Sarah Barkin is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Syracuse University. Her research is broadly situated in visual culture, but she focuses on the ways in which documentaries, graphic narratives, and photography engage with the interplay of history, memory, geography, and trauma. She is currently writing her dissertation on subjectivity in Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese nonfiction and experimental film and photography and the way that this frames, and is framed by, conflict and war.

Stephanie Barnwell is a public historian and archivist-in-training with a particular interest in the ways in which the archive bridges past, present, and future. She is keen to preserve audiovisual materials, especially moving images of the documentary and ephemeral variety. Back in the day, she received her BA from Duke University, where she studied linguistics, film, and American history. More recently, Barnwell received her MA in public history from North Carolina State University and is currently working toward her MS in library science at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Since returning to graduate school, she has worked with archival collections held by the Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries and the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library. Prior to this, Barnwell worked as a programmer for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina—the town she still calls home.

Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz holds a MA in multicultural literature and women’s studies from the University of Georgia, where she served as researcher and writer for the Emmy Award-winning preservation and education project, The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative. In 2008, Ebrahimi was named a University Fellow at Temple University and thus began a three-year tenure to earn her MFA degree in film and media Arts. While at Temple, she wrote and directed three documentary films exploring issues of the Iranian diaspora. Her most recent film, Inheritance (2012), blends poetic and observational documentary forms to investigate diasporic identity formation and gender politics in the shadow of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. As an educator, Ebrahimi is interested in using film, video, and new media tools to inspire critical thinking, cultural understanding, and civic participation. When not in the classroom, she serves nonprofits in meeting their communication needs.

Shawna L. Begay, Navajo, was raised in Window Rock, Arizona, capital of the Navajo Nation. She has a BS in psychology from Arizona State University, and a MFA in film production with an emphasis in editing and sound design from Chapman University. Begay is currently a PhD student in educational technology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, focusing on developing educational media for tribal communities in the area of language and culture revitalization.

María Campaña Ramia is a journalist, film critic, documentary maker, and blogger from Quito, Ecuador. She holds a BA in visual communications from Universidad San Francisco de Quito, a BA in film theory from the University of Montpellier III – Paul Valéry, and a MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from the University Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, where she directed the short documentary Mi abuelo, mi héroe. Between 2001 and 2003, she was the editor for the film section of the newspaper Hoy in Ecuador. Since 2004, she has been part of the staff of the International Documentary Film Festival Encuentros del Otro Cine (EDOC) in Ecuador. In 2012, Campaña coedited the book El otro cine de Eduardo Coutinho and curated a showcase of the Brazilian filmmaker for EDOC. She writes about film, travel, and current issues for Ecuadorian and British journals, magazines, and newspapers. Her writings can be found on her blog archibaldodelacruz.blogspot.com.

Emily Cohen is a National Science Foundation Science, Technology, and Society postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. This fall, she will start teaching as an assistant professor of anthropology at the City University of New York’s LaGuardia Community College in New York City. She completed her PhD in anthropology at New York University, where she also earned a Certificate in Culture and Media. A filmmaker as well, Cohen recently began production for the documentary Virtual War: Memories of Abu Ghraib, which follows a group of Iraq veterans who are undergoing an experimental therapy to treat their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Cohen’s documentary Bodies at War: A Colombian Landmine Story is near completion.

Gilliam de la Torre is a graduate of the School of Audiovisual Media of the preemiment Cuban arts school, the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). In 2011 she also studied through New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Havana in a cinema studies course on the essay film. She is an accomplished cinematographer and has worked on fiction and documentary shorts. Her fiction works include Casi, El deseo, and La doble vida de Yordanka. Her nonfiction cinematography credits include El bosque de Sherwood, Domingo, Amor de pelicula, and Raudel. She is also a collaborating photographer of the theater magazine Tablas.

