ALEKSEI BARYKIN has been is a director and producer for film and television. After graduating from university, he was hired to oversee corporate programming for the Russian satellite broadcast channel TNV. He went on to produce and direct five television series in five years, winning a national award for “Best Corporate Television Project.” In 2004, he founded a production company, Griffion Studios, where he produced, wrote, and directed a twelve-part narrative series and television hit, Love on the Job (2005). In 2006, he made a feature-length musical fairytale on commission for TNV. He studied film directing at the Aleksandr Mitta Studio School in Moscow, and was named Artistic Director of the Kazan Film Studio, one of the oldest in Russia. In 2008, he shot three documentary films with support from the Russian Ministry of Culture.

CLAUDIA CHUPINA was born in Yugorsk, a city in Western Siberia. She earned a degree in translation and interpreting at the Perm State Technical University, graduating with honors. Following her studies, she became the manager of translation at the Flahertiana International Festival of Documentary Film in Perm, and has since become the Working Manager of the festival, taking part in all aspects of organizing and producing three Flahertianas, as well as “Echo” festivals in cities around Russia and Europe. She is also an active contributing organizer of the “Perm Cinemateque” project, for which she curates and produces a series of award-winning films from festivals around Russia. She continues to work translating titles for documentary, narrative, and animated films.

ALEKSANDR GABRILYAN is a director and producer of independent films. He served in the Russian Army from 1993 to 1995, then completed Sergeant training to become a Special Commander for the Intelligence Division. He saw live action during the First Chechen War (1994-1995), and was awarded numerous medals for excellence and bravery. After his service, Gabrilyan studied law. In 2008 he graduated from VGIK, Russia’s top film school, as film director, where he studied with the internationally known documentary filmmaker Sergei Miroshnichenko. Gabrilyan is a member of the Filmmaker’s Guild of Russia. He is the director of eight films, including Angels on Earth (2007) and Toward Heaven (2006), both produced with support from the Russian Ministry of Culture, and Hunting Season (2005), which opened the program of Short Film at the 2005 Russian Film Festival in Lecco, Italy.

OLEG VIZZHACHY is a director and producer of independent documentary films. He was born in Arkhangelsk in 1974, and now lives in Moscow. He made his first film as a high school student by shooting slide film, which he spliced together and ran through a projector. He studied film directing at the Sverdlovsk Film Studio in Yekaterinburg, and at the renowned VGIK Institute in Moscow. He is the general director of the Mir Kino Film Studio, which is devoted primarily to biographical films focusing on an individual, family, community group, or town. He often works internationally, making films about people from many different backgrounds and minority groups. His films have been shown at festivals around Russia and Someday… Never… won the Jury Prize at the 2005 Stalker Film Festival in Moscow.

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MIA FERM resides in Portland, Oregon, and is a collective member of the nonprofit film screening organization, Cinema Project, known for their dedication to experimental film and video art. She received her M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University in 2008 before relocating to Portland and has held internships at Film Comment and at Anthology Film Archives. Outside of film studies, Mia also produces personal video and photography work. Her most recent video piece, Castanets: Tendrils was a web exclusive on Pitchfork Media in spring 2008. She has also screened work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, California.

HEATHER LANE Heather Lane lives in Portland, Oregon. She is a letterpress artist, a collective member of Cinema Project, and enjoys working with film, particularly super-8 and slide shows. In the summers she is a botanist on the eastern side of the state, where she tries to film the ground, with limited success thus far. She grew up in Lewiston, Idaho and Clarkston, Washington.

JULIE PERINI is an experimental media artist, educator, and writer based in Portland, Oregon. She is a recipient of the 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Cross-Disciplinary/Performative work. Her work screens regularly at alternative media spaces, galleries, festivals, bars, nightclubs, sidewalks, and private living rooms. Julie holds a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.F.A. from the University of Buffalo’s Department of Media Study where she studied with experimental and documentary filmmakers Tony Conrad, Steven Eastwood, Sarah Elder, and Caroline Koebel, and Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble. Her individual art practice investigates the immediate social world around her, as well as larger societal structures and institutions, often blurring the boundary between art and life. She teaches in the Intermedia Department at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

ENIE VAISBURD grew up in Brazil before moving to Israel to earn her B.A. in French Literature from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She then moved to the United States and earned her M.F.A. in cinema from Southern Illinois University. Enie is Assistant Professor at Pacific University Oregon where she teaches film and video production, history, and analysis, and is also on the board of directors of Cinema Project. Previously, she was one of the lead faculty members at the Northwest Film Center, taught community outreach projects, served on multiple grants panels, curated and presented film programs throughout the country, and acted as consultant on numerous film projects. She enjoys making films about the emotional and physical space of people living between cultures and the heroic of the mundane.

