Marissa Aroy recently directed Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farmworkers Movement, which will air on public television next year. In 2008, she received an Emmy for the documentary Sikhs in America. She produced and directed Little Manila: Filipinos in California’s Heartland for PBS and produced Sounds of Hope and Uneasy Peace for Frontline World. In 2012, Aroy received a Fulbright in the Philippines. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Boston College and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sonja Bertucci is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and scholar. She has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts as well as a PhD in French and Film Studies from UC Berkeley. Originally from France, she has taught at numerous institutions of higher learning in the US (including UC Berkeley, Duke University, Miami University, and Concordia College). At Berkeley, her dissertation focused on intermediality in the works of Proust and Godard. Her creative work takes a poetic-experimental approach to documentary filmmaking. She just completed her first feature-length documentary entitled Stranger from Within, a personal and political film about Serbian culture in Kosovo, which was (pre-)screened to general acclaim at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles.

Beyza Boyacioglu is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker, video artist, and curator. She directed the short film Toñita’s, a documentary portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Toñita’s was produced during Beyza’s 2013 fellowship at UnionDocs Collaborative Studio, and premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight 2014. She curates Fiction-Non, a documentary series exploring narrative/nonfiction hybrid films, at Maysles Cinema in Harlem. Her work as a video artist has been exhibited in many venues, including MoMA (New York), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), NoteOn (Berlin), and Sakip Sabanci Museum (Istanbul). In fall 2014, Beyza will begin her studies in the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT, where she will be a researcher at Open Doc Lab.

Jehnovah Carlisle is an African American filmmaker, born in 1988 in Berkeley, California. In 2013, he received his Bachelor’s degree in American Studies with a focus in Film from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Carlisle is working towards his MFA in Film at the California College of the Arts. He recently screened Game, a socially conscious music video, for guitarist and singer Augusta Lee Collins at the African American Museum in Oakland, California. In 2012, Carlisle screened Beyond the Bookshelf, a short documentary about the Oakland Public Library, at the Rockridge Public Library, Oakland, California. This year, he has just completed a 12-minute short film, A Call To Grace, while attending California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Carlisle currently lives in Oakland.

Warren Cockerham is a film and video maker who received his MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2010; he earned a BA in English from the University of Florida’s Film and Media Studies program in 2006. From 2008-2012, his interests in media democracy and advocacy led to the founding of FilmLAB@1512: a film and video art-making program for teenagers in Chicago’s North Lawndale Community. He has worked as a programmer and curator for the Florida Experimental Film Festival, RISK Cinema at the Harn Museum of Art, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and the Eye and Ear Clinic at SAIC. His film and video work is motivated by a curiosity about complex power structures in familial/intimate relationships and how these analogue power structures are presented and observed through the mediation of public and private archival material. His short films and videos have screened at a variety of moving-image venues domestically and abroad. He is currently Visual Arts Faculty at Bennington College, where he runs a biweekly invitational screening and lecture series.

Ryan Conrath is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester’s Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. His dissertation project focuses on the relationship between montage and the human body. He was previously the managing editor of Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture and also co-founded a local, thematically oriented avant-garde film series, which goes by the name of On Film. Ryan has worked as a cinematographer, editor, screenwriter, production assistant, actor, and director on numerous film and television productions, including a series of documentaries on the history of conservation in the Everglades produced by South Florida PBS affiliate WGCU. Beginning next year, he will serve as the Graduate Student Fellow at the Eastman House Museum of Film and Photography.

Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba is a documentary filmmaker from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. Her work combines different approaches to narrative, weaving essays from an anthropological perspective with a creative use of audiovisual language. She is interested in new forms of narrative in documentary. The Dance of Memory is her first feature, which was awarded the Fund for Quality Cinematography by the Mexican Institute of Cinematography. She has a Master’s in Creative Documentary from the Autonomus University of Barcelona. Gabriela has received the Fund for Culture and Arts award in Mexico twice. Her filmography includes short pieces featuring found footage, screen dance, and audiovisual essays.

Lulu DeBoer is a recent graduate of Stanford University. She grew up in rural east Texas in a mixed-heritage family. Her fiction work is mainly fantasy and sci-fi, which allows her to create and construct cultural and societal systems and explore their effects on involved characters. By also doing documentary, Lulu is able to fulfill another side of this dynamic by deconstructing real cultural and societal systems for critical and personal exploration. Lulu is currently finishing a Kickstarter-funded project from her Mermaid Lulu web series, and beginning a personal feature documentary, Millennium Island, which follows her and her family clan as they try to adapt to climate change in the South Pacific.