Garth Donovan is an award-winning independent filmmaker from
Boston. Everyone’s Got One, his debut feature, was voted
“New England’s Best Comedy” by the National Society of Film Critics in 2003. Phillip the Fossil, his fourth feature film, premiered at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival, where it went on to win the
Special Jury Award for Best Individual Performance by an Actor. Rubberneck, Donovan’s most recent feature, premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. The Wall Street Journal said “has its antecedents in everything from German Expressionist classics to 1970s slasher flicks to the tense, static psycho-dramas of Michael Haneke.”
Currently, Donovan is producing two feature-length documentaries. One about the growing abundance of great white sharks in New England waters, and the other is about an aspiring hip-hop artist’s relationship with his incarcerated father.

Divad Durant is a multimedia artist, community organizer, and educator. He is a facilitator at Global Action Project, where he conducts workshops on media literacy and media production for youth organizers based in community groups. In 2012 he coproduced the “Three Strikes, You’re In!” action in partnership with the Yes Men to bring attention to the alarming number of people of color being stopped and frisked by the NYPD in NYC. He is also working on a feature-length experimental documentary called A Bronx Tale, which uses home video, found footage, performative ethnography, and filmic depictions of his home borough to cultivate the multiple imaginations of the Bronx. He is currently a digital media fellow at the National Black Programming Consortium developing “Tweets to a Black Conscious Youth,” a multi-platform media project intended to create a supportive community of black conscious youth. When no one is looking, he sings songs, writes rhymes, and reads comic books.

Jos Duncan is a multimedia storyteller and producer of video and theater projects. In 2007, she founded GRIOTWORKS with the goal of bringing communities together through the production of mixed-media storytelling projects. She facilitates film and storytelling workshops nationally and is emerging as a public speaker using arts and culture as a tool for social change. Duncan holds a MFA from the City College of New York and has received recognition for her work through awards and fellowships from the American Folklore Society, New York Women in Television and Film, Colin L. Powell Center for Leadership and Service, and the Leeway Foundation. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rebecca Marshall Ferris received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has served as a cameraperson, editor, and producer on many nonfiction projects. From 1999 through 2006, Rebecca worked with the renowned documentary film company Pennebaker Hegedus Films, serving as associate producer on their films Startup.com, Down From the Mountain, Only the Strong Survive, and Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which won two primetime Emmy Awards and was broadcast on HBO. In 2005, she produced Fox vs. Franken for the Sundance Channel’s series on the First Amendment, as well as the feature documentary, Al Franken: God Spoke. Ferris recently completed Miller’s Tale, an ITVS-funded film about the actor and playwright, Jason Miller, which aired on PBS. Her current film, Can't Stop the Water, will be released in 2013.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente was born in Puerto Rico and earned her BFA in film and TV production at New York University. A multidisciplinary artist and media maker, she was recently appointed Secretary of State of the Republic of Zaqistan, a micronation in the Utah desert. She has worked under the tutelage of Albert Maysles, as well as collaborated extensively with experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, most notably as editor of Wind In Our Hair, a bilingual film inspired by the short stories of Julio Cortázar. She also worked as an associate producer at HITN, a Hispanic public television network, where in 2011 she directed and produced Labor, a documentary about the creative process behind an art exhibition inspired by the archive of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She currently lives in Brooklyn, works as a freelance filmmaker, and is one of the founding editors of IndigNación, a Spanish-language newspaper born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Haitao Guo was born and grew up in China. He is an independent filmmaker/writerbased in Philadelphia and a recipient of the Temple University Fellowship for Graduate Study. In the last three years, Guo has completed two feature-length screenplays, nine short narrative films, three short documentary films, and one feature-length documentary. With a strong desire to tell stories about the problems, confusion, distress, and hopes of everyday people from a personal angle, he strives to be an acute cross-cultural observer and recorder. He wants to portray the real modern China, especially his connection to the marginalized within society, through documentary and narrative filmmaking.

