Giles Duley was born in 1971 in London. After 10 years as an editorial photographer in the fashion and music industries in the United States and Europe, Duley now focuses on humanitarian projects, working with several respected charities to highlight lesser-known stories that deserve public attention and action. Although documenting challenging and sometimes horrific situations, Duley captures the strength of those who fight rather than succumb to adversity. In 2011, while on patrol in Afghanistan with the United States Army’s 75th Cavalry Regiment, Duley stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED). He lost both legs and an arm. Despite his injuries, Duley is again working as a photographer. His work has been exhibited and published worldwide in many respected publications, including Vogue, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, the Sunday Times, the Observer, and the New Statesman. 

Nadim Houry is deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division and director of the Beirut office. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Houry served as deputy counsel for the Volcker Commission, where he spent more than a year conducting fact-finding missions in the Middle East as part of the United Nations' corruption inquiry into the Oil-for-Food Programme. He is fluent in Arabic and French.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Zalmaï left the country after the Soviet invasion in 1979. He travelled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he became a Swiss citizen. Following his passion for photography, Zalmaï pursued combined studies at the School of Photography of Lausanne and the Professional Photography Training Center of Yverdon. In 1989, he began to work as a freelance photographer, traveling the world and eventually returning to Afghanistan, where he continues to document the plight of the Afghan people. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Time, the New Yorker, Harper's, and Newsweek. He has also worked for a number of nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime, and UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. 

Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch's Emergencies Director and an expert in humanitarian crises, is responsible for coordinating the organization's response to major wars and other human rights crises. A Belgian-born Stanford Law School graduate specializing in the laws of war, Bouckaert is a veteran of fact-finding missions to areas that include Lebanon, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Macedonia, Indonesia, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. 

Born in Ankara in 1978, Deniz Gamze Ergüven had a very cosmopolitan upbringing, between France, Turkey and the United States. A compulsive cinephile, she studied directing in Paris, after a BA in literature and an MA in African History at Johannesburg. Her graduation film, Bir Damla Su (Une goutte d'eau), screened at the Cannes Festival Cinefondation and won a Leopards of Tomorrow award at the Locarno Festival. Opening with a shot of a veiled woman blowing a bubble with chewing gum, the 19-minute short tells the story of a young Turkish woman (played by Deniz herself) rebelling against the patriarchal attitudes and authoritarianism of the men in her community. The story of an emancipation, Mustang is a powerful, female take on contemporary Turkey. Deniz Gamze Ergüven shot it around Inebolu in northern Turkey, 600 kilometers from Istanbul.

Nanfu Wang is an independent filmmaker based in New York City. Wang was born in a remote farming village in Jiangxi Province, China. After losing her father at the age of 12, Wang was forced to forgo formal education and take whatever work she could to support her family. Unable to afford high school, she studied at a vocational school until she secured work as a teacher at a primary school at the age of 16, teaching herself English during her spare time. Hooligan Sparrow is Wang’s feature debut. Wang is a recipient of the Sundance Documentary Fund and Bertha Britdoc Journalism Fund, and a Sundance and IFP supported filmmaker. 

Danae Elon graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 1995. Her first feature length documentary film was Another Road Home in 2004, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival, and was theatrically released in the US. In 2009 Danae was the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in Film.

Photographer and filmmaker Adam Sjöberg has traveled to over 40 countries covering conflict and natural disaster, design and architecture, beauty and suffering, light and darkness. His work is imbued with his unique personal touch – and an intimacy with his characters – and Adam’s voice as a storyteller has been recognized most recently as GOOD magazine’s GOOD 100 for storytelling. His projects have been featured by dozens of international outlets including BBC World News, WIRED magazine, PASTE Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and the CBS Evening News.

Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami was born in Tehran and studied filmmaking and animation in Tehran Art University. Her short documentary works include Pigeon Fanciers (2000), A Loud Solitude (2010), Born 20 Minutes Late (2010), Going Up the Stairs (2011), and the animated documentary Cyanosis (2007).

Matt Black is a photographer from California’s Central Valley. His work has explored themes of migration, farming, poverty and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico. Recent photo essays have been published inThe New Yorker, Mother Jones, and Vice Magazines.

He was named Time Magazine's Instagram photographer of the year in 2014 and is a contributor to the @everydayusa photographers’ collective. He has produced short films and multimedia pieces for msnbc.com, Orion Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has taught photography with the Foundry Photojournalism Workshops and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Anastasia Photo gallery in New York represents his fine prints. He is a nominee to Magnum Photos.

His work has been profiled by National Geographic, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Time and Slate, and has been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, World Press Photo, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Pictures of the Year International, the Alexia Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. He lives in Exeter, a small town in California’s Central Valley.