Chris Boeckmann is a freelance writer-programmer from Missouri. His story consulting credits include Procession (dir. Robert Greene, Netflix) and Mija (dir. Isabel Castro, Disney). He programmed at the True/False Film Fest from 2009-2020 and has written for Film Comment and Filmmaker Magazine. He is currently working on Subject, a long-term research project looking at the repercussions nonfiction films have on their participants.

Bentley Brown began making films while growing up in Chad. Working frequently on the subjects of international mobility, disidentification, and belonging, his past films include Oustaz (Berlinale 2016), First Feature (IFFRotterdam 2019), and Revolution From Afar (Mimesis 2020). Brown recently completed a PhD in Emergent Technologies and Media Art Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker whose works have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Whitechapel Gallery, Anthology Film Archive, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and more. Her writing has appeared in SciArt Magazine, Labocine, The Brooklyn Rail, High Country News, and Natural History magazine. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies & the Moving Image Arts and the Department of Critical Media Practices. She is co-founder and Co-Director of NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Keely Kernan is an award-winning freelance photographer and filmmaker who grew up in the Appalachian mountains. She has traveled extensively both nationally and internationally to produce work for a variety of media outlets and non-­profits. Her work focuses on topics such as the environment, the natural resources that we use daily, globalization, identity, and community.

Kernan has produced work for publications such as the Guardian and The Huffington Post, as well as, clients such as USAID West Africa Trade hub, CCTV Africa, the Global Shea Alliance, and The Indigenous Peoples Task Force. Her short films, long format work, and photography have screened and exhibited globally. These venues include the DC Environmental Film Festival, Carnegie Institution for Science, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Bright Lights Film Series partnering with MIT’s Women Take the Reel Film Festival, Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, Rio WebFest, New Media Festival, American Conservation Film Festival, Environmental Film Festival at Yale, Environmental Film Festival Australia, Oaxaca FilmFest, The Natural Resources Defense Council, and The Gordon Parks Museum, among others.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs brings an uncompromising feminist sensibility to a body of work spanning everything from Bruce Connor-informed found footage experiments to the reflective, essayistic approach of pieces like Your Day is My Night (2013) and Film About a Father Who (2020). Inquisitive, honest, and intimate, Sachs’ films subvert traditional concepts of chronology and narrative, approaching storytelling as a vehicle for empathy and an opportunity for self-discovery. Recognizing that performance and artificiality are unavoidable in film, Sachs highlights the process of creation, the essentiality of overlooked details and places, and her collaborative relationship with her documentary subjects to build what she describes as “a new kind of truth.” Sachs is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and a grantee of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, the New York State Council on the Arts, and MacDowell. Her films have been screened at museums and film festivals internationally, with recent retrospectives hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Walker Art Center, and others.

Sanaz Sohrabi (b.1988, Tehran) is a research-based artist and filmmaker, currently a Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture doctoral candidate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, Montréal. Sohrabi’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Iran Cinéma Vérité Festival (Winner of International Mid-length), IndieLisboa (Silvestre Section Best Short Film), Valdivia International Film Festival Chile (Special Jury Mention), Mimesis Documentary Film Festival (Best Documentary Short), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Jury Award), Montréal International Documentary Film Festival (RIDM), Sheffield Doc/Fest, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Centre Clark Montréal, and VIDEONALE 16. Sohrabi has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Transregional Academy at the American University of Beirut, and RAW Académie Senegal. Her doctoral research and practice examine the relationship between resource nationalism, image cultures of oil, and political economy of photography during the British controlled oil operations in Iran.