Nichole Whitney is a filmmaker based in Portland, Maine. She creates genre-defying work that explores memory, personal archive, and complicated intimacies through a blend of fiction and nonfiction, poetic techniques, and observational filmmaking. Her documentary practice is rooted in personal connection and creative reimaginings of current reality. She believes in documentary as a form of time travel. Her first short film, The Round Forest (2025), premiered at the Camden International Film Festival. Nichole was previously a Collaborative Studio Fellow at UnionDocs and a Documentary Storytelling Fellow at The Nature Conservancy in Maine. She is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Vassar College.

Meet Nichole

Myles David Jewell works as a film and video maker, not specializing in one trade or form.

He runs Pennington Productions, which produces non-fiction and hybrid feature, shorts and installations. He believes firmly in the ethics of representation and collaborative approaches to media production, seeing the work as a community building exercise. His practice fluctuates between minimal resource filmmaking and larger more technical productions. He is a nerd for form.

He lives and works in Burlington, Vermont, where he will put his bones to rest.

He is a Lecturer at The University of Vermont. He has wanted to be a teacher since he was a wee lad.

Meet Myles

Emilia Mello is an Brazilian-American director, photographer and producer. Her first feature documentary, SEM DEUS, SEM DEMÔNIO (No Kings), premiered at CPH:Dox 2020 and played at the True/False Film Festival 2021 and MoMA Doc Fortnight 2022 among others. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University with a degree in Evolution, Ecology, and Environmental Biology and has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has received support from the Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance Documentary Film Program, IDFA Bertha Fund, IDA, and Visions du Réel, among others.

Meet Emilia

mai eltahir is an independent curator and researcher based in Philadelphia, PA, with roots in Sudan.

Her work focuses on Black cultural production, post-colonial hauntologies, and the intersection between experimentation and the geopolitical.

Her practice convenes avant-garde legacies of the moving image across the African continent and diaspora, place-based methodologies and affective registers of contemporary African artistic practices, and the transregional affinities they continue to generate.

Her current research examines the violent onset of modernity across East African coastal cities and ports, tracing its residues in modes of thought, knowledge production, spirituality, ecology, and more-than-human relations. These efforts are conveyed and unfold in practice through exhibition-making and discursive programming within and through para/institutional and collective contexts.

Zainab Sultan is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and impact producer whose work expands how Muslims in America are seen and understood.

Raised in Saudi Arabia, she spent several years working as a journalist in Doha, Qatar, where she developed a deep passion for storytelling and community-centered reporting.

Her latest documentary, Stand Up for Madinah, premiered on Al Jazeera English. Zainab also served as the outreach and impact manager for To Kill a Tiger, the documentary nominated for the 96th Academy Awards.

Most recently, she worked as an impact producer on The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony, which premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival.

She is a board member at People’s Media Fund in Philadelphia and at Bitchitra Collective: Indian Women in Documentary, an organization advocating for the rights of women and non-binary filmmakers of Indian origin in the U.S. and India.

Through her volunteer work, she is focused on building narrative power within marginalized communities and helping move resources to those who have historically been unheard.

Zainab is also a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, the Asian American Documentary Network, and the Global Impact Producers Alliance. Her writing has been featured in Columbia Journalism Review, Al Jazeera English, TRT, Middle East Eye and other outlets.

Meet Zainab

Ellie Yaejin Koo (b. Incheon, 2002) is a filmmaker, cultural organizer, educator, and artist based in Lenapehoking (Philadelphia, PA).

Their work in film and installation challenges the legibility of the Korean-American identity and explores Diasporic Ecologies, Personal Memory, and Language. They currently attend Temple University for an MFA in Film and Media Arts and are in the works on a DIY radical microcinema called Dream Dialect Cinema Club.