Almudena Escobar López is a film archivist, curator, and scholar with an international background. Her research is focused on experimental time-based media production addressing the relationship between curatorship and preservation, in an attempt to open an active dialogue between critical theory and archival studies. After having her first contact with moving-image experimental analog productions at London’s no.w.here artist-run platform, she interned at Lux Artists Ltd. and at The Academy Film Archive’s preservation department. Almudena is currently earning her Master’s in Film and Media Preservation through the L. Jeffrey Selznick program at the University of Rochester (New York), on a Fulbright scholarship. Through a summer internship at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, she will continue her archival experience working with one of their mixed-media collections. She is the Short Film Programmer for the London Spanish Film Festival and collaborates regularly with Desistfilm magazine. Almudena is curently based in Rochester, New York, and will be starting a PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Jacob Feiring is a Philadelphia-based filmmaker. His work, which ranges from documentary and fiction films to music videos and commercial shorts, has screened at film festivals, on television, and on music and fashion websites, including “The Source,” “Stereogum,” and “Urban Outfitters Blog.” He is a 2013 recipient of the Motion Picture Scholarship Award at Temple University where he is currently a third-year MFA candidate, and is completing his feature-length documentary, Samantha’s Amazing Acro-Cats. He received his BFA in film production from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts.

Louai Haffar is a commissioning producer with the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel in Doha, Qatar. In his capacity as a commissioner, Louai oversees the production process of nearly 100 documentary hours annually. Before his current post he worked as a researcher and media analyst. He is especially interested in content analysis of new documentary proposals. Louai holds an MA degree in sociology from George Mason University and is currently developing a feature length documentary about Syria—his motherland.

Kay Hannahan is a filmmaker who hails from Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes. She codirected the series Lost in Bulgaria, which was nationally broadcast in 2011 and has spent years documenting the minority Muslim community in Bulgaria where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. She is interested in making ethnographic films that blur the line between documentary and the avant-garde. Kay has a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Concordia University in Montreal and is currently an MFA candidate in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She enjoys almond croissants, news programs, and fine Bulgarian moonshine – in no particular order.

Tamer Hassan has spent the last five years integrating himself into the countercultures of rural autonomous communities throughout the United States. His work from this practice has screened internationally at venues ranging from the Princeton Environmental Film Festival to the Tinai EcoFilm Festival in Goa, India. Hassan recently completed a fellowship and residency at UnionDocs, a center for documentary arts in Brooklyn, NY, where he worked as an editor and cinematographer on several shorts, with select screenings at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, Flux Factory, and IndieScreen.

Eli Horwatt is a writer and (de)programmer living in Toronto. His PhD scholarship at York University works towards a topology of the aesthetic and ethical legacy of post-minimal and conceptual art in experimental-documentary cinema. His research focuses on institutional critique in cinema environments, paracinematic art, and readymade films. He programs with Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, assists the Wavelengths program at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is part of the collective Pleasure Dome, a nomadic experimental microcinema.

Maori Karmael Holmes is the founder of the BlackStar Film Festival (blackstarfest.org). She has received awards from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, Independence Media, Women’s Way, and Philadelphia Commission on Human Rights. Her films, including the documentary Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop, have been screened internationally and broadcast throughout the US. Maori has curated and produced events at the National Museum of American History, Howard University, Swarthmore College, and Temple University, among others. She was most recently the Associate Director at the Leeway Foundation, where she worked from 2007-2014. She also served as the artistic director of the Black Lily Film & Music Festival from 2006-2010. Maori received a BA in History from American University and an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University. She is currently working as a freelance producer in Philadelphia.

Arber Jashari is an independent filmmaker and film researcher/essayist from Kosovo. He believes that in order for film to continue its development as an art form, it must stay true to its original nature: the poetical structuring of images must always be placed in front of other parts in the assembling of a film. His field of concentration is documentary, with a particular interest in ethnographic film. Among other things, he is currently engaged in the translation of Bill Nichols’s Introduction to Documentary, which will be the very first book in the Albanian language dedicated exclusively to documentary film. His plans for the near future include the production of a series of ethnographic films in his native Kosovo, and the establishment of an organization for the digital restoration and preservation of classic Kosovo films produced during the ex-Yugoslavian era.

Amy Jenkins is an artist and filmmaker whose work has been exhibited and screened internationally. She is best known for her work with the moving image combined with sculpture. Her installations, which focus on themes such as familial relationships, desire, and the male/female identity, have been exhibited at museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY; The Haifa Museum, Haifa, Israel; Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria; and Palm Beach ICA, FL. Jenkins’ recent work, in documentary film continues to focus on visceral and emotional themes that offer a window into intimate moments of life. Her newest work-in-progress, a feature-length documentary entitled Instructions on Parting, is a meditation on the birth-death continuum. The film follows the concurrent cancer illnesses of her mother, sister, and brother, and the coinciding births of her daughter and son.

