Galloway’s films explore the intersections of institutional power, civil & human rights, and political activism — with a particular focus on the American justice system. In addition to THE RETURN, her recent work includes the critically acclaimed feature documentary EL POETA (PBS VOCES, 2015) – an examination of the international drug war through the eyes of Mexican poet turned international protest leader Javier Sicilia; ERIC & ANNA, a post-911 love story featuring a teen FBI informant and a question of entrapment (The Interept/Field of Vision, 2015); A RIDE HOME FROM PRISON, a brief meditation on what it means to “reenter” life outside prison after decades behind bars (NYT Op-Docs, 2015) and several short format series.  THE RETURN (2016, with Duane de la Vega) completes her triptych of feature length documentaries on the American criminal justice and mass incarceration systems for the acclaimed national independent film series P.O.V., which also broadcast BETTER THIS WORLD (2011, with Duane de la Vega) — the story of two young men charged with domestic terrorism and their relationship with a radical mentor and undercover FBI informant and PRISON TOWN, USA (2007, with Po Kutchins) which looks at the impact of the prison building boom on rural America. Prior to her work for POV Galloway produced and reported an award-winning trio of films on the justice system for PBS FRONTLINE including SNITCH, THE CASE FOR INNOCENCE and REQUIEM FOR FRANK LEE SMITH (2001). A two-time Sundance Fellow, HBO/Film Independent Documentary Fellow and recent Filmmaker in Residence at UC Berkeley Journalism School’s Investigative Reporting Program, Galloway has won the Writer’s Guild of America’s Best Documentary Screenplay Award, Gotham Independent’s Best Documentary Award, four national Emmy nominations, Best Documentary Awards at San Francisco International, Tribeca, Sarasota and other top film festivals. Galloway holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley with a focus on Political Behavior and Public Law and a M.S. in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has taught documentary production, history and theory at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and at UC Berkeley’s Department of Media Studies. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and four sons.

Loteria founder DUANE DE LA VEGA‘s documentaries have screened at film festivals worldwide, opened theatrically and broadcast nationally on POV/PBS and the Documentary Channel. Her work has received the Writer’s Guild of America’s Best Documentary Screenplay Award, Gotham Independent Film’s Best Documentary Award, Tribeca Audience Award and multiple national Emmy nominations. Duane de la Vega’s film BETTER THIS WORLD won Best Documentary Feature at SFIF and Sarasota Film Festival, received an IDA Creative Achievement award and was selected to screen at NY MoMA’s documentary fortnight. MONUMENTAL screened at the Lincoln Center, was acquired by the Smithsonian for its permanent collection, EL POETA called “dramatic and inspiring” by the LA Times broadcast on PBS’s Voces. She has produced short format work for The New York Times, Mother Jones, IFC and Discovery, among others. A Sundance & HBO/Film Independent Fellow, she has guest lectured at various universities and taught Documentary Forms at UC Berkeley.

"The process of creating a frame to me is always a very personal one. It cannot be separated from your own personal taste, opinions, or agenda. However, it is only a frame. The content within this frame is very often the result of a collaboration of more people than only the filmmaker and his initial agenda. Of course, I as a filmmaker always do have a certain vision in my mind and I try to achieve this vision. But especially when making a documentary I have to keep an open mind to what my counterpart might bring to the table. Only by being able to react to what happens during the process of filming can I create something real and refrain from creating some sort of egocentric propaganda piece.”