Meet Ellie

Jezabeth Roca Gonzàlez is a multidisciplinary maker and educator working in collaboration with their family. Through multimedia installations, they make use of video, photography, soil, and plants to explore the intimacy of place and the ever-shifting, migratory movement of people between the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Their practice is invested in generating visual records of their own family dynamics, which include themes of generational difference, altered landscape, and the cultures and aesthetics of care.

Jezabeth constructs video vignettes and builds multiple, parallel realms that question the manner in which colonial legacies shape the land, their own cuirness and the duality inherent in everyday life.

Meet Jazabeth

naakita f.k. is an interdisciplinary artist based between Zhegagoynak/Chicago and Tio’Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

Through place-based and site-specific relations, they consider extractivism, including both resource extraction and extractive ideologies that show up in the wake of violence to land.

They have screened, performed, and installed their work internationally with notable institutions such as MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012); Trinity Square Video, Toronto, ON (2016); Mémoire de l’Avenir, Paris, FR (2019); Videofenster, Cologne, DE (2021); Fonderie Darling, Montreal, QC (2022); Images Festival, Toronto, ON (2023); CAFKA Biennale, Kitchener, ON (2025); the Quebec Biennale, Baie Saint-Paul, QC (2026); and The Block Museum, Evanston, IL (2026).

They have received grants and awards from Trinity Square Video (2016), Saw Video (2017), Museum of Jewish Montreal (2020), Canada Council for the Arts (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), CALQ (2022), LOJIQ (2024) and Northwestern University (2025). Since 2021, they have completed residencies with Jardins de Métis, Ada X, Fonderie Darling, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture and the China America Reel Ecology Program.

In 2016, f.k. completed their BFA in Intermedia Arts at Concordia, Montreal, QC and in 2026 they received their MFA in Art, Theory & Practice from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

Meet naakita

Francisca Jiménez (Colombia, 1993) is a visual artist, film director, and editor.

Her practice explores the intersections of expanded cinema, photography, research, and printed editorial production. Across her work she establishes a continuous dialogue between reality and historical fiction, drawing on critical fabulation and self-representation to trace how Latin American conflicts leave both aesthetic and political marks on landscapes, communities, and bodies.

Her filmography has been screened at international festivals such as the San Sebastián Film Festival (Spain), FICCI (Colombia), MIDBO (Colombia), FICUNAM (Mexico), Frontera Sur (Chile), and FESTIFREAK (Argentina). In parallel, her visual work has been exhibited in Bogotá, Cartagena, New York, San Juan, Buenos Aires, Toronto, and Chicago.

Most recently, she was awarded the New Artist Society Scholarship to pursue an MFA in Film and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently developing her first feature film.

Meet Francisca

Reem Jubran is a filmmaker, visual artist, and educator, based between Southern California and Palestine. Through a combination of her international filmmaking practice, writing, and photography, Reem’s work brings to life the complexities and beauty of Palestinian family dynamics, displacement, and radical feminism. Reem’s work is committed to reaching local and international audiences through her unique perspective as a Palestinian-American filmmaker.

Reem’s latest film “Don’t Be Long, Little Bird”, was recognized by the Gotham Film Institute and was distributed online through Focus Features. The film also received the “Spirit of Palestine” award from the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, and UCLA’s highest distinction “Grand Jury Prize”. The “making of” this film is featured in the award-winning PBS documentary “LA Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement”, where she represents a continuation of the legacy and solidarity between black and indigenous filmmakers movement from UCLA. Reem’s social impact campaign, titled “Cinematic Rebellion”, features a screening program of these two films followed by a discussion of practicing community care through filmmaking. She has toured with this program at over 15 universities, community centers, and screening venues across North America and Europe.

Reem carries a B.A. in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and continued her film education on location in Palestine, where she worked as Assistant Director on Palestinian narrative feature films for several years. She also holds an MFA in Directing from University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been covered by Filmmaker Magazine, Focus Features, Rawy Talks, and Palestine in America.

