LISANDRO ALONSO is a young talentfrom Argentina who had his first feature La Libertad (2001) chosen for the Festival de Cannes (Un Certain Regard). Los Muertos (2004) and Fantasma (2006) were also invited to Cannes, premiering in the Director’s Fortnight.Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Lisandro Alonso studied at the Universidad del Cine (FUC) and co-directed in 1995 with Catriel Vildosola his first short film Dos En La Vereda (1995). After working as assistant sound engineer in many short films and a few features and as assistant director of Nicolas Sarquis for his film Sobre La Tierra, Lisandro Alonso returned to directing, making his first feature. In 2003 he founded 4L, a production company based in Buenos Aires, to produce his own films.

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BENJ GERDES is an artist, writer, and organizer working in film, video, and several other public formats. He frequently works in collaboration with other artists, activists, and theorists, including as a member of 16 Beaver Group. He is interested in intersections of political discourse, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His individual and collaborative work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes through historical research, dialogue, and participatory or aleatory formalizations. Gerdes’ work has been exhibited widely in both traditional venues and emerging platforms, with the former including Kiasma Musuem of Modern Art (Helsinki), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), Guangzhou Triennial (China), Luleå Biennial (Sweden), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), REDCAT Gallery (Los Angeles), Images Festival (Toronto), Art in General (New York), the New Museum (New York), and Migrating Forms (New York); and the latter more often including public performances and programs, web platforms, broadcast television, and books and publications such as October, The Journal of Aesthetics + Protest, Ninth Letter, and Rethinking Marxism. He is the recipient of numerous residencies, including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Woolworth Building Workspace Residency and Visual Arts Network (VAN) Exhibition Residency, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, and the Experimental Television Center. He has taught and lectured in numerous institutions and public contexts, including recently three years as Visiting Artist in the Cinema Department at Binghamton (State University of New York). He currently serves on the video faculty at the Cooper Union School of Art.

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PEDRO GONZÁLEZ-RUBIO is a Mexican filmmaker born in Brussels. His initiation to visual arts came at the age of 16 while living in New Delhi. He studied media in Mexico before attending the London Film School. He worked as a cinematographer on the film Born Without (2007) by Eva Norvind. His directorial debut, Toro Negro (2005, co-director), received several awards including the Horizontes Award for best Latin American film from the San Sebastian Film Festival. ALAMAR is his feature film debut, which nonetheless remains true to real life.

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JENNIFER HAYASHIDA is currently a 2009 Fellow in Poetry through the New York Foundation for the Arts. Additionally, she is the recipient of a PEN Translation Fund Grant, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and residencies through, among others, the MacDowell Colony and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is the translator of Fredrik Nyberg's A Different Practice (UDP, 2007) and Eva Sjödin's Inner China (Litmus, 2005); Poems and translations have appeared in journals including Salt Hill, The Chicago Review, Calque, Harp and Altar, Circumference, The Literary Review, Insurance, The Asian Pacific American Journal, and Action, Yes. Her collaborative and individual work in art and media has been shown widely in the U.S. and abroad, including venues and festivals such as Artists Space (New York), the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (New York), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Migrating Forms (New York), the Luleå Biennial (Sweden), SPACES (Cleveland), the Images Festival (Toronto), and REDCAT (Los Angeles). Her fields of interest include representations of the immigrant subject within the welfare state, cross-genre literary forms, experimental documentary practices, and Asian American community activism. She is presently the Acting Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

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AKOSUA ADOMA OWUSU, a Virginia born Ghanaian filmmaker and artist, is an alumna of the University of Virginia where she earned a Distinguished BA degree in Media Studies and Fine Art. She went on to enroll at the California Institute of the Arts in the MFA program of Film & Video and Fine Art. Inspired by her bi-national identity and West African griot folklore, she uses auteur filmmaking style to insert herself in the tradition of African storytelling. In 2008, her thesis film, Me Broni Ba (My White Baby) gained the attention at high profile festivals worldwide, including BFI London, Cannes, MoMA, Visions du Reel, and numerous others. It won Best Documentary prizes at Chicago Underground and Athens Film & Video Festival in 2009. She worked as a Development and Production intern at Echo Lake Productions (the Producer’s of Tsotsi) and at HBO Films. She was awarded an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences grant to provide post-production assistance on Chris Rock’s critically acclaimed documentary, Good Hair. She is also an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2008. Owusu is currently editing a short film entitled, Body Waving II: White Afro and developing a script for fiction film about a Ghanaian prostitute and her young albino daughter in which Owusu explores the politics of appearance and the persecution of albinos in African societies. She lives and works in Ghana and the US.

