Nyasha is an award-winning pan-African director and cinematographer who tells stories that traverse the continent and reflect alternative voices. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School. In 2015, her first film 'Through the Fire' about a recovering drug-user facing the demons of his past won the Audience Choice Award for a short documentary at Atlanta Docufest. Her short documentary 'Queens & Knights' about a gay and inclusive rugby team won first prize at the 2016 NBC Sports film contest Cptr’d and premiered at South by SouthWest. In 2019, she wrote, filmed and produced 'Sex and the Sugar Daddy' an extensive multimedia piece on transactional sex relationships in Kenya which was a finalist for the One World Media Awards in the Popular Feature and Digital Media categories. Nyasha's latest work includes 'Le Lac' a virtual reality documentary which looks at the effects of climate change and the Boko Haram insurgency around Lake Chad. 'Le Lac' won the Digital Narrative Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest in 2019 and is currently on the festival circuit. And, her investigative documentary 'Imported for my Body' about cross-continental sex trafficking was shortlisted for the Amnesty Media Awards in 2020.

Erika Cohn is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning director/producer who Variety recognized as one of 2017’s top documentary filmmakers to watch and was featured in DOC NYC’s 2019 “40 Under 40.” Most recently, Erika completed THE JUDGE, a Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated film about the first woman judge appointed to the Middle East’s Shari’a courts, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS’ 2018 Independent Lens series. Erika co-directed/produced, IN FOOTBALL WE TRUST, an Emmy award-winning, feature documentary about young Pacific Islander men pursuing their dreams of playing professional football, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS’ 2016 Independent Lens series. She has received numerous accolades for her work, including a Director’s Guild of America award for her film, WHEN THE VOICES FADE, a narrative profile of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006, and has been a featured panelist/speaker at various film festivals and university conferences across the globe. Her work has been supported by IFP, the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Institute, Hot Docs, Sheffield, ITVS, Women in Film, BAVC and the CPB Producer’s Academy among others. Erika grew up attending the Sundance Film Festival as a native Utahn, where she first began her career. She studied at Chapman University (California) and Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and has degrees in Film Production, Middle East Studies, and Acting Performance. In 2013, Erika founded Idle Wild Films, Inc., which has released three feature documentaries and produced numerous branded content and commercial spots, including Gatorade’s “Win from Within” series, for which she received a 2016 Webby award nomination.

DAVID FRANCE, Director, is an Oscar®nominated filmmaker, bestselling author, and award-winning investigative journalist. His directorial debut, HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, is hailed as an innovative and influential piece of storytelling and is regularly screened in university classrooms, and bycommunity groups and AIDS service organizations. Appearing on over 20 “Best of the Year” lists, including Time and Entertainment Weekly, the documentary earned a GLAAD Award and top honors from the Gotham Awards, the International Documentary Association,the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the Provincetown Film Festival, among many others. HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE also garnered Oscar®and Emmy®nominations and a Peabody Award. His 2017 film, THE DEATH & LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON,received rave reviews and won numerous festival prizesincluding the Outfest “Freedom Award” and special jury recognition from Sheffield International Documentary Festival. David’s latest book, also titled HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (Knopf, 2016),received multiple awards including the Baillie Gifford Prize for best nonfiction book published in the English Language, and was named by Entertainment Weekly, Slate, and LitHub as one of the top books of the 2010s. In addition, France has seen his journalistic work inspire several films, including the Peabody-winning Showtime film SOLDIER’S GIRL, based on his New York Times Magazine story of the transgender girlfriend of a soldier killed in an anti-gay attack.

Mira Jargil is known for the award winning festival hit: "The Time We Have", the series "Till Death Do Us Part", and the feature documentary “Dreaming of a Family”. Both films have each won a prize for best documentary at the prestigious Danish Film Awards (Robert). Her new film, Reunited, premieres at CPH:DOX in 2020. Mira Jargil owns the Danish, critically acclaimed production company, Moving Documentary, together with director Christian Sønderby Jepsen.

Peter Murimi is a multiple award-winning Kenyan TV documentary director focusing on hard-hitting social issues, from extra-judicial killings to prostitution. He recently won the 2019 Rory Peck award for news feature camerawork. His first win was the CNN Africa Journalist of the year award for his intimate documentary about Female Genital Mutilation among his Kuria community, “Walk to Womanhood” (2004). Another ground-breaking project was the film “Slum Survivors” (2007) which won an award at the Czech Tur Ostrava film festival. Peter was a producer/ director for Al Jazeera's Africa Investigates strand exposing crime and corruption, including "Spell of the Albino" (2011) and "Zimbabwe's Child Exodus" (2011). "Kenya's Enemy Within" (2015), also for Al Jazeera, revealed the terror threat posed by homegrown al Shabaab Somali militants to Kenya. "I am Samuel" is his feature directorial debut, filmed verite style for five years in his home country of Kenya.

Ursula is a journalist-turned-filmmaker. She worked at The New York Times Op-Docs, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, Asia Pacific Forum on WBAI, StirTV, the Jax Show, Hyphen magazine and currently freelances as a film and television producer. Various producing credits include: One October, Tough Love, Wo Ai Ni Mommy, Spartan Ultimate Team Challenge, UFC Primetime. She directed, produced and shot the award-winning film, 9-Man: A Streetball Battle in the Heart of Chinatown, which aired on public television and was called an "absorbing documentary" by the New York Times. Down a Dark Stairwell is her second feature as a director. Ursula is a Brown Girls Doc Mafia board member and belongs to A-DOC and Film Fatales. She lives in the Bronx, NY.

Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya’s feature documentary, Coded Bias, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. She directed the season finale episode for the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, a series profiling trailblazing scientists transforming the future, Executive Produced by Ron Howard, broadcast globally in June 2017. Her debut feature film Catching the Sun, about the race for a clean energy future, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was named a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Catching the Sun released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo DiCaprio, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award for Best Documentary. Kantayya is a TED Fellow, a William J. Fulbright Scholar, and a finalist for the ABC Disney DGA Directing Program. She is an Associate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Maeve O’Boyle is an Emmy-award winning editor and producer. She edited The Education of Mohammad Hussein (HBO), which was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She co-produced and edited the Emmy-award-winning and 2014 IRE Award winning, Firestone and the Warlord (PBS). She also edited and co-produced Growing Up Trans (PBS), which won a DuPont Columbia award and co-wrote and edited Do I Sound Gay?, which premiered at TIFF and was awarded the runner up for People’s Choice Award. Other work includes Left of the Dial (HBO), Heat (PBS), 112 Weddings (HBO & BBC) and The Kids Grow Up (HBO), which premiered at IDFA and Full Frame and was awarded a special Jury prize at AFI Docs. She is currently co-directing and editing a feature documentary on the folk singer Joan Baez.

Lucy Kennedy is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. She directed four episodes of the Netflix investigative documentary series Rotten including Lawyers, Guns & Honey and The Avocado Wars. She was the commissioning producer for three years of the Emmy-award-winning investigative series, Fault Lines on Al Jazeera. Over that period she directed and commissioned for the series; directing credits include Death on the Bakken Shale, One Day in Charkh and American Sheriff. Other work includes Explorer (National Geographic), Frontline (PBS), Need to Know & Wide Angle (WNET) & Prime Time (RTE). She is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.