship, and mental health. Originally from rural West Virginia, they have called Philadelphia home for over a decade. They spend most of their time at Phillycam, Philadelphia’s public access tv station, producing content with other community members. They recently created a series called Theydies and Gentlethems, which is a playful guide to using trans and nonbinary affirming language for adults. When they are not working on video projects, they are teaching media arts workshops in their neighborhood, gardening with their twin, or dm’ing a dungeons and dragons campaign. They are a recipient of Philadelphia Independent Media Fund and the Leeway Foundations Art and Change Grant. Their work has also received support from Scribe Video Center and The Puffin Foundation.

Elena H. Guzman

Elena H. Guzman is a documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the performative imaginings of the nation, state, and cross border communities on the southern border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Currently, she is working on revising her dissertation into a book manuscript entitled Entangled Borders: Performance on the Edge of Nations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a documentary filmmaker. She co-directed a film entitled Bronx Lives (2014) that explores homelessness for Latinx and African Americans in New York. She is also the director and executive producer of the film Smile4Kime, currently in post-production, that explores the intersections of race, gender, and mental health. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.

Emily Hong

Emily Hong is a Seoul-born and New York-raised visual anthropologist and filmmaker. Her research interests include indigenous media, sensory ethnography, law and society studies, feminist epistemology, and the anthropology of collaboration. Emily’s research, films, and activist engagements are largely rooted in Thailand and Myanmar, where she has spent a decade, first as a human rights campaigner and trainer, and later as a filmmaker and researcher. Emily’s non-fiction film and video work combines feminist, decolonial and ethnographic approaches with impact-oriented storytelling. Her films GET BY (2014), NOBEL NOK DAH (2015), and FOR MY ART (2016), have explored solidarity and labor, womanhood and identity in the refugee experience, and the gendered spectatorship of performance art, respectively. Her current project ABOVE AND BELOW THE GROUND features indigenous women and punk rock pastors leading an environmental movement in Myanmar’s North. Emily is the co-founder of Ethnocine and Rhiza Collectives, co-host and producer of the Bad Feminists Making Films podcast, and a core member of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-DOC). She has screened and exhibited her work at the San José Museum of Art, Johnson Museum of Art, and at international film festivals. Her research and films have been supported by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Asian American Media, Bertha Foundation, and the Tribeca Film Institute.

Miasarah Lai

Miasarah Lai is a Community Manager at Brown Girls Doc Mafia and a freelance documentary filmmaker who works as a camera operator, editor, and producer. She has worked internationally in Honduras, Ghana, Myanmar, China, Nicaragua, Romania, and the U.S. She has produced work for American Airlines, Nike, NBC Universal, University of Chicago, among others. Her work has screened at Big Sky Film Festival, American Documentary Film Festival,San Jose Museum of Art, The Block Museum of Art, & Herbert Johnson Museum of Art. She has received grants from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Camden International Film Festival, Double Exposure Film Festival, The Propeller Fund, and a DVID fellowship from Kartemquin Films. Miasarah is a co-founder of Ethnocine Collective and is a member of Asian American Documentary Network.

Mariangela Mihai

Mariangela Mihai is an Anthropology PhD candidate at Cornell University and a filmmaker. Her multi-modal work uses feminist filmmaking, poetry, and activist ethnography, to explore Indigenous resistance on the India-Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands. She is co-founder of Ethnocine, a feminist filmmaking collective of women of color and queer scholars committed to push the boundaries of documentary storytelling through intersectional feminist and decolonial practices. Mariangela's films have screened at international film festivals, universities, museums, and other public and art institutions in Athens, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Paris, New York, Yangon, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Jose.

Laura Menchaca Ruiz

Laura Menchaca Ruiz is a sociocultural anthropologist and media maker from the borderlands of the U.S. Southwest. Her research and visual work are rooted in multi-sensory ethnography, epistemologies of the “global south,” feminist, gender and sexuality studies, decolonial approaches to space and place, and beauty as a critical method. Laura is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Media Studies and the Division Head of Humanities and the Practicing Arts at Al-Quds Bard College; Co-Founder and Creative Director at Element Media; Co-Founder of the feminist filmmaking collective, Ethnocine; and a Producer for the Bad Feminists Making Films podcast. Her creative work celebrates the marks that people make on the world, highlighting the extraordinary in the ordinary, and her scholarship explores the reach for autonomy amidst marginalizing constraint. Her approach to all her work treasures the local, the small-scale, the personal, the eccentric, the intimate. She is currently working on several media and film projects, including Hay Betl7em—a social media-based docuseries (Co-Director & Co-Producer), and a feature non-fiction film, Smile4Kime (Editor). Her work has been featured via the Society for Visual Anthropology, Fieldsights/Society for Cultural Anthropology, and at El Movimiento de Cultura y Arte Latino Americana (MACLA) in San José. Her research has been supported by the Palestinian American Research Center, Society for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, a MA from Columbia University, a BA from San Francisco State University an an AA from Palomar College.