Meet Reem

Deniz Buga (b. 1982, Istanbul) works and lives in Amsterdam. Their film, video, and photography works focus on urbanism, minority politics, and queer stances.

Buga holds an MFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts and was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Their work has been presented at film festivals and art venues including San Sebastian Film Festival, Oxford Modern Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and C/O Berlin.

Meet Deniz

Dylan Adamson is a film and video critic, curator, and preservationist based in Toronto. His writing can be found at the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Filmmaker Magazine, The Walrus, Senses of Cinema, and many other outlets. His curated programs have played at TIFF Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and elsewhere.

He is currently employed as Technical and Collections Manager at Vtape, the Canadian video art distributor.

Meet Dylan

Matazi Weathers is a temporal and spatial film farmer, filmmaker, curator, creative producer, and educator from Los Angeles (via Twiggs, Georgia and Dayton, Ohio), whose practice constellates image-making across the African diaspora through experiential research and embodied storytelling.

Matazi creates work rooted in land and spirit that center pleasurable forms of radical interiority, orienting toward revolutionary transformation. Their short films Za Mwezi, Darker, and Some Age have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Slamdance, the Vancouver International Film Festival, Ishango Encounter in Goma, and community cinemas across the world.

Matazi trained in filmmaking at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, where they later taught and designed film courses. Formerly Film Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Matazi designed and led LACMA's Aspect Ratio filmmaking courses for adults in South Central LA, and has spent years teaching adaptive and celluloid-based filmmaking to generations of young people and adults across Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

They are head of the Cinema Celluloid Department at Yole!Africa, a programmer on the Feature Narrative Program Committee at BlackStar Film Festival, founder of Black Bloom - a Black farmers' cooperative in Los Angeles, and co-founder of Black Film Assembly - a living mycelium of Black filmmakers, programmers, educators, and storytellers rooted in Los Angeles, reaching across the diaspora.

Meet Matazi

Lorran Dias (b. 1994) is a Brazilian filmmaker, curator, and cultural manager. Born in Favela da Maré, Rio de Janeiro, he develops work from popular territories and dissident experiences, asking how images circulate, remain socially alive, and become part of collective memory.

He founded the production company TV Coragem in 2020, supported by Instituto Moreira Salles, and co-founded Anarca Filmes in 2014, a queer cinema and contemporary art collective whose decade retrospective, "The Delirium Anthology — 10 Years of Anarca Filmes," was presented at Instituto Moreira Salles in 2025.

He wrote, directed, and produced Between the Colony and the Stars (BlackStar Film Festival, 2023), Perpetual (IFFR, 2019), Novo Rio (2021), and others — exhibited, supported, or licensed by the Canal Brasil TV channel, the Globoplay streaming platform, Göteborg Film Fund (2021), Instituto Moreira Salles, Pivô Art and Research, Museu de Arte do Rio, and Heinrich Böll Stiftung, with support from Rio de Janeiro's State Culture Secretariat and the Brazilian federal government.

He has taken part in the Locarno Industry Academy Latin America (2024), DOCSP (2024), Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Creators Lab in the Peruvian Amazon (2022), the U.S. State Department program American Film Showcase (Los Angeles, 2023), and Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires (2022).
Lorran Dias works as an Analyst in the Cultural Management department of Sesc's National Department (Social Service of Commerce), one of Brazil's largest social development institutions. He leads strategic articulation between Sesc's Regional Departments to implement nationwide audiovisual policy — spanning policy induction, technical cooperation, indicator research, and professional development for Sesc teams, alongside direct engagement with strategic players across private companies and public institutions in the audiovisual sector. He coordinates curation, programming, and licensing for CineSesc, Sesc's nationwide exhibition network, bringing together the annual licensing of 50 feature films, regional teams, and infrastructure to expand the circulation of Brazilian cinema beyond commercial release and enable free in-person screenings in territories often outside the traditional exhibition circuit — many with no movie theater at all.

