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Sujata Day

With her infectious personality and unique sense of humor, Pittsburgh native Sujata Day has established herself as a performer, creator, writer, and director. She regularly performs in Upright Citizen Brigade’s hit Asian AF show. Sujata is known for her starring role as CeCe in Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. She’s recurred for three seasons on HBO’s Insecure. Sujata is a Sundance Lab fellow, Sundance Film Festival influencer, and Sundance Collab advisor. Her short film, Cowboy and Indian, sold to a major studio for series development with Sujata writing, producing and starring. She served as HBO Visionaries Ambassador in 2019. She directs This Is My Story, a series in which beloved storyteller LeVar Burton narrates real life personal experiences of everyday racism. Sujata’s debut feature film, Definition Please, currently screens on the film festival circuit.

Niav Conty

(Writer, Director, DP, Producer, co-Editor) Niav’s films span darkly humorous investigations of the taboo, intimate and troubling coming-of-age portraits, and cutting-edge Machinima. She is an active freelance director, cinematographer, and editor in New York City. Her award-winning films have traveled to festivals worldwide and she is a recipient of the 2013 Princess Grace Award. She is currently working on a new feature, Person Woman Man Camera Tv slated for release in early 2021

David Liban

David Liban is the writer, producer, and director of A Feral World. He is both a filmmaker and a film professor at CU Denver’s College of Arts & Media. He is the Chairperson for the Dept of Film & TV. He holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and has been making independent films in a variety of genres for some years. He has been a Fulbright scholar and a prolific filmmaker of short-form films. His documentary Mortal Lessons won an Emmy in 2010. Over the years, his films have screened at numerous film festivals and television outlets.

April Wright

Jiayan “Jenny” Shi

Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old Chinese student full of optimism, comes to the U.S. to study. Within weeks of her arrival, she disappears from campus. Finding Yingying follows the search to unravel the mystery of her disappearance and seek justice while navigating a strange, foreign country.

Catherine Axley

Catharine Axley is a documentary filmmaker and editor who seeks stories of empowerment through subjects that defy expectations. Her films have played at festivals including the San Francisco International Film Festival, DOC NYC, Harlem International Film Festival, and the United Nations Association Film Festival. She was a Regional Finalist for the 2014 Student Academy Awards and an official nominee for the David L. Wolper Award at the 2015 International Documentary Association Awards. She holds an M.F.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. in History and Ethnicity, Race & Migration from Yale University.

Sarah Pirozek

Sarah Pirozek is an award-winning filmmaker with a fine arts background. She is a DGA member in good standing. Her short films, Confessions of a Girl Who Never Received a Visitation from the Sacred Heart, and Before and After French Kissing screened at the London International Film Festival. She has directed TV commercials and music videos, also broadcast TV (& Web content) as a director/producer/supervising producer for the Sundance Channel, MTV, VH1, PBS, HBO, NAT GEO, AMC the Discovery Channel and BBC Channel Four TV in London. 

Elegance Bratton

Elegance was thrown out of his mother’s home at the age of 16 in New Jersey for being gay. He spent the next 10 years homeless seeking refuge on Christopher Street and the New Jersey, Philadelphia metro areas. After ten years spent homeless, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps where he learned how to make films. Elegance’s award-winning short films have played in almost 150 film festivals world wide including Sundance, Outfest, and the American Black Film Festival.

Hanan Harchol

Born in Israel and raised in the United States, Hanan Harchol has been a public high school teacher in New York City for the past 12 years, teaching filmmaking to students who are for the most part socio-economically disadvantaged. “I made this film because I felt that often the portrayal of teachers on film and television was a comedic caricature of the profession. I wanted to show what teachers really go through and begin a discourse on how to better support teachers, and with that, how to better support our disadvantaged student population.” Hanan is a New York based teacher, filmmaker, animator, fine artist, and classical guitarist. About a Teacher is his first feature film.

Lizette Barrera

Lizette Barrera is a Chicana filmmaker based in Dallas/Ft.Worth with ties in Austin, TX. Her film Mosca (Fly) is currently in distribution with HBO. She was awarded The Filmmaker to Watch Award at the Women Texas Film Festival and the EBW by Sandra Adair cash grant from the Austin Film Society for her latest film Chicle (Gum), has World Premiered at SXSW. She has received her MFA in Film Production at The University of Texas at Austin and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington. She is represented by Inclusion Management.

Alexander L. Fattel

Alexander L. Fattal is a filmmaker, documentary artist, and assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University where he learned filmmaking in the Sensory Ethnography Lab. His first short Trees Tropiques is an immersive family portrait in the Amazon basin that explores small scale deforestation in Brazil. Trees Tropiques participated in Cannes Short Film Corner and other film festivals around the world. Limbo, Fattal’s second documentary short, is an experimental complement to his recent book Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2018). The film had its world premiere at the Official Selection at Sheffield Doc/Fest and MOMA PS1, the School for Visual Art in New York City, and the FICCI – Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena have shown work-in-progress screenings.