Melika Bass makes slow-burning, abstracted narrative films and atmospheric, experiential installations. International screenings and exhibitions include: BFI London Film Festival; Kino der Kunst, Munich; Torino Film Festival, Italy; CPH Dox Film Festival, Copenhagen; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Museum, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is a recipient of an Artadia Award, an Experimental Film Prize from the Athens International Film Festival, a Kodak/Filmcraft Award from Ann Arbor Film Festival, and two Media Arts Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Melika was one of a dozen international filmmakers commissioned by Icelandic band Sigur Ros to create an original film for their Valtari Mystery Film Experiment. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Teresa Castro is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She studied Art History in Lisbon and London and she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris (2010-2011) and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2011). She was a member of the film collective Le Silo (2007-2014), co-curating several film retrospectives and events in France. A significant part of her current research has focused on two domains: photography and film in (post-) colonial situations and the links between cinema and animism. In 2011, she published La Pensée cartographique des images. Cinéma et culture visuelle (Lyon, Aléas). She is currently working on a book on the links between cinema and the vegetal.

Nellie Kluz is a filmmaker currently based in Chicago. She works in video, using curiosity, observation, and analysis in recording and interpreting various locations and communities, and focusing on social interactions and aesthetics, belief systems, and material realities. Her movies have screened at the Full Frame Film Festival, Festival dei Popoli, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, and Rooftop Films. Originally from upstate New York, Kluz graduated from Boston University and has just completed an MFA degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pejk Malinovski is a Danish-born poet and documentarian. His works have aired on Public Radio, BBC, and other radio stations around the world, and have been shown in museums and galleries. They have won prizes at festivals and competitions like Prix Europa, Sheffield International Doc festival and Third Coast International Audio Festival. In 2012 he launched “Passing Stranger,” an audio walking tour of the East Village’s poetry history, narrated by Jim Jarmusch. Pejk was the co-creator and host of Thirdear, an online audio magazine, and he continues to edit and translate books for Basilisk, a poet-run publishing house in Copenhagen. He is currently working on a radio play with Wallace Shawn and a documentary about the poet Steve Roggenbuck.

Theresa Loong is an interactive media director and producer who creates intergenerational storytelling experiences focused on memory, identity, and immigration through the use of film, games, and apps. Her documentary, Every Day Is a Holiday, was shown on more than 200 public television stations in the United States. Theresa also designs interactive visual experiences for museums and public spaces. She has received distinction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island National Monuments. Her work has been exhibited at SOMArts, the National Gallery of Art, Sala de Exposiciones, Teriennale di Milano, Museum of Chinese in America, Brooklyn Museum, Eldridge Street Museum, Lu Magnus Gallery, and Circulo de Bellas Artes. She is chairperson of the board of directors of The FilmShop, a film collective based in New York City.

Nicholas Carter is a filmmaker and video artist working at the edges of documentary, essay film, and experimental narrative. With a background in anthropology, his work—often cross-cultural—explores racial politics, history, spirituality, and the relationships between humans and natural environments throughout North and South America. His filmmaking practice relies on a direct engagement with the natural world—exploring human perceptions about and in relation to it—primarily by using abstraction to produce particular effects, and considering what it means to look closer at the spaces we inhabit. Additionally, he has served as editor for the documentary On Her Own (Hot Docs, Slamdance, San Francisco Doc Fest), and in 2012 shot, edited, and produced Oíaymelo, an experimental documentary on Afro-Colombian history, identity, and música callejera (street music) in Cartagena de Indias. Currently he is an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts.

Stephanie Z. Delazeri is an undergraduate studying Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. Her animations have screened at film festivals both nationally and internationally. Most recently, she has presented her research regarding race and gender in educational animation materials at the Asia Animation Forum in South Korea. In addition to animation and research, Stephanie enjoys reading and eating tangerines.