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SALTANAT BERDIKEEVA is an emerging filmmaker and a native of Kyrgystan, and is a Senior Research Analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, Inc (EPRINC). With an extensive background in public policy research and international security issues, Berdikeeva seeks to portray critical political and social problems via film. She received her master’s degree in security studies at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.

ANDRE DAHLMAN grew up in the Washington, DC area. After completing a dual degree in Psychology and International Relations from the University of Toronto, Andre moved to New Zealand to direct the award-winning documentary Southern Faces (2004). He then returned to DC where he works as a documentary director, producer, and editor. His most recent projects include Murphy’s Gambit (2009), the story of a homeless hustling chess savant as he attempts to get off the streets and beat an addiction to drugs, and A Historic Inauguration (2009), a documentary exploring Washington, DC’s response to Barack Obama’s historic presidential inauguration.

SANDY WATERS is an M.F.A. candidate at Howard University, working on the completion of her documentary film about the U.S. and Cuba and the effects of the embargo. She graduated cum laude from the University of the District of Columbia in 1999 with a B.A. in Mass Media--TV Production. She is a freelance videographer, photographer, and editor. She specializes in documentary video and photography, special events, commercials, and portfolio work. She is also a substitute teacher in the DC public schools and has taught young people videography and photography.

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ALAN DATER graduated from Goddard College in 1965 with a B.A. in Philosophy. He began his film career in New York City, working on documentaries as a freelance soundman and later as a director/cameraman. These productions were broadcast on major U.S networks including: Lifeline, an Emmy Award-winning medical documentary series for NBC; The Body Human, an Emmy Award-winning medical series for CBS; and National Geographic specials. Other credits include Hi Mom, directed by Brian De Palma, and a documentary about Johnny Cash entitled Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music. After moving to Vermont, he began producing independent films, including: The Stuff of Dreams, the story of a community theater group’s original production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and Blanche, a portrait of the conductor, Blanche Honegger Moyse.

BOB NESSON is an independent filmmaker and educator. His films cover politics, economics, urban issues, culture, history, and the environment. His work as an educator includes leading workshops in environmental filmmaking in Russia and Turkey, and the Jason Project, an effort to bring remote, ecologically sensitive locations--rainforest canopies, lava fields, and underwater cliffs--to students in classrooms around the world through real-time, interactive video. Nesson is an adjunct professor at Emerson College, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses such as Filmmaking and the Environment. He is active in grassroots groups working to improve the sustainability of local urban areas, and is on the Board of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. He is president of Nesson Media Boston, Inc., which produces documentary and commissioned media worldwide.

KAVITA PILLAY began working in film as an associate producer on broadcast-length documentaries and museum installation videos at Northern Light Productions in Boston. In 2005, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India, where she researched the work of Kerala’s parallel filmmakers and began conducting research that became the basis for My Good Name Is Stalin. Following an intensive course at the Prague Film School, Kavita took a brief hiatus from film in order to set up Scrubya, her politically oriented soap company. She returned to filmmaking last year as a 2008-09 Filmmaker-in-Residence at WGBH Boston. A graduate of Tufts and Johns Hopkins, Kavita is also a contributing writer for Asia! magazine. She lives in Boston with her husband/co-collaborator, Sauli Pillay.

PAIGE SARLIN is a filmmaker, activist, and curator. She has an M.F.A. in Film, Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in English from Oberlin College. She was awarded a Joukowsky Presidential Fellowship by Brown University where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. Her first full-length documentary, The Last Slide Projector, premiered at the Rotterdam Festival in 2007, and screened at Anthology Film Archives, the Toronto Contact Festival, NW Film Forum, and the 2008 SCMS Conference. She has been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Politics, AREA: Chicago, and the forthcoming Framework. Paige is also the curator of Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island. Currently she is finishing a documentary on the consequences of American democracy-promoting initiatives in Macedonia, as well as developing a dissertation and film about the history of the interview form.

ALEXANDRA SHERMAN is a producer, new media artist, and educator based in Boston. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Alexandra began working in education in museums and nonprofit organizations, including Education Development Center Inc. and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. After receiving her masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Alexandra began producing educational media for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She currently works in digital product development at Pearson Education, specializing in video and interactive media for humanities and human geography.