—Farid Eslam | Director, Yallah Underground

Dan Archer is the founder of Empathetic Media, a VR, AR and graphic journalism production agency specializing in immersive storytelling. His work has been published among others by the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Washington Post, American Public Media, Vice and Fusion, covering topics from the Colombian peace process to homelessness in NYC, life in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh and human trafficking in Nepal. Through Empathetic he also created the first augmented reality coverage of the Freddie Gray trials being held in Baltimore through Empathetic's mobile app, ARc stories. He is currently researching the metrics of empathy in VR journalism at the Tow Center at Columbia University, was a 2014 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow at the University of Missouri and a 2011 Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. @empatheticmedia www.empatheticmedia.com

Marcelle Hopkins is a journalist and VR filmmaker specializing in human rights and humanitarian crises. She directed, wrote and co-produced a virtual reality documentary on South Sudan for the PBS series FRONTLINE and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. On the Brink of Famine premiered on Facebook 360 and Oculus in March 2016. In 2015, she received a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and a Social Justice Media Fellowship from the Made in NY Media Center by IFP. In 2014, Marcelle wrote and produced an interactive documentary on Sri Lanka’s recovery from civil war, which won a UN Foundation Prize and a Horizon Interactive Award. Follow Marcelle at @marcellehopkins

Francesca Panetta is a multi-award winning sound artist and journalist. She works for the Guardian as a Special Projects Editor leading on projects which innovate in storytelling. Working with journalists and multimedia producers, developers and designers, she has commissioned and directed flagship pieces such asFirestorm, The Shirt on Your Back, the View from the Shard, The First World War: an interactive multilingual interactive documentary. In addition to her work at the Guardian, Francesca works as a sound artist specialising in binaural sound design and non-linear storytelling, usually in physical landscapes. Francesca talks around the world about digital storytelling and innovation in audio.

Lina Srivastava is a strategist who works in narrative design, social innovation, and storytelling for human rights and international development. She is the founder CIEL, a social innovation strategy group in New York City. Lina has worked with social impact organizations around the world including UNESCO, the World Bank Institute, AARP, UNICEF, the Rockefeller Foundation, Apne Aap, Shine Global, and Donor Direct Action. The creator of the “transmedia activism” framework, Lina has worked with impact campaigns for several documentaries, including Oscar-winning Born into Brothels, Emmy-nominated The Devil Came on Horseback, Oscar-winning Inocente, and Sundance Film Festival and Social Impact Media Award-winning Who Is Dayani Cristal? She has produced Priya’s Shakti, an augmented-reality comic book concerning gender-based violence in India, is the interactive producer for the forthcoming Traveling While Black, and works with Lakou Mizik, a music project in Haiti. A former attorney and nonprofit executive director, Lina is on faculty in the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Design and Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts.   

Francesca Panetta is a multi-award winning sound artist and journalist. She works for the Guardian as a Special Projects Editor leading on projects which innovate in storytelling. Working with journalists and multimedia producers, developers and designers, she has commissioned and directed flagship pieces such as Firestorm, The Shirt on Your Back, the View from the Shard, The First World War: an interactive multilingual interactive documentary. In addition to her work at the Guardian, Francesca works as a sound artist specialising in binaural sound design and non-linear storytelling, usually in physical landscapes. Francesca talks around the world about digital storytelling and innovation in audio.

Sam Gregory helps people use the power of the moving image and participatory technologies to create human rights change. He is Program Director of WITNESS (www.witness.org), the leading organization supporting millions of people to use video for human rights; he also teaches on human rights and participatory media at the Harvard Kennedy School. Sam has worked on impactful campaigns worldwide and created many training programmes and teaching texts. He leads WITNESS’ work on the award-winning ObscuraCam and CameraV tools and helped co-found the global Video4Change network. In 2010 he was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident on the future of video-based advocacy, in 2013 he was a Future for Good Fellow at the Institute for the Future looking at the power of immersive advocacy and in 2015, he launched the ‘Mobil-Eyes Us’ initiative focused on combining the experience of live and immersive video with smart task-routing within networks to drive more meaningful and useful global activism. Follow Sam at @samgregory or blog.witness.org/samgregory.

Born in 1972 in El Salvador, Tatiana Huezo moved to Mexico City at age five. A graduate of the prestigious Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC), she's the recipient of the Gucci/Ambulante award, a grant established in 2007 to support new and established Mexican documentarians. Huezo has taught documentary film at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. THE TINIEST PLACE is her first feature-length documentary.