Joel Neville Anderson is a cross-disciplinary filmmaker and scholar producing experimental narrative and documentary cinema while specializing in the study of Japanese film and culture. He is pursuing a PhD degree in the University of Rochester’s Visual and Cultural Studies program and is an alumnus of Purchase College’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts & Film, where he was the recipient of the President’s Award for Achievement. In his practice, research, and teaching, he addresses intergenerational communication, independent production methodologies, East Asian cinema, and visual culture. His work has been screened at Anthology Film Archives, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, as well as at school campuses and community events. As an educator, Joel has worked with the Museum of the Moving Image, the Jacob Burns Film Center, Purchase College, the New School, and DCTV, in addition to film curating and nonprofit fundraising at Japan Society, New York. Joel is based in New York City and Rochester. www.joelnevilleanderson.com

Beth Balaban is a Boston-based filmmaker. She is the co-founder and chair of The Non-Fiction Cartel (www.thenonfictioncartel.com), a working collaborative that will launch a new fellowship in Fall 2013 to support emerging short-form, nonfiction artists in New England. Beth received her MFA in Media Arts from Emerson College and has worked with the small production team Principle Pictures since 2010 as a director, producer, editor, and director of photography. Currently she is co-producing two feature-length documentaries: What Tomorrow Brings and the Sundance-supported Dakota Dream. Beth is co-directing, co-producing, and photographing Son of Saichi in Japan, set for completion in 2013. She also works as a Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Extension School for video production and editing.

Cecilia Barrionuevo is a programmer for the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Argentina. She is a member of the team that defines the official competition sections and identifies who will participate in them. She is also in charge of following cutting-edge filmmaking and experimental formats, documentaries, found footage, and fiction. Besides her work at the film festival, she has co-programmed the series Refractarios—Muestra de cine documental y experimental español, at MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires), 2009. She co-organized the series Found Footage, una venganza contra la historia del cine, for the Cortópolis Festival, Argentina, 2010, and curated the series The Other Argentinean Cinema (La Casa Encendida cultural space, Madrid, Spain, 2013). She has an MA in Creative Documentary Making issued by the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain. She has contributed to several cultural publications, has been a juror for cinema festivals, and has taught documentary cinema classes in universities and cultural institutions in Spain and Argentina.

Amanda Berg is a documentary photographer and filmmaker. She received her BFA in Photojournalism from Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently working towards her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. Since joining the MFA program at Duke, she has become increasingly inspired by the intersection of the still and moving image. Her current projects explore gender in sport, the crossroads of military and civilian life, and her own familial memory.

Yoni Brook is a director and an Independent Spirit Award-nominated cinematographer. He shot his first feature film, Valley of Saints, with a makeshift crew under a military curfew in Kashmir; it won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. In collaboration with Musa Syeed, he has created three documentary films: Bronx Princess (PBS POV, Berlinale), The Calling (PBS Independent Lens), and A Son’s Sacrifice (PBS Independent Lens, Best Doc Short at the Tribeca Film Festival). Prior to making films, Brook worked as a photojournalist at the New York Times and the Washington Post. Brook is an alumnus of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Malia Bruker is a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, and editor. Her early work in independent news and political media continues to influence her most recent films, but she has since shifted to a more personal style, often comedic and sometimes irreverent. Her short documentary Chase, a humorous and inventive exploration of the banking industry,screened at festivals throughout the US and won several awards. Malia holds a BA from Florida State University and recently completed her MFA at Temple University where she was a Temple University Graduate Fellow. Malia also worked on the weekly news magazine SourceCode for Free Speech TV, the progressive national news and documentary channel. As Production Manager. she helped lead a team of independent filmmakers and citizen journalists in a groundbreaking model of news production. She is currently working on her first feature documentary, Heirloom, a personal essay film exploring themes of nostalgia, activism, community, and cynicism.

Brenda L. Burmeister  is currently a 2014 MFA candidate in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University and a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a reluctant conceptual artist, devout experimental film/video maker, but above all, an avid metaphor maker. As a single mother of three, her work is often preoccupied with domestic drama and the themes of intimacy through exposure, identity within family narrative, and the interplay of technology in personal relationships.