JEFF DANIEL SILVA is a filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Somerville, Mass. His films and moving-image installations have been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and museums in the United States, South America, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Jeff is currently a professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University. Jeff also co-founded and co-curates the Balagan Experimental Film Series (www.balaganfilms.com). His most recently completed work, Balkan Rhapsodies, had its U.S. premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’ s Documentary Fortnight series and has gained recognition throughout festivals in Europe and Latin America. Balkan Rhapsodies won the 2009 Basil Wright prize at the RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute) Film Festival.

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DAVID DINNELL is a filmmaker and film programmer currently based in Milwaukee. He has been the Film Programmer for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Theatre for five seasons, from May 2007 through December 2009. He has programmed film and video for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and the Detroit Docs Film Festival, and was the Program Director of the Media City Film Festival (Windsor, Canada) from 2004-2006. His 2007 video, Midden, showed at numerous international venues and festivals, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Images Festival (Toronto), and the EXiS Film Festival (Seoul). His most recent video, a collaboration with percussionist Jon Mueller, was published by the Table of the Elements/Radium experimental music label in May 2009.

FRANCES GUERIN completed her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University in 2000. She is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Media Studies, Ruhr University, Bochum, in Germany. She is the author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and the co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, 2007). Her book entitled Through Amateur Eyes: Cinema and Photography in Nazi Germany is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. She has written a book on grey painting: The Truth is Always Grey: the Ambiguity of Modernist Painting, which is also forthcoming. Her works in progress include Industrial Views: Art, Industry and Identity in the Ruhr Valley, and she is concurrently writing her first novel. Frances lives in Paris.

IRENE LUSZTIG uses film and video to explore the production of historical memory, and her work has won numerous awards and screened around the world, at the MoMA, Boston’ s Museum of Fine Arts, at IDFA in Amsterdam, and on television in the U.S., Europe, and in Taiwan. She is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, and the New York State Council for the Arts. Irene received her B.A. in filmmaking and Chinese studies from Harvard, and completed her M.F.A. in film and video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College. She has worked as a freelance documentary editor and taught at Harvard, New York Institute of Technology, SUNY Purchase, and Temple University. She is currently a professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

DELPHINE SELLES-ALVAREZ was born and raised in France and came to the United States in 1989 to study. She completed a Master’s Degree in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research. She is currently in charge of film at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy where she promotes French and Francophone cinema and works closely with American film programmers and universities. She is particularly interested in the intersection between politics and cinema and the boundaries between documentary and fiction.

RICHARD SHPUNTOFF is a filmmaker from New York City, now living in Buenos Aires where he works as a translator in the film community and writes on Argentine and Latin American film for English-language film magazines. He is currently working on his first feature film, a documentary about the Annual Queens Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade and the murder of Julio Rivera.

JESSE TRUSSEL is a film programmer and writer based in Austin, TX. He was born in rural Texas and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated with a degree in Radio-Television-Film. He has worked at the Austin Film Festival since 2004 in various capacities, working in programming since 2006 overseeing the festival’s main feature and short film competitions, and moderating panels and discussions with such notable filmmakers as Oliver Stone and Danny Boyle. He also programs an outdoor summer film series. In 2009 he accepted a position at the film distributor B-Side Entertainment, working with festivals around the world. In addition, Jesse has produced documentary projects that have played the festival circuit and on public television. Additionally, he has served on several festival juries and writes the blog “I Prefer Your Earlier Work.”

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ROBERT E. CARGNI-MITCHELL works for a nonprofit film theater specializing in repertory, independent, and avant-garde film. He focuses on showcasing artistically significant and socially relevant motion pictures, and programs and screens masterpieces from around the world, rescuing many films from silent obscurity. Additionally, he is the projectionist and main tech-support for International House’s S.A. Ibrahim Theater, and is the Special Programs Curator for the America-Italy Society where his work includes initiatives focusing on new works of Contemporary Italian Cinema, Italian culture, and the Italian language.

