WFA 2021 Directors Spotter Sheet

William Mark McCullough, part Native American, who works as an actor, director, writer and producer, has been directed by Academy Award winners and acted opposite many stars: Glenn Close in the Ron Howard drama Hillbilly Elegy; Tom Cruise in American Made; Channing Tatum in the Steven Soderbergh comedy Logan Lucky; and Mahershala Ali in Free State Of Jones. He earned his degrees from Mercer and American University. Mark and his partner, Alexis Nelson, founded Fort Argyle Films.

Naddine Madell is a producer, director and writer. She has produced or directed several short form projects: Computer Potato (2013), Consolation Prize (2014), Who is Riley Oakes? (2015), The Parent Council (2018), nominated for Best Web Series at the 2018 AMPIA awards, and ageLESS (forthcoming). As a writer she has been nominated for and won several screenwriting awards and works as an AD and Production Coordinator. A Wicked Eden is her feature-length film debut as a director and producer.

Emiliano Sette is the scriptwriter of the series "The clown Plim Plim, a Hero of the Heart" aired by Disney Junior for 22 countries in Latin America, Discovery Familia USA, and Itay. He is the winner of the Martin Fierro 2012 Award for Best Children's Cable Program.Raúl Koler is the director of the animated short film "Reflejos", winner of the Infancias Awards. He is also the director, screenwriter and executive producer of "Anacronte", a CGI 3D animated short film that has won more than 130 festivals and more than 350 selections worldwide.

Emma Jordan is a Washington-based stop-motion animator whose fascination in bringing the inanimate to life led her to study at Arts University Bournemouth, where she formed her crude and creepy style while living across the street from the grave of Mary Shelley. She believes that the best art is the kind that finds elegance and beauty within disturbing ideas, and hopes her work can achieve this effect one day.

Jitendra Rai has built an excellent reputation in the theatre community in Mumbai. He has worked extensively with NGOs that are related to children's issues and is highly active in conducting theatre workshops with children. He has worked as an assistant director on films including Stanley Ka Dabba, Hawaa Hawaai (with Amol Gupte) and Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (with Vishal Bhardwaj). Jitendra is a gifted visualizer and has written many films, of which Baitullah is very close to his heart.

Big Girl is Alyssa Cartee's award-winning directorial debut. As a senior producer/editor on the creative team at Newsy, she recently produced the creative and promotional work for A Broken Trust, a documentary about the lack of justice for Native American sexual assault victims. She studied Journalism at Mizzou's J-School and spent four years in commercial post production. Alyssa is a co-founder of Brazen NYC.

Måns Berthas was born in Sundsvall, a small town in Sweden. From his early years he had a strong interest in film, literature and music. He started to direct short films with a borrowed VHS camera. Måns has worked within different genres and he has directed number of award-winning documentaries and shorts. In 2015, he directed "Champion", which debuted at Göteborg Film Festival. He also directed "Bitchboy" and "Vila i frid (Rest in Peace)" 2016. "Bitchboy" had its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2016 and was awarded with the Special Jury Mention. In 2017, Måns directed "A Swedish Classic" and in 2018 "Isle of Capri". Bottleneck (2019) is his latest short work.​

M. Rowan Meyer is a NYC-based screenwriter/producer. In 2020, his period pilot Lemonlight won Best Comedy at the Austin Film Festival, his religious pilot Cloistered received a staged reading at Sundance, his animated series Chlora & Phyll was optioned, and he released his self-produced medical pilot Patient. He was awarded ISA's "Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch" in 2021. Rowan is currently In pre-production for his short comedy Diving In which received funding after winning the "Emerging Screenwriters Shoot Your Short" Grand Prize.

After a master degree of cinema at Roma Tre and at the Sorbonne and INA in Paris, Mathilde Babo directed the two short films, Même Pas Peur and After the Spring. She has directed work for Arte and RTBF. The Swiss-Belgian filmmaker Zoé Rossion has directed several award-winning films and radio documentaries which have been selected in numerous festivals worldwide and broadcast on various tv/radio channels. Her work mainly deals with social and postcolonial issues.