Brett Kashmere is a Canadian-born, Pittsburgh-based filmmaker, curator, and writer. Combining traditional research methods with materialist aesthetics and hybrid forms, Kashmere’s experimental documentaries explore the intersection of history and (counter-) memory, popular culture, and geographies of identity. His 2006 video essay, Valery’s Ankle, which examined the spectacle of hockey violence in North American media, has screened internationally at festivals, museums, microcinemas, and galleries. Kashmere’s follow-up, From Deep (2013), continues his foray into the skein of sports, identity, nationality, and fandom, focusing on the merger of basketball and hip-hop culture in the mid-1980s. His writing on experimental film and video has appeared in journals, anthologies, and magazines such as Millennium Film Journal, The Films of Jack Chambers, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Senses of Cinema, Esse, Take One, and more. Kashmere is currently co-editing a book on the films of Arthur Lipsett and is also the founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media.

Laliv Melamed is currently completing her PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University, where she also received her MA. Melamed was the co-editor of a special issue on screen memory for the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. Her work, centered mostly on documentary and nonfiction, has also appeared in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, New Cinemas, the anthology Silence, Screen and Spectacle, as well as various popular art and film publications in Hebrew and English. Since 2012 she has been a programmer for the international competition in Docaviv: Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, and the curator of its new competition Depth of Field. She recently became the leading curator for Film Platform, an online resource for distribution and learning of documentary works.

Emily Mkrtichian is a young filmmaker based in Yerevan, Armenia. She has made fiction and documentary films for festivals, television, and the web, and continues to search for more stories to tell through any and all mediums. In 2011 she produced a short fiction film, 140Drams, that was shown in over 15 festivals in 10 countries, including Camerimage and the Clermont-Ferrand IFF. Last year, she produced and directed two documentaries for ARTE France/Germany, one in India about child police officers and one in Pakistan about the country’s greatest humanitarian. Her last short documentary, Levon: A Wondrous Life, follows a 60-year-old rollerblading philosopher through the busy streets of Yerevan. She is now working on a short visual documentary about the movement of time in a country where the ancient and the hypermodern are colliding in one small space.

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir is an interdisciplinary artist/filmmaker based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. She studied Screenwriting and Directing in Binger Filmlab, Amsterdam. The art of Bjargey Ólafsdóttir is not confined to a single medium, as each of her concepts calls for a different tool: film, sound art, performance, drawing, and photography. Her works are narrative by nature, telling stories of bored female dentists, rock stars in Japan, and women that can see into the future and beyond. They are sometimes scary, yet beautiful, and always brimming with humor and playfulness. Her work has been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including KunstWerke Berlin, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Tate Modern London, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Gothenburg Film Festival, Sweden. Bjargey Ólafsdóttir is currently working on her first feature film, Horrorpop, with support from the Icelandic Filmcentre.

Finn Paul is a filmmaker and artist whose work addresses coming of age themes in and out of the context of Queer communities. Using moving image and performance, Paul takes up his own identity as a locus for the complexities of community and isolation, enacting an examination which also reveals the lives inextricably bound with his: friends, family, and the array of social texts that influence Queer culture. Narrative, essay, and documentary forms are used in Paul’s film work to uncover how trauma and radical identities come together in everyday, commonplace ways. Paul’s work has screened at Outfest, REDCAT, the Echo Park Film Center, the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Northside Film Festival, Mix NYC, and the San Francisco Short Film Festival. He received his BA in Anthropology from the UC Santa Cruz in 2003 and is currently pursuing his Master’s in Fine Arts from CalArts.

Maria Stalford is a PhD candidate in social anthropology and critical media practice at Harvard University, where she was also a Film Studies Center fellow in 2012-14. She holds an MPH in International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Maria is currently working on two ethnographic documentary video projects, one based in a Buddhist temple in Boston, and the other emerging from her dissertation research with cancer patients and their families in Vietnam.

Arjun Shankar is a teacher, writer, researcher, and mediamaker. He is currently getting his PhD in Anthropology and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation research weaves together rural violence, NGOs, the Kannada film industry, sericulture, and educational aspiration into a single story of rapid change and development in villages surrounding Bangalore. He is a co-founder of Camra, a collective of researchers and educators committed to participatory, experimental mediamaking. He recently completed two short documentary films on the pan-African Rastafarian movement in South Africa, in collaboration with Mariam Durrani, the musical troupe Ancient Vibrations, Professors Deborah Thomas and John L. Jackson Jr., and elders from the Rastafarian community. He is also a director of the Center for Curiosity, which engages in transdisciplinary research into the concept of “curiosity” with the specific purpose of creating curricular tools for teachers and students. He encourages teachers at all levels to “think with multimodality,” making the audiovisual a part of classroom instruction as well as classroom assignments.