Shannon Carroll is a Brooklyn-based artist and documentary producer. She works with media and storytelling to foster community engagement, cross-cultural understanding, and human rights advocacy. Her creative roots lie in photography, and her current work involves documentary filmmaking, web design, installation art, and interactive media. Recently she traveled to El Salvador and to immigrant communities within the United States to investigate liminality and repressed histories of place, and is producing a site-specific audio walk through South Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Carroll is a Web Producer at POV, and a Collaborative Fellow at UnionDocs, a center for documentary art.

Chico Colvard is a Boston-based filmmaker, lecturer, and curator. His award-winning documentary, Family Affair, premiered at Sundance and has screened at major festivals and TV channels around the world. He is a frequent guest speaker at colleges and universities, film festival panelist, moderator, and juror. His new film, Black Memorabilia, is an intimate portrait of the people who consume, manufacture, and assume the identities of these objects.

Sara Zia Ebrahimiis a curator of film, visual art, and new media who has produced film screenings and exhibits in the Philadelphia area for over a decade. She has worked as a consultant with the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and with documentary filmmakers on their engagement and outreach campaigns. Currently she works as a Social Media Specialist at American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). An MFA graduate of Temple University, her own short films have screened internationally and have been awarded grants from Chicken & Egg Pictures, Rooftop Films, and the Leeway Foundation.

Sarah Garrahan is a documentary filmmaker and editor from San Antonio, Texas. She received her BS in Radio-Television-Film from the University of Texas and her MA in Creative Documentary from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is currently an MFA candidate in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. Her work has focused on documenting underrepresented communities. She most recently worked as a documentary editor for KLRU, Austin’s local PBS affiliate. She is currently working on a documentary film, Deja que salga la luna, which chronicles a family of Durham restaurant workers from Chiapas, Mexico.

Einar Thor Gunnlaugsson is a graduate of the London Film School and holds an MA from City University, London, in art policy and management. Now an Iceland-based writer/director, he has a number of short films and music videos under his belt, as well as two drama features and two documentaries. His articles and short stories have appeared in magazines and daily newspapers, and he has produced ten major radio programs for National Radio 1 in his native country. He also has credits as production manager on various film and theater projects from his early days, and has appeared in a number of short films and videos as an actor, including a Soul II Soul music video for the United Nations. He has received a writer’s award from the European Script Fund and was nominated for the Young Filmmaker of the Year Award at the Edinburgh Festival 1992.

Stacey Lynn Holman is a Harlem-based independent filmmaker and freelance producer. She has produced and directed two award-winning films, Mirar Mirror and Girl Talk, as well as several other shorts. Currently she’s completing her documentary Dressed Like Kings, shot entirely in South Africa, about a group of fashionable Zulu men. In addition, she’s a line producer with Firelight Films, producers of the PBS documentary on the Mississippi Summer Project 1964, better known as Freedom Summer.

Jeng-Tyng (Jen) Hong is a documentary filmmaker and multimedia journalist from New York City. She spent the last four years in Bulgaria: three as a Peace Corps volunteer and then as the executive producer of a documentary about small-town life in Bulgaria. While an undergraduate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Jen interned at Good Morning America in Washington, DC, where she discovered her passion for journalism. She has also worked at World News Tonight and the specialized Law and Justice Unit at ABC News. Though Jen’s background is largely in network news, she is fascinated by all forms of visual storytelling. Jen is currently pursuing a master’s degree in broadcast journalism and documentary films at Columbia University.

Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich is a documentary artist who has completed projects in Kingston, Jamaica, Miami, Florida, and extensively in the five boroughs of New York City. Her work has been featured in Studio Museum’s Studio magazine, ARC Magazine, BOMBlog, and Guernica magazine, among others. She has received grants from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, as well as the National Black Programming Consortium. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Miami, and London. Madeleine has a degree in Film and Photography from Hampshire College and is a current MFA candidate in Film at Temple University. Her work explores themes of physicality, violence, masculinity, and identity within Caribbean American and urban space.

Leslie Koren is a documentary filmmaker who has helped to produce award-winning works. Her work is distributed through Tribeca Institute’s ReFrame Collection, and has been exhibited in print, online, and in festivals, including UnionDocs Bodega, the Global Peace Film Festival in Orlando, Hamptons International Film Festival, Copenhagen International Film Festival Market, Lowell Independent Film Festival, Branchage International Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives. She is a 2012 recipient of a New York Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies Scholarship and of the Center for the Arts Dean’s Grant at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she is a second-year graduate student and Graduate Teaching Assistant with a focus on documentary practice. Originally from Buffalo, New York, she began her film career as an undergraduate student at Hampshire College and has been involved since in documentary producing and directing.

Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain is a Jewish and Turtle Mountain Chippewa multimedia artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds a BA from Hampshire College where she studied experimental film, photography, and Native American Studies. LaFountain spent two years as the general operations manager of the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, where she still serves as a 16mm film instructor and screening curator. Her films have been shown in festivals and venues across the country and abroad, including ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Festival in Toronto and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York. LaFountain’s photography has won numerous awards, including the Santa Fe Indian Market Best of Classification Award. She is currently a dual MFA candidate in the Photography and Media program and the Film and Video program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, critic, and programmer based in Chicago. He has produced critical video essays for Sight & Sound, Indiewire, Fandor, and other outlets, and has written for Slate, Cineaste, and TimeOut. He is co-founder and programming executive of dGenerate Films, a leading distributor of Chinese independent films. In 2012 he co-programmed the series Chinese Realities / Documentary Visions for the Museum of Modern Art. He also served as supervising producer for Roger Ebert Presents: At the Movies. He is pursuing an MFA and MA dual degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Naomi Levine is an MFA candidate in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She received a BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her background is in ethnography, youth media, and documentary practices. She is primarily interested in documentary portraiture and humor. Her first film, I Run Slow, was about her father's invention of jogging. She is currently working on a short documentary, Home(land) Movie, about the emergence of Birthright programs, such as Birthright Armenia and Birthright Israel, and how these programs are changing traditional diaspora paradigms.

Alexandra Liveris is an MFA Candidate in Stanford University's Documentary Film and Video Program. Prior to Stanford, she worked at the William J. Clinton Foundation as the Multimedia and Special Projects Manager and at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) as the co-founder of their young leaders project, CGI Lead—a program focused on development projects in the Congo. Alexandra started her career at the Charlie Rose show, producing shows on foreign policy and the arts and spearheading a special edition series on the Sino-US bilateral relationship. She received a BA in International Relations at Tufts University. Alexandra studied and performed at the Private Theater, the Maggie Flanigan Studio, and the Stella Adler Studio in New York City from 2008 to 2012.

Jonna McKone is a journalist, audio producer, and filmmaker currently working towards her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. Her films thus far have focused on landscape and spatial organization, the relationship between the environment, consumption, and history, and cross-cultural issues. She strives to approach documentary film as a blend of nonfiction and experimental techniques, employing collaboration and participation, unexpected artifacts, careful observation, and archival research. Before starting graduate school, Jonna worked as a public radio reporter and has also worked as a community-based researcher and educator. She holds a BA from Bowdoin College.

Abraham Osuna is motivated by the educational and economic inequity he observed as a student and educator in South Central, Los Angeles. He taught high school mathematics and video production in his neighborhood and then cofounded Los Angeles Collective Media (LA CO-MEDIA), a volunteer group dedicated to empowering marginalized communities through media workshops, collaborative projects, and multimedia exhibitions. Abraham currently pursues an MFA in CalArt’s Film and Video Program, with a concentration in Integrated Media. Inspired by experiences in LA CO-MEDIA, Abraham’s documentary and video installation work continues to explore methods for involving his subjects in the creative and editorial processes. His work highlights themes of institutional violence, memory, and resistance.

Joana Pimenta is a filmmaker and researcher. Originally from Lisbon, Portugal, she is currently a doctoral candidate in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. Her research focuses on hybrid film/video practices in the 1960s and 70s, and the sites of the documentary image in contemporary art. In her practice-based work, she has worked mainly in film and video installation and documentary. She will be a 2013-14 fellow at Harvard’s Film Study Center, where she will be developing the project Grande Hotel, a film set in a modernist-style beach hotel off the southern coast of Portugal.

Jesse Pires is Program Curator at International House Philadelphia, where he has curated numerous film screenings, including films by Robert Bresson, Pierre Clementi, Bob Cowan, George Kuchar, Frank and Eleanor Perry, Ben Rivers, and Jerzy Skolimowski. His more recent work has been concerned with mining the connections between experimental cinema and contemporary art. He screened a series of short films in conjunction with Philagrafika 2010 and co-curated the program Pop Cinema: Art + Film in the US and UK, which was presented at International House in 2011 and was funded by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. His 2012 program, Mixed Messages: Marshall McLuhan and the Moving Image, was a series of screenings around the life and work of media theorist Marshall Mcluhan, as well as a panel discussion featuring Rebecca Clemen, Peter d’Agostino, Tom Sherman, and Gerd Stern. Jesse was a delegate at the 2010 Experimental Media Congress (Toronto) and the 2012 Experimental Cinema Congress (Berlin). He has curated programs for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Slought Foundation, and UnionDocs in Brooklyn, New York. From 2005 to 2011, Jesse also produced and hosted a radio show on 103.3 FM WPRB in Princeton, NJ.