Mark Brecke is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer, whose work documents the stories of people victimized by war, ethnic conflict, and genocide. Since 1995, he has covered the most troubled regions of the world. Mark’s work has been exhibited at a wide variety of venues, ranging from micro-cinemas to the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. His photographs are in the collections of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and the Museo de Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. Emerging from the experimental film community in San Francisco, Mark studied cinema with Phillip Greene (apprentice of Ansel Adams and assistant to Dorothea Lange), and continued his studies at UC Berkeley with found-footage, underground filmmaker, Craig Baldwin. From 2012 to 2014 Mark lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where he started production on a new film in Somalia.

Laurids Andersen Sonne is a Danish-born interdisciplinary artist. His work spans moving image, installation, sculpture, performance, and socially engaged art. Since 2004, Laurids has been a member of the acclaimed three-person art collective Parfyme, focusing on participatory and socially engaged art, developing new platforms for community, interaction, and exploration. Laurids sees art as a tool that can be used for many things: as a catalyst for personal contributions and ameliorations to our surroundings, a way to explore and unfold serious topics. Laurids holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Lund University, Sweden, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.

Danny Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Port Washington, New York. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a BA in Communication Arts - Radio, TV & Film in 2008. Now a documentary filmmaker based in Durham, NC, he was the producer of the feature documentary film, Love Child, which screened at major festivals such as Sundance and Jeonju International Film Festival. Danny is currently pursuing his MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. During his first year at Duke, Danny won the 2017 Hal Kammerer Memorial Prize for film and video production for his documentary, Still Waters, and his short experimental film, Autumn Nights. Both films screened at the Duke Independent Film Festival. In May 2017, Danny was invited to speak at the AAJA N3 Media Conference in Hong Kong, as a panelist for independent filmmaking in Asia.

Maura Morales Bergmann is an Italian-Chilean director of photography. She studied with Giuseppe Rotunno at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (class of 1979), and has worked as an assistant and cameraman with many directors of photography and film directors. Since 2003 she has worked as a cinematographer with many international directors. Her works have premiered in international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Torino, and Rome. She was the cinematographer of eight feature films, fourteen documentaries, and fifteen short movies. She is currently preparing and shooting her first documentary as director, working between Italy and Chile.

Anto Astudillo’s background in psychophysical theater has led her to interweave her exploration in experimental and documentary filmmaking with performance. Born in Santiago, Chile, Anto worked as a Producer for the Santiago a Mil Festival. As an MFA student in Boston, Anto became the co-director of the New England Graduate Media Symposium programing artists such as Laurie Anderson and Almagul Menlibayeva.  She is a founding member of the Boston Film Collective AgX where she develops personal work and has a curatorial role programing screenings of experimental work to promote analog formats and alternative practices. She obtained an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Emerson College where she is currently teaching Introduction to Film.

Carmel Curtis is an independent moving-image archivist and curator who has experience working with a range of institutions and individuals, including the United Nations, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dirty Looks, New York University, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and Deluxe. She is currently co-curating a retrospective spanning five decades of work made by the legendary lesbian filmmaker/artist Barbara Hammer, which will open in the Fall of 2017 at the Leslie Lohman Museum. Carmel is a proud member of XFR Collective (pronounced “transfer” collective), a volunteer group that works to increase community access to at-risk audiovisual media by providing low-cost digitization services and fostering a community of support for archiving/access through education, research, and cultural engagement.

Patrícia Mourão is a Brazilian film scholar and independent curator who received her PHD from the University of São Paulo in 2016. As a curator, she has organized thematic series and directors` retrospectives at different venues and festivals in Brazil. Her most recent project was an Andrea Tonacci retrospective, presented at Cinéma du Réel, in Paris, in 2017. She has edited publications on Jonas Mekas, Harun Farocki, Naomi Kawase, David Perlov, Pedro Costa, and Straub-Huillet. In past years, she collaborated with the Italian-Brazilian filmmaker Andrea Tonacci (1944-2016) on his archive.

Lee Douglas is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and photographer with a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Culture & Media from New York University. Combining scholarly research with visual production, Lee examines how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through engagements with still and moving images. At present, she is preparing a book manuscript,Worlds of Absence, whichexamines the intersection of forensic science, modes of documentation, and image-making practices during the excavation of mass graves in post-Franco Spain. Paying close attention to the circulation of forensic evidence, it asks what the entanglement between science and visual representation reveals about the production and mobilization of knowledge in times of economic austerity and political change. She is the director of the filmWhat Remains and is currently embarking on a new project that uses images of/from archives to narrate how deviance is imagined through scientific and photographic practices that document criminality in Spain.