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EUGENIO POLGOVSKY (Mexico City, 1977) studied film directing and cinematography at the CCC Film School. His first documentary,Tropic of Cancer, screened at numerous film festivals around the world including Cannes and Sundance. In 2004, Polgovsky received the National Youth Award in Mexico. He has worked as a cinematographer in a number of documentary, narrative feature, and visual arts projects. In 2008, he directed, photographed and edited Los Herederos (The Inheritors), a documentary about the children who work in the Mexican countryside. The film premiered at the 65th Venice International Film Festival and was the first documentary invited to participate in the competition section Generation Kplus at the Berlin Film Festival. Polgovsky is currently working on a documentary about children suffering from parasitic infections in Africa, which will be part of a campaign to combat this widespread health problem.

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URUPHONG RAKSASAD was born in 1977 to a farming family in the district of Terng - 60 kilometers from Chiang Rai, northern part of Thailand. He came to Bangkok for the first time when he was 18 to further his study at Thammasat University's Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communications, where he majored in film and photography. After graduation in 2000, he had worked as a film editor and post-production supervisor for several Thai feature films. Since 2004, he quietly left the industry and has tried to achieve his grassroots filmmaking through the story from his home village.

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LUCY RAVEN is an artist based in New York. Her new movie China Town, an experimental photo animation about global copper production, is currently screening at art and film spaces around the country, including MOMA, Mass MoCA, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Raven has been a resident artist with The Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Atlantic Center. She is currently organizing an exhibition called Nachblachen to open at the Goethe Institute in May. She is founding editor, along with Rebecca Gates, of The Relay Project audiomagazine, is Contributing Editor of BOMB Magazine, and is Managing Editor of Bidoun.

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ALEX RIVERA is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer premiered at Sundance 2008, and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has also been screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, the Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other international venues.

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MIKA ROTTENBERG was born in Buenos Aires in 1976, and holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2000) and an MFA from Columbia University (2004). She lives and works in New York City. She has had solo exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens (2004); Le Case d'Arte, Milan (2004 and 2005); Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (2008 and 2006); Maison Rouge in Paris (2009); and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2006). Her exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Irresistible Force, Tate Modern, London (2007); The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007); Uncertain States of America: American Art in the Third Millennium (multiple venues, 2005-2006); New Work/New Acquisitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005) and Greater New York 2005, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. She has participated in the 2nd Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina (2009), the Moscow Biennial (2007), the Herzliya Biennial , and the Busan Biennial (2006). In 2004 she was awarded a grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and in 2006 she became the first recipient of the Cartier Award in conjunction with the Frieze Art Fair. Her work is currently on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao. She has upcoming exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010), Mary Boone Gallery (in collaboration with Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, 2010); de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2011), and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2011).

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KAZUHIRO SODA was born in Ashikaga, Japan in 1970 and has lived in New York since 1993. His first feature observational documentary CAMPAIGN (2007) was world-premiered at Berlin Film Festival (Forum). Its 52-minute version was broadcast in almost 200 countries, including on PBS in the US, winning the Peabody Award in 2009. His second feature observational documentary, MENTAL won the best documentary award at Pusan International Film Festival and at Dubai International Film Festival in 2008. It has also won Special Jury Mention at Miami International Film Festival 2009, Outstanding Documentary Award at Hong Kong International Film Festival 2009, and Inter-religious Jury Prize at Visions du Reel 2009. He is currently working on THEATER (working title), an observational documentary about an influential playwright/theater director Oriza Hirata and his company Seinendan. This fall, he is planning to premiere a new documentary PEACE. He is also an author of a book MENTAL ILLNESS AND MOSAIC (Chuohoki Publishing). He holds BA from Tokyo University and BFA from the School of Visual Arts.

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ZHAO DAYONG graduated from China’s Lu Xun Art Academy in 1992, where he specialized in oil painting, Zhao worked for a number of years as a professional artist and advertising director, first in Beijing and later in Guangzhou. In 1997, he found Guangzhou Dake, a design company. He was also founding editor of Culture & Morals, a now deceased journal for the contemporary arts in China. Zhao began exploring the medium of digital video in 2002. His first documentary film, Street Life, premiered at Austria’s Viennale in October 2006, and screened the next year at Germany’s Globale Film Festival and China’s YunFest. Zhao’s second documentary film, Ghost Town, a collage of stories that take place in the former government seat of Zhiziluo in remote northwestern Yunnan province, was given an Independent Spirit Award at the 5th China Documentary Film Festival held in Beijing in May 2008.

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NAOMI UMAN grew up in suburban New York, in a small town on the Hudson River. She attended the Culinary Institute of America and worked in the kitchen for many years. After a brief period in Spain, she returned to New York City, and studied experimental film with the then curator of film/video at the Whitney Museum, John Hanhardt. She later attended the California Institute of the Arts, where creative expression and critical thinking were the cornerstones to strong filmmaking. Uman is currently living in the Ukraine, in order to explore a world left behind by her great-grandparents, and to experience immigration first hand. During her time there, she has completed several films in a cycle called The Ukrainian Time Machine, and continues living there, working the land, making paintings, creating an artists residency program and working on a videodiary piece. Her work has screened at Sundance and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, The New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film festival among others; she has also screened her work at The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney, and The Smithsonian.

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