Gagandeep Kalirai is a director and animator who identifies as a member of the diaspora. After graduating in Animation from the University for the Creative Arts, Gagandeep went on to win the Limelight film award for Best Student Documentary for her animated short Another Girl. Passionate about combining animation and documentary, Gagandeep aims to bring light to issues within ethnic communities that the wider audience is rarely privy to.

Cops Are(n’t) Colorblind was collectively directed, filmed, and edited by students in the Educational Video Center’s Youth Documentary Workshop. These students were Temis Anthony Cantos, Demitrius Doward, Nyla Cepeda, Laye (Dany) Diakite, Geordy (Geo) Eduardo Mejia, Niaja L. Nazario, Diana Pagan, Jhonatan St. Phard, Taliya Hughes, Mikey Rosa, Moesha Martinez, and Shaniya Fletcher. At the time of the making of the film, they attended high schools across New York City, including Cascades High School, Lower East Side Prep, City-As-School, Brownsville Academy, and Independence High School.

Jörgen Scholtens is an actor and movie director. After five years of acting in different Dutch movies and television shows he gathered a film crew to make his first short movie. His film Masterclass was announced one of the best 48hour-films worldwide in 2018 and was screened at the Cannes Festival in 2019. In 2019, Jörgen made his first film with a fair budget. This resulted in the film Cuckoo!, which was selected in the Dutch Film Festival as one of the best debut films.

Tammy Hineline is a Marine Corps veteran and freelancer. She spent nine years in the USMC as a Combat Photographer/Videographer and has worked on multiple projects from small news packages to large productions featuring Medal of Honor Recipients and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Her film work has gotten awards in several competitions including the GI Film Festival, Military Videographer of the Year, and from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.

Deco Farkas is an artist, animator and muralist from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Danica Gabriele is a director, writer and actor who loves classic literature, history, weaving original stories and twisting familiar tales. She is set to complete her Master’s Degree in Text and Performance (a joint program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and Birkbeck, University of London) this year.

Iván Löwenberg has been a grant holder of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts twice, and won the Hubert Bals Fund to develop his debut film, La castración (2011), which later won Best Foreign Language Film at the Winter Film Awards in 2013. His last short film Encounter (2019), won at Morelia Films Fest, was nominated for the Mexican Academy Awards and qualified to be considered for the Oscars. He is currently post-producing his second feature film.

Mateo Willis is a BAFTA and Emmy award-winning filmmaker, working in documentaries, commercials and drama. His career began as a cinematographer on landmark documentary series including the BBC’s Human Planet, Planet Earth 2 & Blue Planet 2 and Our Planet for Netflix. He transitioned into directing and has since made films for National Geographic and Netflix. He is based in the UK. Eulogy is Mateo’s first drama.

Victor Hollingsworth is an award-winning character actor adept at both drama and comedy. Also a writer, director and producer, Hollingsworth heads up Speed Monkey Studios, a Nashville-based film and video production company.

Alan Coulson wrote two new Judge Dredd movies based on the 2000AD comic book character and has written novel adaptations and original screenplays for producers worldwide. He has directed over 30 music promos, as well as live events and short films and directed the slow motion sequences in the hugely successful film Gone Fishing. After directing his first feature film Ashes, he is now preparing his second feature Forgotten about a man trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Jordana Valerie Allen-Shim is a Toronto-born, U.S.-raised award-winning writer, director, and editor of Korean and Jewish descent whose work has been featured in over 115 film festivals around the globe. She is also a dog mom, She-Ra and ABBA superfan, and aspiring graphic novelist. Her life goal is to dismantle capitalism but she is also intent on telling bold, disruptive stories about queer women and non-binary people of color.

Takeshi Yashiro joined Taiyo Kikaku Co., Ltd., a Japanese TV-CM production, after graduating from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1993. He has worked as a director mainly for commercial films and is one of the top "stop motion" animation specialists. He not only directs but also creates the art and sets by himself. He especially likes creating hand-made, story-telling pieces.

Yiru Chen film director, poet. She graduated from NYU Tisch of School of the Arts with a major in Film and Television Production and minors in Psychology and American Sign Language. She is pursuing her master’s degree at Columbia University, Teachers College for Deaf/Hard of Hearing Education. Her films have a unique style and they always incorporate the explorations of humanity, culture, as well as the connections between the civil and universal emotions.