Harsha Menon holds an MFA in Studio Art from Northeastern University and SMFA/Tufts.  She also holds degrees from Harvard University and New York University, where she studied South Asian religious traditions and documentary film.  Harsha specializes in experimental nonfiction film and video, sound, and performance. She is currently a fellow at the Harvard Film Study Center, and will teach a class on Experimental Cinema at Tufts University in the Fall of 2017.  Based currently in Cambridge, MA, her work has screened internationally:  Carpenter Center for the Arts, Director’s Guild of America, Sundance Film Festival, and at the Venice Biennale as part of Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann's installation Labour in a Single Shot.  She is excited to meet the other Flaherty Film Seminar Fellows, to watch and discuss cinema, and to share each other’s work.

Deniz Tortum is an artist working in film, video, and new media. He is a graduate of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the Open Documentary Lab. His most recent film, If Only There Were Peace (co-directed with Carmine Grimaldi), premiered in 2017 at True/False Film Festival. Currently at Harvard Film Study Center, he is working on a film about a hospital in Istanbul. 

Sarah Bliss is a filmmaker, artist, and curator whose hand-processed films and expanded works are rooted in a deep encounter with the sensate, desiring body and its relationship to memory, place, and time. Her work is often three-dimensional, immersive, and site-specific.  It is screened and exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan; Montreal Underground Film Festival, and Bideodromo, Spain. She has been recognized with fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Scotland’s Alchemy Film Festival and is an Independent Imaging Retreat alum.  Current projects include a feature personal doc exploring the politics of desire in the context of aging, illness, and death; developing a public art commission for the Boston Convention Center’s 80-ft tall, seven-screen marquee; and testing the production of film tints/toners made from mushrooms, lichen, bark, and nuts.  She received a master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is a member of Boston’s AgX film collective.

Allison Cekala is a Boston-based filmmaker, photographer, and educator. Her work focuses on landscape, investigating the ways in which humans move, shape, and transform their surroundings. Allison holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Tufts University (2015) and a BA from Bard College (2006) in Photography and Environmental Studies. Her extensive background in fine art photography recently led her to filmmaking. Her first film, Fundir, which traces Boston’s road salt to one of its main sources in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, premiered last year at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her most recent film, Dissolved Solid, considers fracking through the lens of geologic time. Allison’s work has been supported by the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. She has recently taught courses at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University: Art of Meaning: The History and Future of the Image; Senior Thesis: Critique and Exhibition; and Digital Photo.

Madsen Minax makes video projects that are inspired by the collective socio-politics and the individual bio-politics of belonging, and which consider where fantasy, desire, and embodiment interfere. His works have shown at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), REDCAT (L.A.), the British Film Institute (London), the European Media Art Film Festival, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Yale University's Green Gallery, and at numerous film and video festivals around the world. Madsen received an MFA from Northwestern University, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), The Core Program (2012-2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2015), the Berlinale DOC Station (2016).

Darian Stansbury works as a freelance production generalist in Boston, MA. He was recently accepted to pursue his MFA in Cinematography at Boston University’s Cinema & Media Production program. His thesis film, The History of Women (2014), was produced during his undergraduate film studies at Pennsylvania State University, and has screened at several film festivals across the world. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, he spent ten years as a rapper and performance artist. Inspired by the semiotics of experimental hip-hop, beat, and slam poets, he became a filmmaker to play with the rhythms of word + image.

Sayaka Mizuno was born in 1991 in Geneva, Switzerland. She received her BA degree from HEAD/Geneva University of Art and Design in Cinema, and her master’s degree from ECAL/HEAD in Cinema, with a major in Direction. She won the Jury Prize from SSA/SUISSIMAGE for the most innovative Swiss feature film at Visions du Réel 2017.  

