Annie Berman is a media artist living and working in New York City. Her background in photography and psychology inspires work about visual culture, virtual realities, and the changing media landscape. Her films, videos, performances, and installations have shown internationally in galleries, festivals, universities, and conferences, including the Museum of Modern Art's Doc Fortnight, Rooftop Films, Galerie Patrick Ebensperger Berlin, Kassel Hauptbahnhof, and the Rome Independent Film Festival where she was awarded the Best Experimental Film Prize. Named one of The Independent magazine’s ten filmmakers to watch in 2016, her credits include Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D!, Street Views, and Of Birds and Boundaries. Her work has received support from the Puffin Foundation, Wave Farm, The Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts, The Center for Independent Documentary, Signal Culture, and UnionDocs. She is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, and earned her MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.

Alice Butler is a film curator and writer who works in the Programming Department at the Irish Film Institute where she has programmed three film seasons: Eye to Eye: Visionary Partnerships in Cinematography and Direction, Beyond The Bechdel Test and Anger is an Energy: Cinema of Protest. Before launching aemi (Artists’ & Experimental Moving Image) with Daniel Fitzpatrick earlier this year, Butler was a curator for The Experimental Film Club. Programs she curated for EFC include Riddles of The Sphinx, Loop Structures, Schmeerguntz: Films by Gunvor Nelson, and Agnes Martin’s Gabriel (co-curated with Leah Reynolds). Butler is currently Curator in Residence for MEx, an Index of Irish artists’ and experimental moving-image works, founded by Fifi Smith. The residency is supported by the Irish Arts Council. Butler has also written on film for a number of publications including Sight and Sound, Visual Artists' News Sheet, Paper Visual Art, and Enclave Review.

Cíntia Gil attended the Lisbon Film School (Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema) and has a degree in Philosophy from the Oporto Faculty of Arts (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto), where she lectured on Aesthetics. She also worked on a PhD thesis in Philosophy with a grant from the Science and Technology Foundation, Portugal. She wrote for and curated artists' exhibitions, and lectured in the Video and Documentary course in Abrantes (Escola Superior de Tecnologias de Abrantes). Since 2012 she has been co-director of Doclisboa - International Film Festival (presently with Davide Oberto), where she shares responsibility for the program, special projects, and management of the festival. She's a member of the board of Apordoc – Portuguese Documentary Association. She has participated in several international juries at festivals such as FidMarseille, Torino Film Festival, Festival de Mar del Plata, Crossing Europe, Sevilla Film Festival, among others.

Carolina Zúñiga Vásquez is a Chilean academic and documentary filmmaker. She studied social communication and journalism in Santiago. She worked as a researcher for independent documentaries and as a story producer of documentary TV series, among other productions. In 2009 she moved to New York City to enroll in  the Graduate Certificate program in Documentary Studies at The New School University and pursued an MA in Media Studies there. During this time, she produced two short films: Impermanence (2010), filmed in Brooklyn, follows the process of dismantling an apartment after the death of its resident; Coming and Going Home (2012), filmed in Chile as part of a 10-year-long documentary project, is a journey into a big house destroyed by an earthquake. Currently, she is a fulltime academic at Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago) in the Faculty of Communications and Literature, where she teaches digital narratives and documentary.

Josh Guilford is a scholar, educator, and programmer based in Western Massachusetts. He serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College, and programs the experimental film series, X (Unknown Quantity). He is an editor of the Millennium Film Journal and scholar-in-residence at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. His writings have appeared in Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 (John Libbey, 2015), The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and other publications. Programs he has curated have screened at such venues as Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, the Millennium Film Workshop, Le Petit Versailles, Balagan, Magic Lantern Cinema, and Amherst Cinema. His film, Rock Roll (2015), has screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Onion City Film and Video Festival, among other venues.  

Iair Said was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and works as an actor and director. His acting work includes the feature films In Here, My First Wedding, Masterplan, and Nena, salúdame al Diego, and the short film, Soy tan feliz, (Official Selection for the Cannes Short Film Competition in 2011). The short film. 9 vaccines was his directorial debut, and went on to win the Black Pearl Award for Best Narrative Short Film at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and the Best Short Film Award at the BAFICI Film Festival in Buenos Aires. His last short film, Present Imperfect, was selected in the official competition for the 68th Cannes Film Festival 2015 and the 17th International Independent Film Festival Buenos Aires, BAFICI. He is currently developing his debut documentary, Flora´s Life Is No Pic-nic.

Kat Cole is a filmmaker and choreographer utilizing experimental and documentary practices. As co-director of detour dance and the annual Tiny Dance Film Festival since 2006, she creates and curates contemporary performances for the stage and screen. Her work in the performing arts has led her to cinematic storytelling, and she is currently pursuing an MFA in Film at the California College of the Arts. Recent works include the documentary short, Grandmother and Me, which follows the journey of a transman who presents as a woman for his 100-year old grandmother, and Ida and the Door, an experimental narrative short. She has received funding from the SF Weekly’s Masterminds Competition (1st Place Award), the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and Theatre Bay Area’s CA$H Grant, as well as artist residencies at SAFEhouse, ODC’s Pilot Program, and a commission by the University of San Francisco.