Vivian Papageorgiou has a degree in Cinema Studies from Athens University, a Master’s degree in Cinema from Nouvelle Sorbonne Paris III, Cinema Directing from Stavrakos Cinema School, English Literature from Aristotle University and Interior Design from Dimitrelis School of Arts. She is a Sarajevo Film Festival talent alumni (2016) and her script Hansel was at the Pitch. In 2018, her script Lost & Found won the Greek Film Academy Award. She is working at the University of Athens and is in script development of a feature documentary.

Pablo Vara is the writer and director of one of the segments of the feature film Al Final Todos Mueren, starring among others Manuela Vellés (Caótica Ana), Javier Botet (Mamá), Macarena Gómez (Carne De Neón) and Miguel Ángel Muñoz (Al Salir De Clase). He won the award for best webseries for Segunda clase and won the Calle 13 Award for his short film Teen Wars. Pablo is also known on the Internet for creating emblematic characters such as Captain Galaxy and Jack Peligro.

Matan Portnoy is a filmmaker based in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2020, Matan graduated from the Screenwriters Program of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. In 2018, Matan was hired by the IDF Spokesperson's unit to direct a celebratory music video for Israel's 70th Independence Day. The video hit 6 million views. Entropy, narrative short written and directed by Matan was selected and screened in 15 festivals around the world and won awards in 5 festivals.

Mathilde Brandi is a young Danish upcoming filmmaker with an immense eye for visual storytelling and an ambitious approach to documentary filmmaking on a budget. Together with a strong all-female production team, she has created Hear Me Out as a compelling short documentary that investigates how much we can change just by giving people an opportunity to use their voice. Mathilde Brandi has a degree in Film and Media studies from the University of Copenhagen.

Morad is an Egyptian Filmmaker, born in 1988 in Cairo, Egypt. He studied film directing at Cinema Palace in 2008. He started his career as an assistant director and his last film as an assistant was Ayten Amin’s Souad which has been selected in the official selection in Cannes Film Festival 2020. Morad began his directing career in 2019 when he wrote and directed his first short film Henet Ward that had its world premiere at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

Katherine Sweetman is an artist, filmmaker and media technologist with work distributed in major film festivals; broadcast on major TV outlets including Cox, Brighthouse Networks and Time Warner; shown in galleries and museums including The Getty Center, Los Angeles. Katherine has an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a second MFA in Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

Award-winning filmmaker Dan Schaefer makes his directorial narrative debut with Highland Home – a music video and short film based on an original song by Kurt Rosenberg, for which Schaefer also created the film’s story. Previously, Dan has directed several documentaries including popular sports doc Mania, about the Portland Trailblazers, and Figaro! Living in the Moment of a Character, about two music schools brought together for Amadeus Mozart's comic opera.

Bhulla Beghal is an artist/filmmaker based in Birmingham, United Kingdom. His emerging style is a sense of fragility and delicacy which has been applied to social impact projects focusing on end-of-life care, domestic abuse, and in this case, the 2020 lockdown.

Volodymyr Vlasenko is a film director from Ukraine. He is a multi-disciplined visual artist using innovative technologies, techniques and tools to tell engaging and emotional stories. Among his audiovisual works are Somewhere (2013), Story of R32 (2014) and One Who Taught Us to Fly (2016).

John Clayton Doyle is a multi-disciplinary artist known for his experimental use of movement, unconventional casting and meta storytelling. John’s work has been presented at The Brooklyn Museum, MassMoCa, Alvin Ailey Citibank Theater, Joe’s Pub at The Pubic Theater & Clemente Soto Velez to name just a few. John is the co-founder amd Artistic Director of Harlem Dance Club, an arts organization that builds community by breaking down perceived barriers through the use of music, dance & visual arts.

Stacey Larkins is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and musician residing in the New York City Metropolitan area. She has shot, written, directed, composed music and edited short films that have played in numerous film festivals in the United States and internationally. Her films have been licensed by Shorts TV International and Aspire TV. She has also written work for theater that has been produced by theatrical production companies in New York City and the U.K.

