Adesola ‘Des’ Thomas is a queer Nigerian-American TV writer, playwright, and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her reverence for dramedy, afrofuturism, and solarpunk writing developed during her adolescence in the boondocks of ethnoburban Georgia, where she divided her quality time between queers punks in the Atlanta DIY (do-it-yourself) music scene and her charismatic African Christian~Muslim polygamist immigrant family. In the words of Larry David, what a combo. Through her TV writing, Adesola aspires to create compelling, genre television that celebrates the particularities, bliss, slowness, warmth that pools through Black lives across the diaspora. She is especially keen to capture ...

Brit Fryer is a Brooklyn-based director and producer. His films focus on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and his work includes Caro Comes Out, Across, Beyond, and Over, and trans·ience. He is an alum of the Creative Culture Fellowship and the Sundance Ignite Fellowship. He is currently in GLAAD’s Equity in Media and Entertainment Initiative and the Gotham and HBO Documentary Films Documentary Development Initiative ...

Génesis Mancheren Abaj (b. 1992, they/them) is a Queer, Kaqchikel actor and filmmaker, born and raised in New York City. As a screenwriter and director, they are interested in exploring Kaqchikel contemporary stories that include the supernatural, the surreal and the absurd. Génesis completed their first short film called Terrible Angel in November of 2022, in which a young woman is reunited with one of her ancestors that guides her into the afterlife through a ritual of care. Upon graduating from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2017, they have worked extensively within film. Their written, produced and edited work ...

Ireashia M. Bennett is a storyteller, filmmaker, and writer whose work aims to create worlds, and document moments, where Black queer, disabled folks can exist in ease, complexity, and pleasure. Their work takes the form of new media, short and experimental films, as well as written and multimedia essays. They are a recipient of the two-year RaD Lab + Outside the Walls fellowship at Threewalls and the SPARK Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition. Their artistic work has been exhibited in art spaces such as the Sullivan Galleries, Arts Incubator, Stony Island Arts Bank, and Chicago Art Department in Chicago ...

Ley Comas is a production sound mixer and educator and serves as an Adjunct Professor at Temple University. Their work as a filmmaker of trans experience is grounded in collaborating in the creation of films that highlight and empower the narratives of historically erased identities ...