Alexandra Halkin founded, in 1998, the Chiapas Media Project, an award-winning binational organization that has trained more than two hundred indigenous men and women in video production in Chiapas and Guerrero, Mexico. In 2008, Halkin, who is both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, published an article, “Outside the Indigenous Lens: Zapatistas and Autonomous Videomaking,” inGlobal Indigenous Media (eds. Dr. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, Duke Press). From 2000 to 2010, she produced five documentaries in Mexico. These documentaries focused on environmental justice, indigenous rights, the War on Drugs, and migrant farmworkers and were screened at film and video festivals worldwide. In 2010, Halkin founded the Americas Media Initiative (AMI) a nonprofit organization that works with Cuban filmmakers living in Cuba. In June 2012, Halkin helped the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar bring three Cuban filmmakers to the Seminar.

J. Christian Jensen entered the media world as a journalist—a passion that lead to his career aspirations as a documentary filmmaker. While pursuing a BA in film from Brigham Young University, he worked on several nonfiction productions including ones for National Geographic Film & Television, and FRONTLINE and American Experience for PBS. His directorial debut was a broadcast-length documentary called Sou da Bahia (I’m From Bahia) about art and Afro-Brazilian identity in northeastern Brazil. He also cocurated a multiple medium art exhibit by the same name to accompany the film’s premiere throughout the United States and Latin America. Having lived and worked in Brazil and China, Jensen is interested in films that explore stories in newly industrialized nations. He is also fascinated by topics of religion and faith from both a secular and nonsecular perspective. Jensen is currently pursuing an MFA in documentary film at Stanford University.

Nuno Lisboa is a filmmaker, teacher, and programmer. Since 2006, he has programmed and run Doc’s Kingdom, International Seminar on Documentary Film, created in 2000 by José Manuel Costa (who was inspired by the Flaherty Seminar). Lisboa teaches at Escola Superior de Artes e Design de Caldas da Rainha. He is also a PhD candidate in communication sciences, film studies at Universidade Nova de Lisboa as a FCT Fellow. Lisboa currently lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Cuilan Liu is a doctoral student on Tibetan studies and a documentary filmmaker. With financial support from Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a fellowship from the Film Study Center at Harvard, she is currently finishing up a feature-length documentary on the life of a young Buddhist monk in northeastern Tibet.  

Tom McCormack is a critic living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, Film Comment, Rhizome, The L Magazine, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to Moving Image Source, an editor at Alt Screen, and the film and electronic art editor of Idiom.  

Milton McGriff, an award-winning poet, playwright, essayist, and journalist, is the author of 2236, a novel about the erosion of democracy, the rise of corporate rule, and resistance from freedom fighters who call themselves Unit 2236. His 17-minute video, Can’t Sell Drugs in the Lib No More, is based on a chapter of the novel. In 2010 and again in 2012, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony awarded him Fiction Workshop scholarships. He holds a BA and MA from Iowa State University in English and creative writing. McGriff lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Meghan Monsour graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a BA in media studies and American studies. After college, she spent several years working for various youth organizations such as Upward Bound, AmeriCorps, and the High Rocks Academy of West Virginia. Monsour moved to Mexico City in 2006, where she worked as the festival coordinator and executive assistant in Canana Films. Since 2008, she has been part of the team that organizes and programs the Ambulante Documentary Film Festival, which travels to 12 states in Mexico every year exhibiting documentaries in nontraditional settings.

Tara Merenda Nelson is a Boston-based filmmaker, curator, and installation artist. Her 16mm and Super 8 films have been exhibited in galleries, museums basements, and backyards throughout the United States, Europe, and Canada, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Sydney Underground Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde program. In February 2011, she curated a four-city tour for French experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder. She has worked as an intern at the Harvard Film Archive and WGBH’s Antiques Roadshow, and has lectured at Montserrat College of Art. Nelson holds an MFA in film/video from the Massachusetts College of Art.

Cruz Gustavo Pérez is a documentary filmmaker, photographer, and poet. His short documentaries include The Voyage, Caidije, The Weaver, and Sola. His first feature documentary, All Were to be Queens, participated in the International Festival of Poor Cinema, the International Documentary Festival “Santiago Álvarez in Memoriam” and the “Made in Cuba” section of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. His film Journeying participated in Sunny Side of the Doc and was acquired by the broadcast channel Odyssey in Catalonia. His documentary Hail Mary screened in the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Cuba and won awards at the International Film Festival in Guadalajara, Chicago Latino Film Festival, Latin American Video Festival (Argentina), Toronto Hispanic American Film Festival, and the London Latin American Film Festival.