Jules Katanyag is a writer, director, producer and a media entrepreneur. His first film, Si Magdalola at ang mga Gago, won the Jury Prize at the Cinemaone Film Festival. Some of his recent TV works were filmed during the pandemic. He is a co-owner of Digital Dreams Inc, which has produced films, series and short-form content such as the iScream Stories. He is usually developing concepts, writing and dreaming.

Aly Muritiba was born in 1979. He graduated with a degree in History, specialist in Communication and Culture and studied Cinema. Aly is author of the short films The Factory(Oscar short list 2013), Pátio (Semaine de la Critique Cannes 2013) and Tarântula (Venice,2015). His feature films, To My Beloved (2015) and Rust (2018), have received several awards and were screened in many festivals, including Sundance and San Sebastian.

Eve Ringuette is from Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam, an Innu First Nations band government in Canada. She has previous film experience as a production director, but Kakatshat is her directorial debut. Eve wanted to use Innu references in a horror film.

Born in the Soviet Union, Nadja Bobyleva moved to Germany at the age of nine. For the past twenty years, she has worked as an actress in film and television around the world. She made her directing debut with Father. Mother. Me, in 2017. Her latest film Kintsugi was screened at numerous international festivals and received awards, including Best Director and Best Short Film Drama.

Nicolas Ellef learnt cinematography by himself. He made his first short-movie in 2011, at age 17. Today, he directed more than 40 short-films and 1 full-length movie.

Teddy Tenenbaum & Minsun Park are a team with combined experience in features and television. They have written separately and together, and currently write both as a team and as solo writers. They specialize in genre writing, including horror, thriller, and action, typically with a humorous edge. With Minsun's background as an Asian-American woman born in Korea and Teddy's experience as a White dude from Ohio, they cover a lot of bases.

Lynda Reiss is an award-winning short film director. Born in New York and raised in the UK, she has travelled the world, been a nanny for the elite, a Prop House owner, and a single mom. After a successful career as a Prop Master on projects such as American Beauty, True Detective and Stranger Things she made her first short, Ready To Go. Lynda is a fellow of the Sony Pictures Directors Program, and is who you want standing next to you when you are shooting in some crappy alley at three in the morning.

Born and raised in NYC, Johnny Sweet was recently nominated for an Emmy for Best Long Sports Documentary for Quiet Storm: The Ron Artest Story. Sweet was an Emmy Award winning feature producer at ESPN for 10 years and in 2016, Sweet directed his first long form documentary, Vick which won the Associated Press Sports Editor Award for journalism, his second APSE award. His second film, Quiet Storm, a documentary about the life of Ron Artest, was released in 2019 on Showtime.

Daniel Moshel was born in Germany and currently lives as a writer/director in Vienna. Login2Life (2011) was his first feature-length documentary, which premiered on the German ZDF broadcast station and a successful festival circuit. He is one of 4 directors creating the 2014 ZDF TV-show named House of Love.

Ruwan Heggelman started making short films after experiencing the amazing Shaun of the Dead way back in 2004. At the age of 13, he finished his first zombie film and his journey to become a film director had started. Mime serves as a pilot for a full-fledged (web) series or feature film. Heggelman and his team are currently looking for parties to collaborate.

Milen Vitanov was born in Prague, raised in Sofia Bulgaria and graduated in Animation from the University of Film and Television HFF “Konrad Wolf” in Germany in 2007. His shorts have been selected by many international festivals and have received numerous prestigious awards. Together with a group of fellow graduates and friends, he co-founded the Talking Animals Animation Studio in Berlin.

Cheri Gaulke is a pioneer in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles. Her work has been presented in film festivals internationally, in galleries and museums, and alternative settings including buses, churches, and prehistoric temples. Initially known as a performance artist, her work addresses themes such as the body, religion, sexual identity, and the environment.

Mars Roberge is a Canadian-American dual citizen filmmaker, born in Toronto and living in Los Angeles. A film production graduate of York University, Mars is a multi-award-winning director, producer, screenwriter and editor, known for his narrative feature Scumbag (2017), feature documentary The Little House That Could (2013) while also exhibiting work at galleries in Beverly Hills (Sur Le Mur), Harlem (Chashama) and Tokyo (ARS) alongside Keith Haring, Lincoln Townley and Grace Jones.