PHALLY CHROY was born in Khao-Dang, a UNICEF/UNHCR refugee camp established along the Thai-Cambodia border in 1982. His family immigrated to South Philadelphia, an urban myriad landscape where refugees created communities and shared in similar circumstances. His work consists of experiencing and making documentaries about the Cambodian Diaspora in America and focuses on instigating a discussion of the displacement of culture. As a filmmaker, Phally carries two responsibilities: as a filmmaker who is trying to truthfully present the stories of the Cambodian Diaspora, and as a person of the Diaspora himself, who must navigate through the experience. The purpose of his work is to use media as a mechanism that can share in the understanding of experiences, particularly the placement of Cambodian refugees in America and their navigation of America.

VICKY FUNARI is a documentary filmmaker who directed and edited the award-winning feature documentaries Maquilapolis, Paulina, and Live Nude Girls Unite! Her short films include skin•es•the•si•a and Alternative Conceptions. Her work has screened in many of the world’ s most respected film festivals, including Sundance, Locarno, Havana, Rotterdam, and Tribeca. Her films have won numerous awards, including the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival; Lifetime Television’s Vision Award/Hamptons Film Festival; and Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Women’s International Film Festival of Barcelona. Her films have aired nationally on PBS, Cinemax, and the Sundance Channel. She is a Guggenheim fellow and a MacDowell Colony fellow. She currently teaches at Haverford College.

ELLEN KNECHEL is a filmmaker and an M.F.A. candidate in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University in Philadelphia. She grew up in the Midwest and New Jersey. She is currently working on a film that looks at aging and the back end of the consumer cycle, as she follows a family dealing with the logistics of helping an elderly parent to downsize. Her interest in making media initially grew out of two years spent working with a small, nonprofit organization in Honduras, and she continues to partner from time to time with the nonprofit sector in Philadelphia.

KEVIN MCGARRY is a curator and writer in New York. He is co-founder/director of Migrating Forms, a springtime festival at Anthology Film Archives exhibiting new moving-image work by filmmakers and visual artists in the context of the cinema. Previously he co-organized the New York Underground Film Festival (2006–08) and served as editor of Rhizome.org at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2005–06). Most recently he has written about art, film, and popular culture for Elizabeth Dee Gallery, the New York Times, and UCLA’s Hammer Museum, and presented screenings at BAMcinématek, Columbia University, and the Impakt Festival (Utrecht). He received a B.F.A. in film and television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently completing an interdisciplinary M.A. at European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.

SETH MULLIKEN is assistant professor at Villanova University, teaching sound production and web design. He holds a B.A. in Film from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. Originally from Kingston, Mass., he has been studying and making cinema for almost a decade, attempting to create a suture of theory and practice through his interest in production academic research. Seth’s scholarly interest is in sound studies, and he will doing a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media starting in Fall 2009, researching the role of sound in cinema as a constitutive force of subjectivity and representation.

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MEREDITH DRUM creates experimental cinema and journalistic documentaries which have screened at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Monkey Town, ArtPort Projects at Focus 09 during Art Basel, and other venues. Her work has been published online in the New York Times, T magazine, and Good magazine. In September 2008 she organized a three-night historical survey of avant-garde cinema made by women in the U.S. from 1940 to the present at ISSUE Project Room. In March 2009, in collaboration with Mary Billyou, she organized a six-hour screening of videos about U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern conflict for the Scope Art Fair. Meredith has also had poems and stories published in Ploughshares, Pierogi Press, and Insurance magazine. She is a graduate student within the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

MAX GOLDBERG is a regular film critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. He first studied film at Wesleyan University, where he wrote a thesis on the comedies of Preston Sturges. He has written for the Guardian since 2004, during which time he has also published pieces in Cinema Scope and Moving Image Source. Max’s current research interests include Heddy Honigmann’s interview films and the work of Bruce Baillie.

TOBY LEE is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and its relationship to its host city, looking at how public culture and its institutions mediate the collective experience of place. She also works in video, installation, performance, book arts, and collaborative research projects. Her projects draw from ideas and practices central to anthropology, often exploring the social experience of space, temporality, and history.

KELLY SHINDLER is a curator and writer based in Chicago, as well as a dual Master’s candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001. Since 2003, she has worked at Art21, as producer of the Peabody award-winning PBS documentary series, Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, where she is presently Director of Special Projects. Shindler is the co-founder/curator of the Package Deals film series. She has curated film and video for Australia Cinematheque, Oulu Music Video Festival in Finland, Scandinavia House, Sequences Festival in Reykjavik, CineWomen NY, and others. She also works with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s renowned experimental series, Conversations at the Edge. Shindler recently co-founded Refracted Lens, a new Chicago-based project exhibiting cutting-edge film, video, and new media work.

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