Eunhye Hong Kim is an award-winning filmmaker who is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, finished her undergrad work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and started in the Film Directing Program at CalArts in 2015. Her films have screened in many festivals, including the 46th Chicago International Film Festival, 37th Starz Denver International Film Festival, 5th Chicago CineYouth Film Festival, 6th New Hope International Film Festival, and 12th Korea Youth Film Festival. She received the Best Chicago Award in the CineYouth festival, and the Student Cultural Spirit award in the New Hope International Film Festival. Her short film, The Fever (2014), is currently screening around the world as a part of Chicago Land Short Vol.2 by Full Spectrum Features.

Chloe Reyes was born and raised in North Hollywood, California. She currently studies at the California Institute of the Arts where she is an undergraduate within the Film/Video program. The majority of her work focuses on the personal and observational, through small-gauge analog film. Chloe has also been an active staff member at the Echo Park Film Center since 2012, where she helps teach adult and youth workshops with an experimental approach to personal and individual storytelling.

Leeroy Kun Young Kang is an archivist, independent curator, and visual artist whose work lives in the intersections of legacy audiovisual preservation and access, experimental Asian Pacific film and video, and queer and transgender history and visual culture. Kang’s archival work includes collections at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, MTV Networks, and the New-York Historical Society. He has curated programs for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Dirty Looks NYC, and CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, while his own video work has screened at various festivals and venues including CAAM Fest, Human Resources Los Angeles, MIX NYC, and Studio 2224 in Taipei. Currently he is a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and holds an MLS from Queens College and a BA in Studio Art from UC Santa Barbara.

Sylvia Herbold is a multimedia artist from Maine. Through an exploration of portraiture, landscape, improvisation, and documentary arts—where her practice incorporates everything from film and video to painting and sculpture—Herbold's work centers on the complexity between projection and interiority. She has exhibited in shows in Maine, New York, and North Carolina, as well as internationally in Eindhoven. Herbold taught art at a public school in New York City prior to beginning her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University, where she is currently a student.

Jason Sudak

is a filmmaker currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. His movies explore how familiar, everyday media experiences (on the internet, on television, in films) can evoke the world’s phenomena. Past screenings include the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Media City Film Festival, and a fake Tatooine bar in a Star Wars theme park in London.  

Elena Pardo lives between Oaxaca and Mexico City, where she has worked as a documentary, experimental cinema, and animation filmmaker. She's part of La Trinchera Ensamble, an expanded cinema collective that recycles film equipment and footage for its performances. This interest in reusing materials resulted in her joining the community of filmmakers, programmers, and scholars that carries out, since 2014, the Encuentro Internacional de Archivistas Audiovisuales in Oaxaca. Since 2007, she has participated as a teacher of video production and animation with young people from diverse communities around Mexico. In 2012, she cofounded the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, an association dedicated to disseminating, producing, and teaching experimental cinema. As part of the LEC, she has participated in programming expanded cinema cycles, programming animation and experimental shorts, and organizing conferences and workshops in Oaxaca, Puebla, Mexico City, Zacatecas, Michoacán, and Morelos.

Luis Arnías is a photographer, filmmaker, and sculptor from Venezuela who currently lives and works in Boston, MA. Luis studied film and photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is a recipient of the 2013 MCC Fellowship in film. His short films have screened and garnered awards at the Big Muddy Film Festival (Best Experimental Film); Milwaukee Underground Film Festival (Jury Prize); Festival Internacional de Curtas do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Antimatter Film Festival, Victoria, BC, Canada; Caracas Arte Contemporáneo, Casa Hacienda La Trinidad, Venezuela; TIE, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chicago, IL; Somerville Open Cinema, Somerville, MA; and Balagan Film Series, Cambridge, MA.

Laura Huertas Millán was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and has been living in France since 2001. A graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris and Le Fresnoy, she is currently a PhD candidate at the École Normale Supérieure rue d´Ulm and the Beaux-Arts de Paris (France). Since2014, she is also a fellow at the Sensory Ethnography lab and the Film Study Center at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA). Her works have screened internationally in contemporary art venues and cinema festivals, such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York, US), FID Marseille (France), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Museo de arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina), LABORAL Gijón (Spain), Lugar a Dudas (Cali, Colombia), Galerie Edouard Manet (Gennevilliers, France), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal), FICUNAM (Mexico), among others. Solo exhibitions include Medellin´s Museum of Modern Art (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Colombia), la Villa Arson (Nice, France), Metales pesados (Chile) and Annecy Castle Museum (France). She has been awarded grants in support of her work from the City of Paris, the Colombian Film Development Fund, Harvard’s Film Study Center and prizes from Videobrasil festival (Resartis residency prize) and the Moving Image Biennial in Argentina (Special jury mention).