Kevin Derek attended Columbia College in Hollywood, earning a BA in Motion Pictures and has studied under the tutelage of some of the best in the business. He has extensive experience in the movie industry both as a producer, director, and editor and is a two-time TELLY Award Winner. Kevin has dedicated his life to the art of karate and holds a black belt in three different styles.

Mohsen Mehri Darouei is a filmmaking student and Musician is his second film.

Director Helena Middleton’s award-winning debut short film Kin had its international premiere at Palm Springs International Film Festival and won the city prize at the Festival du Court-Metrage. Her second short My Mama, A Man, screened at BFI Flare Festival 2020 She most recently directed a trio of music videos for singer/songwriter Sam Brookes. Helena is also a freelance theatre director and founding member of internationally acclaimed theatre company The Wardrobe Ensemble.

Rebecca Thomassie is an Inuk of Kangirsuk, in Nunavik Canada. She participated in Wapikoni workshops to document traditional knowledge of the different ways to name the snow, and taught them to her daughter to ensure the sustainability of her culture.

Cedric Hill has won multiple honors and distinctions as a writer, director, and producer of both film and theatre including the shortlist for the 2016 Academy Awards for short film. In 2005, he founded To & Fro Productions, a film company dedicated to telling gripping stories with depth and sophistication. As executive producer of To and Fro Productions, he wears many hats - from developing scripts, creating budgets and casting to writing, engineering production strategy, and directing.

Nicolas Villarreal is an award-winning animator who was born an raised in Argentina. He has worked for several Animation studios including Walt Disney, Sega and PlayStation. His films Nieta, Pasteurized, The House of Colors and Things are Looking Up have all being awarded. He is currently working on his first feature film The Aces.

Alejandro Zuno graduated from the Film School of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He won the ARIEL-Mexican Academy Award for best fiction short film and many other prizes with his film Oasis. His first feature film Newborn will combine the topics he has addressed before: gender identity and sexual diversity.

Kelzang Ravach spent his first 11 years without his parents, alone in the wild with 60 other children, in a research laboratory working on the super-saïen human capacities. And his name is Kelzang. For him, reality and fiction are two worlds that always share a bond. He created Temple Caché with Marion Castera in 2018, a company and place where he can create stories mixing strange things, reality, life and sci-fi, absurd and poetry.

Sophia Banks is an award-winning director, who shot her debut feature, Black Site, an action thriller starring Jason Clarke, Michelle Monaghan and Jai Courtney in Australia’s Gold Coast, in February 2021. Banks’ debut sci-fi short, Unregistered, starring Dylan Penn and Trevor Jackson, premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and she has recently partnered with Anonymous Content to produce her latest short film for television.

Röckët Stähr is a singer/songwriter/composer/pianist/guitarist/bassist living in Brooklyn, NY. "Röckët Stähr’s Death of a Rockstar" is his first feature film which he wrote, performed most of the parts for, and spent 8 years animating entirely on his own, having never previously animated anything in his life. The entire project took 13 years to complete, and is the world’s first feature-length animated rock opera.

Jianna Maarten Saada got her degrees in Storytelling as a Director at the American Film Institute's Conservatory program as well as Columbia's prestigious Creative Writing program. Maarten Saada was nominated by the Atlanta Film Festival as Filmmaker to Watch. She enjoys building complex multi-layered worlds firmly rooted in reality by way of the characters who inhabit them. She resides in Los Angeles with her Poochon Atticus.

Diana Zuros comes from a photography background and perceives filmmaking as a visual storytelling vehicle - the fewer words used to convey an idea, the better. Her first feature film Since August told in ASL is the proof. Diana is fascinated by an illusion of contrasts that life has to offer and strongly believes that our mission as humans is to bring together and unite the two extremes of the spectrum. She's written and directed experimental short films, theater productions, PSAs.

Natalie Plaskura has a diploma in photodesign studies and studies directing and cinematography (MA). Her short films “Intrusion” (2012) and “Faint” (2014) went to several film festivals around the globe.

As a filmmaker in Los Angeles, Brent Lydic has directed and produced digital content with over a half billion views. He has launched several successful series including Man at Arms:Reforged, Super-Fan Builds and Interns of F.I.E.L.D. This is his first feature film.

