Director and Photographer Zaradasht Ahmed is a Kurdish/Norwegian Filmmaker. He was born and raised in Northern Iraq. His previous work includes the award-winning “Road to Diyarbakir”, and he has many years of experience working with documentary filmmaking in the Middle East, North-Africa, and Asia, as well as training local people in documentation. His latest film on the topic of illegal immigration to Europe (for SVT Swedish Television) – “Fata Morgana”, has been screened at several prestigious Film festivals.

Raoul Peck’s complex body of work includes feature narrative films like The Man by the Shore (Competition Cannes 1993), Lumumba (Director’s Fortnight, Cannes 2000, bought and aired by HBO), Sometimes in April (HBO, Berlinale 2005), Moloch Tropical (Toronto 2009, Berlin 2010) and Murder in Pacot (Toronto 2014, Berlin 2015). His documentaries include Lumumba, Death of a Prophet (1990), Desounen (1994, BBC) and Fatal Assistance (Berlinale,Hot Docs 2013) which was supported by the Sundance Institute and Britdoc Foundation (UK) and broadcast on major TV channels (Canal+, ARTE, etc.) In 2001, Human Rights Watch awarded him with the Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award. He recently completed shooting his latest feature film, The Young Karl Marx, a European coproduction, shot in Germany and Belgium.

Ben Lear graduated from NYU in 2010 with a degree in music composition. As his senior recital, Lear wrote and performed his folk-opera, Lillian, about a man, who travels to the great pacific garbage patch to reclaim all he’s lost, with a 20-piece orchestra and light show. Upon the album’s release, he partnered with Plastic Pollution Coalition and 5Gyres to raise awareness for plastic pollution. This work has led Lear to performances at TED and the UN. As a result of shooting this film, Ben sits on the advisory board of InsideOUT Writers and is an ally member within the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, teaching a weekly writing class within the Compound and mentoring former juvenile offenders upon reentry.

The Nest Collective are a small army of thinkers, makers, and believers. They use film, visual arts, music, and fashion to dissect and subvert how Africans are seen and unseen, what they can and cannot do, where they can and cannot go, and what they can and cannot say.

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.