Francisco Ohem Chávarri is a Mexican director, editor, and writer. His short film Año Conejo was selected by the Morbido Film Festival. He was Editor of Eternal Youth, a documentary by Nico Bongiovanni; Postproducer of The Well, a film by Michael Rowe, and on Soneros Son, a documentary by Jorge Curioca; First Assistant Director on Plan Sexenal, a film by Santiago Cendejas; Assistant Editor on Come Out and Play, and Second Camera on La última película, by Raya Martin and Mark Pearson. He directed three seasons of Contracampo, a weekly film show for Foro TV (Televisa), and more than 30 short segments for Television Azteca’s coverage of the 2014 Brazil World Cup soccer. He also worked for three years as Postproducer for Canana, one of Latin America’s top production and distribution companies.

Amber Bemak’s creative practice is based in experimental and documentary film, and also spans installation, sound, and performance art. Her films expand beyond the screen to play with perspective, subvert socially conditioned structures, and engage with communities through participatory engagement. She uses her body in a performative and relational context, and sees filmmaking as a kind of alchemical process: transforming trash into treasure, and making new rhythms out of scraps. Her work has been seen at venues including the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Rubin Museum, dOCUMENTA 13, Sculpture Center, and nGbK. She holds a BA from Antioch College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States. She recently accepted a position as assistant professor of film with Southern Methodist University and will be relocating there in August.

Daniel Hui is a filmmaker and writer. A graduate of the film program at the California Institute of the Arts, his films have been screened at festivals in Rotterdam, Yamagata, New York, Lisbon, Bangkok, and Vladivostok. He is also one of the founding members of 13 Little Pictures, an independent film collective whose films have garnered critical acclaim all around the world. His second feature film, Snakeskin, has won several awards, including the Special Jury Award at the TFF Doc section of the Torino Film Festival.

Gerald Peary is the writer-director of two feature documentaries, For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism (2009) and Archie’s Betty (2015). He is retiring as a Professor of Communications at Suffolk University, Boston. He is a longtime film critic, for The Boston Phoenix and now for The Arts Fuse. He is the General Editor of the University Press of Mississippi “Conversations with Filmmakers” series, and the programmer of the Boston University Cinematheque. He is the author of nine books on cinema, a former guest director of the Harvard Film Archive and a Fulbright Scholar in ex-Yugoslavia. He is a member of FIPRESCI, the international critics’ organization, and the National Society of Film Critics. He has served on film juries around the world, including Hong Kong, Bangkok, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Moscow, Locarno, and Buenos Aires. He acted in the 2013 feature film, Computer Chess.

Thorsten Trimpop is a filmmaker currently based in Cambridge, MA. His new film, Furusato 古里, is a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. His first feature film, The Irrational Remains, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won numerous awards around the world. His earlier film and theater work has been presented at venues such as the Locarno Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and on European television. Currently he teaches filmmaking and film studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Boston University. He is also a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where he is working on a new project, The Feather Underground, which begins as a crime caper and unfolds into a deeper story about ecology, empire, and the often destructive human obsession with beauty.

Melissa Haizlip is an award-winning filmmaker who was born in Boston, raised in the US Virgin Islands, Connecticut, and New York, and attended Yale University. She is the 2016 Artist in Residence at the National Black Programming Consortium, an alumna of the 2015 ARC NALIP Diverse Women In Media Residency, Chaz and Roger Ebert Producing Fellow, Film Independent’s Project: Involve, Firelight Media Documentary Lab, and PGA Diversity Workshop. She produced You’re Dead to Me (2013), which won Best Short at the 2014 Imagen Awards, and screened at over 50 festivals. Mr. Soul! Ellis Haizlip and the Birth of Black Power TV screened at IFP’s Spotlight on Documentaries and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. Melissa received the 2015 Media Projects Production Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the 2015 Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund Grant from the International Documentary Association for Mr. Soul!

Derick Crucius is an independent filmmaker who is currently employed by Drexel University as their in-house producer of branded content. Three of his experimental films were shown at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Abstract Currents series in 2013. Buzz & Randy was selected for the 17th edition of the Boston Underground Film Festival in 2015, and headlined the Trigger Warning program at the festival. The themes in Derick’s work tend to revolve around outcasts of society. Other themes that are present in his films include isolation, loneliness, mental health, and poverty. In his character studies, Derick likes to push boundaries and explore new ideas by sometimes showing the extreme. His recently completed short film, Charley Tucson, was Derick’s first attempt to create work on a larger scale. The film premiered at the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2016.