Phoebe Garcia Pearl is an LA native. She attended The Boston Conservatory majoring in dance but left to became a Radio City Rockette at the age of 19. Since leaving the company in 2016, she has redirected her career to focus on acting and directing in TV and Film. She wrote Stage V to pay respect to her father's memory and also to create a piece of art that people far and wide can relate to.

Selection of previous works:“HAS#TAG”, Faroese documentary-series “NINA”, 2018, Faroese-Danish Feature Film “Sum Einglar Vit Falla”, 2014, Faroese-Danish Short Film

Georgi M. Unkovski was born in New York City in 1988 , after which he spent most of his youth in Macedonia. At the age of 22, he graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology - Eastman’s School of Photography, with a degree in Fine Arts. Shortly after his graduation he moved to the Czech Republic to pursue his passion in film making and enrolled in the post-graduate program at renowned university of FAMU in Prague.

Ziyi Wang is a New York-based Artist and Filmmaker. She is currently working at Baidu as animation designer and SFK as part-time portfolio instructor. She graduated from SVA BFA animation(2021), and is going to Columbia university for graduate study. Her works have been recognized and screened in numerous awards and festivals worldwide. She also participated in multiple animation and game projects. Ziyi strives to create eye-catching dynamic pieces.

Kazem Mollaie started filmmaking with short films in 1999. He holds a B.A. in Cinema Directing from Soore University of Tehran. Mollaie is a member of several organizations including the Iranian Young Cinema Society (IYCS), the Iranian Alliance of Motion Picture Guilds (Khaneh Cinema), the Board of Directors of the Iranian Short Film Association (ISFA) and the Directors Guild of Iran.

Chabname Zariâb was 7 when she emigrated to France from Kabul Afghanistan with her parents. She grew up in a very literary family and studied law in Paris, then real estate before becoming an expert in building damage. In 2011, she published her first novel, "The Afghan Pianist", winner of several literary prizes. She then turned to writing documentary screenplays.

David del Río Teixeira and Miguel Varela Vazquez are first time directors.

Iris Moore is an artist and animator based in Victoria, British Columbia. Primarily a visual artist, she uses stop motion animation to tell fantastical stories that turn an eye inward on psychological and emotional exploration. Her animations are made using watercolor and paper cut-outs, and are created entirely by hand. She has been featured in over 80 film festivals worldwide and has one 11 awards.

Anna Karen Eyjólfsdóttir (also known as Anna Karen Knight) is a first time director. She studied acting in New York in 2015 and has tried to put herself out there as an actress. She studied directing and screenwriting in Iceland; to open up more opportunities , she wrote, produced, co-directed, starred and edited The Life of Bella. She still pursues acting but continues to write screenplays for herself until she gets her big break.

Devin E. Haqq is an IFP alumni and a Semi-Finalist for the HBOAccess 2020 Directing Fellowship. He directed the feature film Ambition’s Debt, which won the 2017 Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at the prestigious American Black Film Festival (ABFF) and the 2018 Paul Robeson Award-Honorable Mention at the Newark Black Film Festival. He recently produced the short film Cupids, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival as part of the 8:46 Films Initiative.

Jim Warren is a musician and animator living in Lowell, Massachusetts. In addition to film work, he plays in the bands Inspector 34, Squash, and Dad Doxxxer.

Veemsen Lama is a Nepalese film director based in London and Kathmandu. After serving some time in the British armed forces as a Gurkha soldier, he joined film school in London to study film production. His short films including Maya and Chyanti have won numerous awards in BAFTA and OSCAR qualifying film festivals. The Puppet is his debut feature film.

“Cinematized” at an early age, Christopher has worked steadily in the motion picture business since moving to Los Angeles in 1987. He secured his first job with legendary visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, and has contracted his varied abilities with over 100 production companies and producers, often working as a post-production supervisor, director, writer and editor. His vast experience has allowed his skills and imagination to become cinematic reality.

Chelsea Low is a vivacious filmmaker and graduate from FSU's College of Motion Picture Arts who likes to create fun, shocking, and inspiring films with her twin sister. Being bi-racial, her goal is to tell meaningful stories that bring hope and representation for people who don't fit the mold of one race or the other, but belong to the human race. She wants to create thrilling films that are inclusive and empowering to all! Chelsea’s last name might be "Low" but her ambitions are high!