Razan AlSalah is a Lebanese-Palestinian media artist and cinematographer living and working between Beirut, Philadelphia, and New York. Working as a cinematographer, she’s often thinking about how the image is an extension of the camera-body moving in space. On the other side of this same coin, within her expanded-cinema practice, is the process of mapping an image in place and connecting it to the viewer's body. Razan’s work is in the permanent collection of the Sursock Museum in Beirut and has been exhibited in Beirut, Dubai, Philadelphia, and New York. She is a Fulbright scholar and MFA candidate at Temple University.

Arlene Fernández is a graduating Master of Social Work student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice (SP2). She is currently working on several short documentary film projects, including one with a high school in southwest Philadelphia. During her time at SP2, Arlene worked with incarcerated individuals through a local reentry program and supported the public policy work of Philadelphia’s largest domestic violence organization. She is currently a Research Fellow at SP2 working in partnership with an NGO in Venezuela that provides ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) training for low-income women. She also serves as a Graduate Assistant for GSE Films at Penn, providing teaching support for graduate level community filmmaking courses. Prior to entering SP2, Arlene worked in the higher education, nonprofit, and legal fields in Philadelphia and New York City. She received her BA. in Urban Studies from Penn. She calls Philadelphia home and is proudly from Queens, NY.

Kelsey Halliday Johnson is an art historian, writer, and artist based in Philadelphia who is a member of Vox Populi and is the Curatorial Fellow of Photography & New Media at the Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, PA. She is currently working on a Pew Center-funded project, Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology (1968-85), that will be on view at Rosenwald Wolf Gallery at University of the Arts, Lightbox Film Center, and Vox Populi this Fall, accompanied by a new scholarly publication. Kelsey studied art history at Princeton University, has an MFA in interdisciplinary fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of the Institute of Curatorial Practice at Wesleyan University. Her ongoing research explores themes about human perception, our evolving understanding of the verisimilitude of lens-based media, how technology shapes our reality, and our mediated relationship to the landscape.

Nehad Khader is a Philadelphia-based filmmaker/curator, writer, and editor. Trained in Palestinian and Black literature and media, Nehad's interest in images revolves around more than aesthetics; she is fascinated by the anatomy of art and the interconnectedness of stories by creatives of color globally. Nehad is the Senior Program Manager at the BlackStar Film Festival and Managing Editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She served as lead curator on the DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival for six years and currently serves the festival in an advisory position. She has published essays and interviews in various print and online publications and aspires to one day call herself a cultural-social historian. She is currently writing an absurdist comedy web series about the lives of two best friends as they navigate through the changes of their hometown of Philadelphia. The series features people of color in every role, as an antidote to the increase in syndicated shows that feature the stories of white gentrifying hipsters in cities like New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia. She is also producing a musical documentary film by David Felix Sutcliffe (Terror, Adama) about Islamophobia in the US. Nehad is enamored by her parents and is recording their oral histories.

Julie Rainbow is a social researcher, activist and artist, attuned to the voice of the aging population in modern society. With over 25 years of social work experience, Julie is able to listen deeply to the stories of elders, analyzing and synthesizing them into original works of art. Her book, Standing the Test of Time: Love Stories of African American Elders (2002 Pilgrim Press), is a tribute to African American elders and their enduring marriages. Julie also uses documentary film and diverse multimedia platforms to create spaces where the aging population can be honored, engaged, and heard across generations. Julie was a 2016 Leeway Foundation Transformation Award recipient and a W.K. Kellogg Foundation International Leadership Fellow. She has received funding from the Georgia Humanities Council, Leeway Foundation, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  She studied at Spelman College and at Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.

Craig Scheihing is a filmmaker, photographer, curator, educator, and the founder of Big Mama’s Cinematheque in Philadelphia. Working freely between diary, essay, abstract, and expanded cinematic forms; his work explores how, in a culture hyper-saturated with self-reflexive imagery, deep explorations of the personal can become a way for audiences to engage with the communal. He is interested in divorcing personal imagery from persona, engaging through pathos, and ultimately unifying human experiences, rather than individualizing them. His films have been screened and performed in film festivals, basements, bars, batting cages, vacant lots, galleries, and garages on tours throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He is a 2017 nominee for The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage's Fellowship in the Arts.