 Herb Shellenberger is a curator, projectionist, and filmmaker based in Philadelphia. He has presented programs at Vox Populi, Cinedelphia Film Festival, and International House Philadelphia. He organized the series The Cinema is Jonas Mekas for International House in 2012-13 and wrote the article “Radical sex education films from San Francisco’s Multi-Media Resource Center,” which appeared in the catalogue Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution. In 2013, he organized “Graphic Hallucinations: Experimental Animation on Film 1912-1992,” a two-screening series with a workshop on direct animation presented at Molodist International Film Festival (Kyiv, Ukraine) and contemporary art center Izolyatsia (Donetsk, Ukraine). Shellenberger served as a juror for the 2013 Open Video Call exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. He runs the experimental film series Black Circle Cinema with colleague Jesse Pires and provides freelance film projection for many nonprofits and universities.

Peter Snowdon is a filmmaker whose work combines documentary process with formal experimentation. Born and brought up in the UK, Peter has lived and worked in France, Egypt, India, and the Palestinian territories. Since 2000, he has been based in Belgium. He holds a Master’s in Transmedia from Sint Lukas Hogeschool, Brussels, and is currently an LSM research fellow at MAD Faculty (PXL/UHasselt), where he is preparing a practice-based PhD on vernacular video and documentary practice after the Arab Spring. His short films are distributed by the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), and have been widely shown at festivals. His first feature-length film, The Uprising (Rien à voir production/Third Films), débuted at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2013, where it won the Opus Bonum award for best world documentary.

Libi Striegl is currently an MFA student in the Experimental Documentary Arts program at Duke University, and holds a BA and BFA in Film Studies and Production with a focus in Experimental Cinema from the University of Colorado at Boulder. This has led to an exploration of varied media, ranging from 16mm film to responsive sculpture, though always with some time-based or durational aspect, and nearly always including elements of animation. Currently engaged in exploring the possibilities of various forms of computer programming and hardware hacking as a means to accessing unique insights into the language and expressions of mental illness, Libi is an unintentional handyperson and has, broadly speaking, an interest in how stuff works—whether that stuff is brains or languages or time travel, computers or bodies or ecosystems.

Alina Taalman is a documentary maker and cartographer, and a current MFA candidate in the Experimental and Documentary Arts program at Duke University. Her projects deal with geographies of time and memory, using maps, photographs, and the moving image to tell stories of the past from an environmental and personal perspective. After working as a documentary editor in New York for several years, Alina earned a BA in Geography from Humboldt State University. Her final project won her the Cartography and Geographic Information Society’s Arthur Robinson Award for Best Printed Map in 2013.

Jenyu Wang is an artist and researcher with a special interest in temporal and spatial relationships. She was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States in her midteens. Jenyu perceives her world in disjunction, instead of continuity—a direction she’s taken in both art and research projects. She received a dual bachelor’s degree in Photography and Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She worked in Modern Taiwanese Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park, receiving an MA in 2010, and an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014. She writes for the art criticism website Chicago Artist Writers and, in April 2014, curated Plural Vision, an exhibition on pluralism in contemporary Asian visual culture, at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Brynmore Williams is an award-winning short-form documentary filmmaker. He has a passion for telling phoenix stories that highlight our ability to triumph in the face of searing opposition. Straddling the worlds of documentary film, advertising, journalism, and unscripted TV, Brynmore’s work has appeared on the websites of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, AOL, and in numerous film festivals, classrooms, and TV networks across the country. He is currently making a series of films for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) in Boston that profile unsung heroes in the neighborhoods of Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury.

Meng Xie was born in Beijing and graduated with a Master’s in Media Studies and Film from The New School in New York City. He started his career producing documentary series for China Central Television (CCTV) and international film productions. The award-winning documentary High Tech, Low Life (2012) is his most recent work as field producer. Mr. Xie has been the film curator/programmer at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing since 2009, where he has curated film programs on Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lü Yue, Lou Ye, Wu Wenguang, and the first retrospectives of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Aki Kaurismaki in China. ON | OFF: Young Artists in China (2013) is his first feature-length documentary film. He has contributed his writings to Artforum China, Southern Weekly, and other periodicals. He has served on the jury for CPH:DOX (2013). He is currently the director of the public programming department at UCCA.

Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker and doctoral candidate in Media Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. She is a fellow at Harvard’s Film Study Center, where she is currently developing Manifest Destiny! a docu-fiction western set in postindustrial Detroit. She is interested in creative processes, labor, the body, and the ways in which “place” is experienced, constructed, and imagined. Her work has been screened at international film festivals, including the Mostra Internacional do Filme Etnográfico, Rio de Janeiro; the Nordic Anthropological Film Association, Stockholm; and the Montreal Ethnographic Film Festival. She is the founding editor of Sensate, an online journal for experiments in critical media practice, and runs Mothlight Microcinema in Detroit, MI, where she is currently conducting her dissertation research.