Sophia Carr-Gomm is a UK-based Director. Her first short film The Wider Sun, premiered at the BFI Southbank and has been screened at fourteen film festivals internationally. Sophia was awarded Best Director at Oslo Independent Film Festival 2018 and The Wider Sun was voted as Best Short Film by Take One Magazine. Her latest short film Mine has just been entered into film festivals and she is currently in development for three more short films, with her eye on her first feature film script.

Torin Scott has spent the past decade bouncing around the globe, sometimes with a camera in hand. He moved to NYC two years ago and has since begun to pursue more narrative work. He is passionate about story telling, visual aesthetics and the creative process.

Xin Li is a Chinese-born animator and filmmaker based in Shanghai. He specializes in the traditional method of paint-on-glass stop-motion animation. Through this technique he explores tranquil and often intimate moments of life through abstract narratives.

Catherine Delaloye is a Swiss filmmaker. Based in New York, she started her career in London working with Richard Curtis and Russel Brand while working as a writing assistant for various shows. Joe Pardavila is an actor, writer, director and producer born and bred in New Jersey. He studied Sketch & Improv Comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade and was a founding member and actor in the New York based sketch comedy group, Clip Show.

Sahar Nourmonavar was born in Shiraz Iran. Sahar met a filmmaker friend and became interested in scriptwriting, then began to take film classes and attend screenings at the Film Society, which deepened her love for cinema. Sahar passed a scriptwriting course with Asghar Farhadi and a directing course with Shahram Mokri. She is currently a student at Karnameh Institute of Arts and Culture that was founded by Negar Eskandarfar. The Wound is her first short film.

Rohini Chandra is a free-spirited artist and storyteller and is based in Los Angeles. In addition to filmmaking, Rohini sings and acts. She intends to break social barriers through the arts for the greater good.

Eva Kaukai and Manon Chamberland were born in Nunavik Canada and grew up in Kangirsuk. With Wapikoni Mobile, they were able to use sound and video to express thier reality, culture and attachment to the land through throat singing.

Alyssa Angeles grew up in Minnesota where she started making music videos in high school. She went on to direct a documentary following the creative process between eight strangers. She moved to Los Angeles to continue her study of film and graduated from the New York Film Academy, where she directed multiple shorts and a music video which premiered through Paper Magazine. She continues to explore her voice as a director, as well as her passion for art and design as a production designer.

Aleksandra Szczepanowska is a New York-based filmmaker. Prior to Touch, her first narrative feature, she wrote/directed/produced short films with her artistic partner Jean Luc Ormieres, including Let it Ring, which premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2013, as well as Naked Soles, a mystery drama shot in Paris, sponsored by UniFrance, which won Best Short Film on Polish FilmWeb in 2012.

Xin Li is a Chinese-born animator and filmmaker based in Shanghai. He specializes in the traditional method of paint-on-glass stop-motion animation. Through this technique he explores tranquil and often intimate moments of life through abstract narratives.

Jaswant Dev Shrestha has worked in India's prominent movie industry for numerous years before moving to America to pursue his childhood dream of working in Hollywood. In 2019, he received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Director of a Documentary from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Heartland Chapter for his documentary film Festivals Of Tihar. Jaswant is the first Nepali-American filmmaker to receive such an honor.

Jet Leyco is a critically-acclaimed filmmaker and journalist based in Manila. He made four feature films in different genres that were exhibited in various film festivals around the world, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. In all of his films, Jet mixes dreams and realities, memories, comedies, and tragedies, black and white, red and blue, and always thinks of you.

Michelle Rose is a senior at Berklee College of Music. She loves to act in, dance, plan and co-direct her own music videos for her original songs. She took a semester of music video editing and hopes to become more involved in other areas of video production, besides planning & directing. Joshua McGrane is a videographer who specializes in weddings. music and event videography. His creative career started in a band and he branched out into writing songs and videography.

João Andrade Medeiros is an economics and film student in São Paulo, Brazil. João lived most of his life in a small town in the interior of São Paulo called Embu Guaçu. From a very young age, he has been interested in cinema and at the age of 15 he started making short films with his friends. The following year, he chose to study cinema in an elective film at school, where he wrote his first screenplay that was filmed.