In 2025 he took part in Ventana Sur, and in 2026 he brought his work to the Bogotá Audiovisual Market (BAM) in Colombia, building connections between his films and TV Coragem's curatorial work across the Global South. His current research, "the democratization of permanence," examines the conditions that allow films, filmmakers, and audiences not only to democratize access to culture, but to remain within it.

Meet Lorran

Chris Filippone is a documentary filmmaker whose work explores survival economies, peripheral perspectives, and liminal spaces through aesthetically immersive approaches. His films have screened at Berlinale, Visions du Réel, SXSW, Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, and Sheffield Doc/Fest, as well as featured in The New York Times Op-Docs, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Short of the Week, and Vimeo Staff Picks.

His film Huntsville Station was nominated for Outstanding Nonfiction Short at the Cinema Eye Honors and Best Short at the IDA Documentary Awards, and qualified for Academy Award consideration. He has also received support from Catapult Film Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AmDoc, Mountainfilm, and Bread and Roses; participated in artist residencies at Points North Institute, KHN Art Center, and Marble House Project; and been awarded fellowships from the Telluride Student Symposium and UFVA.

Chris is a graduate of Stanford University’s M.F.A. Documentary Film program and has previously taught at San Francisco Art Institute, Santa Clara University, and the University of Iowa. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago.

Meet Chris

Mariia is a sophomore at Haverford College, intending to double major in Psychology and Film. She loves rewatching her favorite 4 on Letterboxd and has produced and directed 18 short films of her own, most recently Elevated Pitch, a short-format interview series featuring Haverford alumni. She's active on campus with her work in the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, the International Student Office, and the First-Year Orientation Program.

Filmmaking minor interested in production design/set dec and sfx makeup! Especially interested in indie shorts and music videos. Very excited to be at the Flaherty!

Justice Khor (he, him, his) is a queer Malaysian documentary filmmaker and LGBTQ activist. He is passionate about using factual filmmaking as a means of advocacy and entertainment. Justice previously served as the Vice President of PLUHO (People Like Us Hang Out!), a Malaysian grassroots queer organisation.

Meet Justice

Jay Rosas is a film programmer, writer, filmmaker, and educator from Mindanao, Philippines. He co-founded the film collective Pasalidahay in 2015 where his film programming practice started, curating short film programs highlighting regional and independent works.

His film writing has appeared in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival publications, Eksentrika, and Margin. He was a recipient of the Arts Equator Fellowship in 2023-2024, writing, researching and producing content focused on Philippine regional cinema.

His short documentary Budots: The Craze (2019), which traced the grassroots origins of a Philippine EDM genre, has been screened in Southeast Asia as well as at the M+ in Hong Kong and the Asian Film Archive in Singapore. He has extensively worked in the development sector in the fields of communication, media, and knowledge management.

Currently, he is a part-time lecturer at the University of the Philippines Mindanao.

Yaning Xiong, an image-based creator from China, is currently focused on experimental film and documentary work. She seeks to integrate various artistic forms and media into her personal creations. Her work centers on themes of the body and myth, aiming to reinterpret contemporary social issues from new perspectives. She uses moving images as a tool for self-healing, and is working on systematizing this approach. At present, she is experimenting with AI technologies as one of the tools for visual expression, further exploring the boundaries between the virtual and the real. Her portrait is generated based on the entirety of her past dialogues with AI.

Meet Yaning

Shuqian Lyu is a filmmaker, media artist, and researcher from Suzhou, China. Her practice and research follow people and places under pressure: environmental extraction, institutional control, infrastructural rupture, or material recomposition, often more than one at once. She works across documentary, experimental forms, and emerging technologies, integrating archival research and theoretical writing. She treats imagination and fact as equally core to storytelling and ethics, rather than as opposed elements. She holds a B.A. in Media Arts and Information Science from Cornell University and is an MFA candidate at Duke University.

Meet Shuqian

Lei He is a documentary filmmaker and moving image artist currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts at Duke University. Her practice explores the relationships between labor, the body, belief, capital, and social transformation.