Javier Briones is a Guatemalan filmmaker primarily working in nonfiction cinema. His works include El Soñador, The Color of Time, and The Earth Did Not Speak, which was nominated for a 2016 International Documentary Association Award. Javier’s work focuses on hidden histories told through a lyrical, non-conventional documentary style. Some of his most notable recognitions include the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival President's Award, the JustFilms Princess Grace Award, and the Delphic Art Movie Award. He is the co-founder of 32K Productions, a full-scale film production company based in San Francisco.

Esy Casey’s cinematography can be seen in films including the Emmy-nominated Born to Fly (DPs Albert Maysles and Kirsten Johnson, Independent Lens), Before You Know It (Dir. PJ Raval, America Reframed), and Thing With No Name (Dir. Sarah Friedland, Best Documentary nominee Los Angeles Film Festival). Her directorial debut, Jeepney, premiered on PBS in 2015 and won the jury prize for Best Cinematography at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. She has received awards and fellowships, including from the New York Film Festival, the Princess Grace Foundation USA, the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Initiative, the Center for Asian American Media, the American Association of University Women, and the MacDowell Colony. Her current film with Sarah Friedland, Here After, examines an undersea cemetery, anonymous border graves, and other shifting ways our presence outlives us.

Elise Shubs has always been aware of the effects of injustice on people’s lives. Armed with a Master of Political Sciences (Switzerland) and a Diploma on Researching Country of Origin Information (Ireland), it is natural for Elise to defend those who are affected by “legal poverty” and to make documentaries highlighting these issues. This is the driving force that helps her, as a film director and sound engineer, to develop and search out essential artistic devices, which introduce new perspectives towards the plight of certain groups of human beings. She is Vice-President of the association of independent filmmakers and producers “Casa Azul Films” in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Keely Kernan is an award-winning freelance photographer and filmmaker who grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of southern Pennsylvania. She has traveled extensively, both nationally and internationally, to produce work for a variety of media outlets and nonprofits. Her work focuses on topics such as the environment, the natural resources that we use daily, globalization, identity, and community. Her work also focuses on the construction of identity: how our external landscapes shape and transform us, acting as a mirror that reflects our identity. In 2013 she moved back to the rolling mountains of Appalachia and started producing a feature film entitled In the Hills and Hollows, a documentary about the massive natural gas boom in West Virginia and the boom and bust history of coal. The film premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2017.

Rebecca Zinner is a documentary media artist who is entering her final year of the Interdisciplinary Documentary Media Practices MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work frequently explores topics such as identity, family, and loss. She is currently preparing to shoot her thesis project; an observational documentary film that follows a group of young adults on a Taglit Birthright Israel trip. She received her BA from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

Jiangtao (Harry) Gu is an art and cultural historian whose research sits at the intersection of Chinese visual culture and British imperialism.  He is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where he also holds an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Digital Humanities. His dissertation, entitled “Photography as Omen: Chinese Landscape and the Prospective Vision of Empire, 1856-1915,” probes the early history of photography in China, and examines how the medium both reveals and perpetuates the uneven temporalities between late imperial China and the British Empire. As a methodological intervention on how to approach the medium’s historicity, it contends that photography’s relation to time is never settled in the past tense. On the contrary, photographs also circumscribe what is possible and even inevitable for the future. He also publishes frequently on topics such as contemporary Chinese art, transnational histories of photography, and Chinese nationalism.

Tara Najd Ahmadi, born in Tehran, has an MA in Motion Picture Directing and an MFA in Time-Based Media. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Tara has exhibited her films at art galleries and museums in Tehran, Toronto, Croatia, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Tucson, Albuquerque, Minnesota, Illinois, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Kansas City. She has received awards including New York State Council on the Arts in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund (2017), George Eastman Museum Graduate Fellowship (2016-2017), Celeste Hughes Bishop Award for Distinction in Graduate Studies at University of Rochester (2015), Norman Art Council’s Individual Artist Award (2011), the Madeline Collaborate Fellowship (2009 to 2012), and the 2009 OVAC Momentum Spotlight Honorarium.