Vanessa Renwick, Daughter of the American Revolution, is the founder and janitor of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass. An artist by nature, not by stress of research. She puts scholars to rout by solving, through Nature's teaching, problems that have fretted their trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, her iconoclastic work reflects an interest in place, relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. Her fifty works have been shown internationally at sites such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art and The Kitchen (New York), Kill Your Timid Notion (Scotland), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival (Toronto). The Viennale (Austria), and the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh). She has a brand spanking-new DVD compilation, N S E W, containing three hours of her shorts, and will be hitting the road on a tour with it. She resides in Portland, Oregon.

Raquel Schefer is a filmmaker, a film programmer, a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3, and a FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) doctoral fellow. She is the author of the book El Autorretrato en el Documental (Self-Portrait in Documentary, Argentina, 2008). Raquel currently lives and works in Paris.

Hunter Snyder was born in Western Germany, raised in Maryland, and has been working in New England for the past three years. A nascent documentary filmmaker whose work concerns the relationships between land and labor, he is developing projects on iron ore mining in Greenland, commercial fish farming in Central America, and agriculture and clamming in Maine. Concurrent to filmmaking, Hunter works as an editor and producer with Sensate journal, and is a co-founder of CAMRA at Penn, a research collaborative dedicated to experiments in research representation. where he focuses on legitimation issues of critical media practice in academe. In October 2013, he will begin a Master's course in Anthropology at Oxford.

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker working in both documentary and narrative genres. Her feature-length documentary, Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), shot in Uganda, was commissioned by the Rotterdam International Film Festival where it had its world premiere. Where Are You Taking Me? wasreleased theatrically by Icarus Films; it was a Critics’ Pick by LA Weekly and TimeOut New York, andwas described by Variety as “Beautifully meditative…an uplifting observational documentary that plays on seeing and being seen.” Takesue’s films have screened extensively at festivals and museums internationally, including Sundance, New Directors/New Films, SXSW, Locarno, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Her films have aired on PBS, the Independent Film Channel, and the Sundance Channel. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, ITVS, NYSCA, Yaddo Artist Colony, and the MacDowell Colony, among others.

Pacho Velez is a little bored by sober filmmaking. He prefers its drunken side—poor aesthetic choices, extreme political stances, and staggering formal structures. He is proud to have worked for the Service Employees International Union, for whom he co-directed a documentary about service workers at Harvard University. That film and some others have screened at venues worldwide. In 2006, the US Department of Education granted him a Javits Fellowship. In 2010, he graduated from CalArts with an MFA in Film / Video and began to teach filmmaking at Harvard. He is completing work on Manakamana, a film about chance encounters on public transit in rural Nepal (co-directed with Stephanie Spray).

Bo Wang is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He studied physics and mathematics at Tsinghua University in Beijing for his Bachelor’s degree and obtained his Master's in theoretical physics there before moving to the US. In 2008 he attended the MFA program in photography, video, and related media at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His works have been exhibited internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in the US, China, Brazil, Italy, France, and Thailand, among many other regions. His first (semi-) feature-length film, China Concerto, had its North American premiere at Documentary Fortnight 2013 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He is also a research fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations.

Jim Wolpaw is a veteran filmmaker known for innovative approaches in considering artists and issues in the arts. His documentary Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date (1985) was nominated for an Academy Award. In addition to Keats, his films include Cobra Snake for a Necktie (Showtime, 1980), a portrait of rock and roll legend Bo Diddley; Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson (PBS, 2003 and INPUT, 2004), a quirky look at the poet Emily Dickinson that was chosen by Library Journal for its list of “Best Poetry Films”; and First Face: The Buck Starts Here (PBS, 2011), a “biography” of the dollar-bill portrait of George Washington. He also wrote and directed the feature comedy Complex World (1992, Hemdale, National Theatrical Release). Mr. Wolpaw’s films have won awards at more than a dozen film festivals worldwide. He has taught film production and scriptwriting at Emerson College and the University of Rhode Island, and currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.