Brazilian-American filmmaker Luisa Dantas has worked on a wide array of documentary and fiction projects at the intersection of storytelling and social justice. Her most recent work, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY, chronicles the reconstruction of New Orleans through the eyes of those on the frontlines and asks the question: what kinds of cities do we want to (re)build in the 21st century? The transmedia project includes an award-winning feature film and groundbreaking interactive web platform produced in conjunction with a spectrum of national and local partners in six cities. Luisa also co-produced the acclaimed documentary, WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE, and directed and produced the web-series VOICES FROM THE GULF for Color of Change. She teaches screenwriting and documentary filmmaking at Tulane University. Luisa received her B.A. in English and Latin American studies from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University.

James Klein has been an independent filmmaker since 1970. With his partner, Julia Reichert, he created such innovative documentaries as GROWING UP FEMALE, the first documentary about women from a feminist perspective which was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress; UNION MAIDS, one of the first oral history films and an Academy Award nominee; METHADONE: AN AMERICAN WAY OF DEALING, which challenged government policies on heroin addiction; and SEEING RED, a film about American communists that was nominated for an Academy Award. Klein has also had a distinguished career as a film editor in the independent film community, including such films as SCOUT’S HONOR, about gay discrimination within the Boy Scouts; LION IN THE HOUSE, about kids and their families fighting cancer and a prime time Emmy winner; and the Academy Award nominated THE LAST TRUCK, about the closing of a GM truck factory. He is a founder of the social issue documentary film distribution co-op New Day Films, and retired Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance and Film at Wright State University.

Lisa Molomot is a documentary filmmaker living in Tucson, Arizona. She has been working in film for over 20 years, directing, filming and editing documentaries. Her award-winning feature THE HILL tells the story of an immigrant neighborhood in New Haven, CT and aired on America Reframed in 2015. Her award-winning shorts SCHOOL’S OUT and TEACHING IN ARIZONA have had hundreds of screenings and been featured on Slate.com, in The Atlantic, and on NPR. Her most recent feature documentary, MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY (2020), profiles law enforcement agents, human rights workers and activists who come face to face with the life and death consequences of our broken immigration system. The film is currently playing in select theaters in the U.S. and the U.K. After screening at over 50 film festivals in the past year, MIBC will be released on streaming platforms in the U.S. starting in November and will air on the PBS series Independent Lens.

Lisa teaches in the School of Theatre, Film & Television, the James E. Rogers School of Law, and the Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona, and has also taught filmmaking at Yale University and Wesleyan University.

Paco de Onís is the Executive Director at Skylight Pictures. In 2011 he produced GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR (world premiere at Sundance 2011), a documentary detective story focused on the role of filmic and archival documentation in the prosecution of a genocide case against Guatemalan generals, and launched GRANITO: EVERY MEMORY MATTERS, a companion mixed media project developed to restore the collective memory of the Guatemalan genocide. One year after the release of GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR, the dictator of the title was charged with genocide and put on trial in Guatemala. Skylight’s 2017 film 500 YEARS chronicles Guatemala’s recent history through the perspective of the indigenous Mayan population. Paco also served as the producer on THE RECKONING: THE BATTLE FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT (world premiere Sundance 2009), a documentary accompanied by IJ Central, an interactive audience engagement initiative promoting global rule of law, developed at the BAVC Producerʼs Institute in 2008. Prior to that, he produced STATE OF FEAR, a Skylight Pictures film about Peruʼs 20-year “war on terror” based on the findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Prior to his work at Skylight he produced documentaries for PBS (ON OUR OWN TERMS with Bill Moyers), National Geographic (SECRETS FROM THE GRAVE), and a range of other programs.

Richard Ray Perez is personally connected to the issues presented in CESAR’S LAST FAST. For 22 years, Perez’s father was a farm worker who lived in and worked under the conditions Cesar Chavez fought to end. At five years old Richard joined the historic grape boycotting organized by the United Farm Workers. Prior to directing and executive producing CESAR’S LAST FAST, Richard Ray Perez directed and/or executive produced 4 documentary film series for Brave New films. Mr. Perez is the Producer of Creative Partnerships in the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program.

An award-winning documentary filmmaker and instructor, Anayansi Prado was born in Panama and moved to the United States as a teenager. She attended Boston University where she received a B.A. in Film. She directed and produced the award-winning documentaries MAID IN AMERICA (2004), CHILDREN IN NO MAN’S LAND (2008) and PARAISO FOR SALE (2011) which were broadcast nationally on PBS. Anayansi is a Rockefeller Media Fellow and a Creative Capital Artist, and has received support for her work from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the Tribeca Film Institute. Prado is a Film Expert for the American Film Showcase (2009-present) and works on a regular basis with the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs to bring documentary filmmaking training to aspiring filmmakers in developing countries. Prado’s film THE UNAFRAID (2018) co-directed with Heather Courtney, received the Kathleen Bryan Edwards award for Human Rights at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and was the closing night film of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.

PJ Raval is a filmmaker and cinematographer whose work explores the overlooked subcultures and identities within the already marginalized LGBTQ+ community. Named one of Out Magazine’s “Out 100” and Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” PJ’s film credits include TRINIDAD (Showtime, LOGO) and BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, which follows the lives of three gay senior men, described by indieWIRE as “a crucial new addition to the LGBT doc canon.” BEFORE YOU KNOW IT screened theatrically and broadcast premiered as the season finale of AMERICA REFRAMED on PBS, and was recently awarded the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association Excellence in Documentary Award 2016. Also an accomplished cinematographer, PJ shot the Academy Award‐nominated Best Documentary TROUBLE THE WATER. PJ is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, 2016 Firelight Media Fellow, and a 2017 Robert Giard Fellow.