Valentina Homem is a Brazilian artist who is completing her MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University, where she also teaches as an adjunct professor. Valentina has directed the documentaries Granny (2002), With a Camera (2006), Speak Up! (2005), Landscaping(2007), and New Order (2010); and the short narrative Brócolis (2015)—all of which have been screened at international film festivals. Valentina has created the video installation The Tale of the Void (2013) and the performance Is The Transformation (in fact) Silent? (2015). Her latest film, Abigail, premiered at the Directors Fortnight, Cannes 2016. Valentina is currently developing her first feature film, Last Dance for Grandma in Three Acts.

Jesse Kudler is a musician, composer, performer, and sound artist working in improvisation, collaboration, and site-specificity. He works with field recordings, guitar, electronics, synthesizers, radios, tapes, and text. Kudler lives in Philadelphia, PA (USA). Current and past projects include: a site-specific composition for church organ, guitar, and recordings, with Chris Forsyth; a commissioned sound piece for the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program; live music with film; collaborations with dancers; sound installation; and various improvised groupings. He has performed across the US and Canada and presented workshops at universities and community spaces. He holds a BA in Music from Wesleyan University. Kudler is the co-founder and Director of the Philadelphia Sound Forum, a concert presentation resource. He curated the Sonic Arts Union Retrospective in 2012 and co-created and co-curated the “Wave Currents” series of live music events with live visuals at International House Philadelphia.

Carolyn Lazard is an artist and writer working in media and performance. Her work engages ideas of collective practice, intimacy, care, and technology. She has presented work at UnionDocs, Maysles Cinema, the Arnolfini, and Cleopatra's in Brooklyn. She occasionally programs screenings at Light Industry in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Lazard is a founding member of the art collective Canaries and is a 2015 recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award. She lives in Philadelphia.

Chike Nwabukwu is a father, writer, director, performer, producer, and teacher. Born in Washington, DC, to Nigerian parents, Chike is currently a Future Faculty Fellow at Temple University, completing an MFA in Film and Media Arts. Most recently, he produced the short film Baby Steps, which aired on Comcast’s Xfinity OnDemand and gained admittance to the Afry Kamera Festival in Poland. He has two other shorts in post-production: The Perfect Sound, a narrative about a deaf dancer’s pursuit of her dreams, and Ageless Rhythm, a documentary about cultural performance and the aging process. As an actor, he was seen most recently in the award-winning short film Sides of the Track and the TV pilot series The Life. Mr. Nwabukwu has worked as a teacher and teaching artist in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York City, and Bahia, Brazil. He is passionate about the arts, education, travel, and working with the young at heart.

Mengxi Rao (“Althea”) is a Chinese filmmaker and media artist. She has a keen interest in new media technology and sound art. She has lived and worked in Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo. She makes experimental narrative films and engages a playful writing style in a lot of her work. Her experimental doc-fiction short film, White Mushroom, Black Earth, centered on Walter De Maria’s landscape installation The New York Earth Room. It has been screened in the US, Germany, and Spain. Mengxi cares about solid topics that have social impact. She sees art creation as a collaborative thought/feeling process between the artist and the audience, and wants to bring art experience to each participant. Her current project, Touch, is an interactive dance performance that transforms live data sensed from the participants into projection and sound, which inspires the dancers who provoke audience reactions. Mengxi is working on her thesis film, Three Seasons.

Melanie Hill is the communications director for a conservation-focused nonprofit, and a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At the WILD Foundation, Melanie generates local and international awareness of the organization’s mission to protect and connect wilderness, wildlife, and people. Her growing interest in human-wildlife interactions and community collaboration brought her to CU Boulder, where she pursues a Master’s degree in Media and Public Engagement. Her thesis will use photography, filmmaking, interactive web platforms, and simple, engaging content to tell the story of human and carnivore conflicts in the American West. Melanie received her Bachelor’s degree in Photo-Illustration from Kent State University.

Ramey Newell comes to the Flaherty Fellowship program as an MFA student in Interdisciplinary Documentary Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Ramey has a decade of professional experience in graphic design (web and print), as well as editorial and fine art photography; her images have appeared in both national and international publications. As she transitions her artistic practice to incorporate moving images, she is increasingly interested in experimental, cross-disciplinary, and nontraditional documentary work.

Jerome Dent is a graduate student at the University of Rochester. His work sits at the intersection of critical race theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction, as well as film with a special focus on black imaginative labors.     

Lina Žigelytė was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, and is a PhD candidate in the program of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation charts intersections of migration and sexuality in the historical avant-garde, particularly film and photography from the 1920s and 1930s. She has taught classes on the body in the historical avant-garde and dissident representations of disability. Lina is also an audiovisual and performance artist whose work on queer visibility has been shown in Holland, France, and Lithuania. Her audiovisual work utilizes archival material, storytelling, and mapping.