Working across observational documentary, experimental cinema, and poetic storytelling, Lei’s films focus on overlooked individual experiences and the evolving connections between humans, landscapes, industrial systems, and time. Her film Drifting examines the relationship between coal miners, bodily endurance, and geological time in northern China, and was selected as a finalist for the 53rd Student Academy Awards. Her ongoing project Manufacturing the Sacred investigates the global production chain of Buddhist statues, questioning how the sacred is constructed, circulated, and transformed within contemporary industrial systems.

Through nonfiction filmmaking, Lei seeks to create immersive cinematic experiences that reveal hidden labor, collective memory, and the complex relationship between tradition and the future.

Meet Lei

Savyasachi Anju Prabir is a filmmaker, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of film, art, and anthropology, with a focus on memory, countermapping, and multimodal pedagogy.

Meet Savyasachi

Xiao Zhang is a filmmaker and artist working between Dongguan and Los Angeles. Their work centers on a personal poetics derived from memory, language, body, and diaspora, attending to haptic sites of traces, absence, and exile. They hold an MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from the Beijing Film Academy. Their work has been shown internationally at film festivals and art institutions, including MoMA Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, FIRST International Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, FRACTO, Antimatter [media art], EXiS, CROSSROADS, REDCAT (Los Angeles), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), and UCCA (Beijing), among others.

Meet Xiao

Yuyang Zeng (Rainne) is an independent curator with a Ph.D. in Drama, Film and Television Studies.

Her research focuses on moving image art, intermedial practices, and exhibition and audience studies. She holds a Master of Art Curating and a Bachelor of Art History from the University of Sydney and was an exchange student at Keio University.

Her articles have been published in A&HCI- and CSSCI-indexed journals, and her research has been presented at major academic conferences and forums, including the World Congress of Art History (CIHA), the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and the China Film Studies Doctoral Forum. She currently serves as a reviewer for the annual conference of Cumulus, the International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media, as well as for several international academic journals.
In 2026, she was selected as a Cultural Research Fellow at the West Bund Museum and for the Emerging Curators Project at Central Art Museum, Hangzhou. In 2025, she curated the Pingshan sub-venue of the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB). Her 2023 exhibition “Terrestrial Landing: Planet Candidates” was selected for the Emerging Curators Project at the Power Station of Art.

Meet Yuyang

Yasaman Baghban is a nonfiction filmmaker, film programmer, and educator.

She has also served on jury panels and screening committees, collaborating with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, the Mimesis Film Festival, the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and other organizations. She earned an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University in 2023 and is currently a PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her work focuses on sociopolitical issues, human rights, feminism, memory, and archives.

Her short films have received awards and have been screened at international film festivals, including True/False, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Female Eye Film Festival, and others. In Spring 2026, through Khanesh Institute, an independent nongovernmental organization, she introduced the concept of videographic criticism to Iranian artists and scholars for the first time.

Meet Yasaman

Hello! I am a documentary filmmaker who values the complexities of humans and the way in which they interact with each other and the world around them. I am mainly interested in how labor and leisure affect the everyday working human. My approach to filmmaking is rooted in instinct and emotion. I combine both conventional and unconventional cinematography and editing techniques to produce visually striking imagery, intuitive pacing, and ultimately, heightened sensations for the audience to experience. I come from a whirlwind of moving my whole life and meeting new people and building connections at a fast pace, from a young age. This extreme level of adaptability and resiliency is a value I also prioritize in my collaboration and connection with any participant in my filmmaking process!

Irina Klippert is an interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist based in Portland, Oregon. Whether she's working in fiction, experimental, or documentary forms, her work revolves around visual storytelling and authentic characters, with a "show, don't tell" approach. Her practice is rooted in DIY ideals and the fusion of various art forms to convey a unifying message. A recent graduate of Portland State University, she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in film with a minor in art practice.