Theo Rigby is a director, cinematographer, and interactive storyteller based out of San Francisco. He believes in the power of media to create awareness and dialogue about the world’s most pressing social and political issues.

Rigby’s project WAKING DREAM is featured on Indie Lens Storycast, a web series YouTube channel, created by Indie filmmakers and developed by ITVS. His last project, IMMIGRANT NATION (iNation), is a series of short films about immigration in the U.S. including The CARETAKER, THE MAYOR, and MARATHON, as well as an online storytelling platform, and a series of live storytelling events. iNation has been showcased on the New York Times website, nationally broadcast on PBS, and shown at Ellis Island, the 2014 New York Film Festival, and 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The project received a MacArthur Documentary Film grant, as well as a Tribeca Institute New Media Fund grant. His film, SIN PAIS (Without Country), won a Student Academy Award, has screened in over 30 film festivals, and was nationally broadcast on PBS’ independent documentary showcase POV in 2012. He is currently completing a feature documentary on the contemporary Sanctuary movement.

Producer Lisa Stevens has produced several landmark documentary series for National Geographic Channel: OUTLAW BIKERS, UNDERWORLD CITIES AND DRUGS, INCORPORATED. She recently produced CRACKHOUSE USA for Channel 4 and MSNBC, with Academy Award winning (MAN ON WIRE) producer, Jonathan Hewes of Wall to Wall Media and BAFTA award winning director, Anthony Wonke. Lisa founded her own production Company, Green Acres Films Ltd. in 2009. DREAMCATCHER came about after years of nurturing a relationship with the main subjects of the film.

Anike Tourse is a multimedia maker with accomplishments both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, including writing for the daytime serial ONE LIFE TO LIVE and the sitcom GIRLFRIENDS, an animated short film FRANCES THE FISH, and a children’s story and short film about children biking on Yom Kippur in Tel-Aviv. Before making AMERICA’S FAMILY, she wrote and directed the award-winning short film AMERICA: I TOO starring Academy Award nominee Barkhad Abdi and now in distribution with New Day Films. Commissioned by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights/LA (CHIRLA), the film features a predominantly immigrant cast and crew including over 250 Extras, most of whom are undocumented immigrants living in greater Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and Lancaster, California.

U of A Media Arts (now Film & Television) alumna Lindsay Utz (BA, 2003) is an award-winning documentary film editor based in Chicago. In addition to QUEST, her other credits include the Oscar-shortlisted BULLY (Tribeca FF 2011), FIRST POSITION (TIFF 2011), BUOY (Ashland FF 2013), IN COUNTRY (Full Frame 2014), two Emmy-nominated FRONTLINE episodes (PBS 2015/2016) and multiple shorts for the New York Times. In 2012, Utz was awarded the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship, named in honor of Errol Morris’s late editor. Her latest project, AMERICAN FACTORY (2019), with Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, swept top festival honors, including the Directing award at Sundance, and now streams on Netflix as the first project acquired by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions. She teaches Advanced Documentary Editing at Northwestern University’s MFA in Documentary Media program as an adjunct faculty member.

Chihiro Wimbush (Director/Producer/Editor) is an Emmy-nominated, documentary filmmaker. Chihiro was co-director (with Amir Soltani) and cinematographer on the documentary feature, DOGTOWN REDEMPTION, about homeless shopping cart recyclers in West Oakland, California. The film premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival where it won an Audience Award, and was broadcast on Independent Lens, before being nominated for an Emmy Award. He also edited the award-winning and nationally broadcast CHANGING SEASON about a year on the Masumoto family peach farm in the Central Valley. He has directed, produced and edited numerous short films, most recently LIMINAL, about prisoners released during the pandemic reconnecting with nature, that had its broadcast premiere on Valley PBS. RICOCHET is his third collaboration with Jeff Adachi after serving as editor on Jeff’s previous two films The RIDE and DEFENDER.

Pamela Yates is a co-founder and currently the Creative Director of Skylight Pictures, a company dedicated to creating feature length documentary films and digital media tools that advance awareness of human rights and the quest for justice by implementing multi-year outreach campaigns designed to engage, educate and activate social change. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for her 2011 film GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR, which was used as key forensic evidence in the Ríos Montt genocide conviction in Guatemala. Yates is the Director of the Sundance Special Jury award winning WHEN THE MOUNTAINS TREMBLE; the Executive Producer of the Academy Award winning WITNESS TO WAR, about an American doctor behind guerrilla lines in El Salvador; and the Director of STATE OF FEAR: THE TRUTH ABOUT TERRORISM, which has been translated into 47 languages and broadcast in 154 countries. Her epic film THE RECKONING, about the tumultuous first 6 years of the International Criminal Court was filmed on 4 continents and in 7 languages and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She also directed the development of GRANITO: EVERY MEMORY MATTERS, an interactive media project that gathered memories and put them into a public online archive to help restore and repair the collective memory of the Guatemalan genocide. In 2017, Yates completed 500 YEARS, the third in the Guatemalan trilogy that explores the battle for the national narrative in present day Guatemala. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, The Writers Guild of America, the Independent Documentary Association, and a Contributing Editor to NACLA: Report on the Americas.

Sande Zeig (Producer/Director) Sande Zeig is a writer, director, producer and film distributor. Her short film, Central Park, premiered at Sundance in 1994. She went on to direct a feature, THE GIRL, based on a short story by renowned French writer Monique Wittig that premiered at the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals in 2001. Her documentary SOUL MASTERS: DR. GUO & DR. SHA, was released in April 2008, by Beyond Words Distribution. Zeig is president of Artistic License Films, a film distribution company that has distributed more than one hundred films including films by Ismail Merchant, Michel Negroponte, Jim Stark, Kore-eda Hirakazu, DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. She is head of the Media Department for Institute of Soul Healing and Enlightenment.