Carlos Ismael Rivera Lezcano is a student candidate for graduation in motion pictures from the School of Fine Arts of Puerto Rico. A stringed-instruments musician, he has worked as a documentary filmmaker, editor, and freelance cameraman for various projects in Puerto Rico. In 2011 he won a grant to visit Madrid, Spain, and the Venice Biennale in Italy after having submitted a piece of ephemeral installation entitled La vía es verde. Rivera recently documented several artists including Gerson Orjuela (jazz musician), Vladimir Garcia and Doel Fresse (architects), and Julieta Victoria Muñoz-Alvarado (writer). Rivera and Roberto Rivera-Sánchez will present Revuelo, a documentary about the construction process of García and Fresse’s work at the National Gallery of Puerto Rico. He is currently working on a documentary about the legalization, regulation, and medicalization of marijuana and its socioeconomic effects on Puerto Rico entitled Section.

Gloria Rolando, born and raised in Havana, is an acclaimed Cuban director whose work in both feature films and documentaries spans over 20 years. She is a member of the Cuban Film Industry and Arts Institute (ICAIC) and also heads her own independent filmmaking group, Imagines del Caribe. Many of her films are available through afrocubaweb.com and include My Footsteps in Baragua (1996), Roots of My Heart (2001), and 1912: Breaking the Silence (2010).

Jules Rosskam received a BA in painting and writing from Bennington College in 2001 and a MFA in film, video, new media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. In 2005, Rosskam premiered his first feature film, transparent, which was released to critical acclaim and awards. Frameline Distribution acquired the film in 2006. The film has screened in more than 50 film festivals and had its broadcast premiere on PBS in June 2008. In 2009, Rosskam released an experimental documentary, against a trans narrative, which has since been picked up by the Video Data Bank and broadcast in Canada. Rosskam is presently in postproduction on Thick Relations, a collaboratively developed hybrid video. Currently a visiting assistant professor of video production at Hampshire College, Rosskam is also a fine artist whose paintings, installations, and performances have shown in galleries and venues throughout the United States.

Christine Turner is an independent filmmaker and freelance producer in New York. She is currently directing Homegoings, a documentary exploring the African-American way of death, slated for broadcast on POV in 2013.   

Ben Wang is a Japanese-Chinese American documentary filmmaker who grew up in Sacramento and currently resides in Oakland, California. Wang was the codirector/coproducer of the feature documentary Aoki, a film chronicling the life of Richard Aoki, a third-generation Japanese American who became one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party. He is the director/producer for the feature documentary Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story, which is currently in production. He is a fellow in the Center for Asian American Media’s James T. Yee Fellowship Program.

Roberto G. Rivera Sánchez is finishing his BFA in image and movement with studies in graphic design and industrial design at the School of Fine Arts of Puerto Rico. He works as a freelancer in different creative projects for graphic design, film, photography, and theater, and has volunteered with the Puerto Rico Film Society since its foundation in 2009. Starting at the end of 2010 and in collaboration with Carlos Ismael Rivera Lezcano, he began documenting artists; their projects include El Rito with Awilda Sterling-Duprey (painter, performer, and experimental dancer), Tarareando al son de los 70s: Memorias, based on the book written by Julieta V. Muñoz-Alvarado (writer, professor, and journalist), and Revuelo, a temporary installation in the National Gallery of Puerto Rico by Vladimir García and Doel Fresse (architects). Rivera-Sánchez is developing a community audiovisual archive presenting the “big picture” of what has been happening in the different disciplines of the contemporary arts in Puerto Rico. Visit: rgrs-multimedia.com, www.vimeo.com/rgrs

Palesa Shongwe is an emerging director and scriptwriter from South Africa, currently studying for a MA from the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her interests are in short experimental films and writing for drama. With experience as a spoken-word artist, writer, and researcher, her work mixes fiction and documentary, archive material, animation, and text. Her short film Atrophy earned the Ecumenical Jury Award at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Germany.