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.

Jason Benjamin was born in New York City and educated at The City University of New York. He received a BA in Sculpture and an MFA in Documentary film. He worked as a welder for 11 years and then became a boom operator. For the past 14 years, he has quietly observed a wide-ranging group of directors, actors and showrunners transform their stories from script to screen. SUITED is his directorial debut.

Mehrdad Oskouei is an Iranian filmmaker, producer, photographer and researcher born in Tehran in 1969 and later graduating in film direction from the University of Arts.  His films have been screened at numerous festivals both at home and abroad to great critical acclaim, making him one of the major Iranian documentary makers. In 2010 Oskouei received the Dutch Prince Claus Award for his achievements. He is a founding member of the Institute of Anthropology and Culture and has sat on several international film festival juries as well as being a cultural ambassador for the United Nation’s humanitarian committee UCHA. He also teaches at film schools around Iran and is active in the Tehran Arts and Culture Association.

Kristi Jacobson is an award-winning filmmaker whose films capture nuanced, intimate and provocative portrayals of individuals and communities. Her newest film, SOLITARY, an unprecedented look at life inside a supermax prison, will premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Jacobson’s film A Place at the Table, premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures in over 35 US cities. The film, which examines the shocking paradox of hunger in the wealthiest nation on earth through the very personal stories of three American families who face food insecurity daily, won the IDA’s prestigious Pare Lorentz Award and was nominated for Best Feature Documentary by the Producers Guild of America. Produced by Participant Media, the film is the cornerstone of a multi-year campaign to end hunger in the US.

Kate Trumbull-LaValle is an independent documentary filmmaker who first began in the field of social justice media as an educator and program coordinator for the Media Arts Center San Diego. She is associate producer for PBS's No Más Bebés (Los Angeles Film Festival, 2015) and is the director and producer of Ovarian Psycos (SXSW, 2016). In 2013 she co-founded Sylvia Frances Films with Joanna Sokolowski.

Joanna Sokolowski is an independent documentary filmmaker. She co-produced the film Very Semi Serious (Tribeca, 2015), and has worked as a producer at Walking Iris Media and Open Studio Productions. She formed Sylvia Frances Films with her filmmaking partner Kate Trumbull-LaValle in 2013 to producer their first feature: Ovarian Psycos (SXSW, 2016) .

After an award-winning career as a photojournalist, Maisie turned her attention to filmmaking. In 2014 her short film, T​he Last Clinic was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy, and she was listed as one of PDN InMotion’s 20 Emerging Artists to Watch in Film and Video. In 2012, her multimedia project, Half-Lives: Chernobyl Workers Now won an Overseas Press Club award. In 2010, her short film A ​Life Alone was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Most recently, she worked as a director of photography on MTV's documentary series, True Life.