Nilima Abrams is a documentary filmmaker and social entrepreneur with extensive experience in India. As an undergraduate she integrated self-taught documentary filmmaking with coursework, and wrote an award-winning honors thesis on schools and media in India. She also made a film on child labor prevention in India, and went on to complete an MFA in documentary film at Stanford. She has taught kids filmmaking in India, as well as native Vermont and Somali refugee youth, in a summer camp she co-created. Nilima received a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a year in India filming for a feature film and guiding students on THE TENT VILLAGE. Nilima teaches social issue and cause marketing documentary film courses at the University of Vermont. Besides filmmaking, Nilima works in various media to make “good causes” accessible.

Jacob Bricca is an award-winning Tucson-based documentary editor, director, and teacher. He has edited over a dozen feature films including the international theatrical hit LOST IN LA MANCHA, the New Yorker Films theatrical release CON ARTIST, the Independent Lens Audience Award Winner JIMMY SCOTT: IF YOU ONLY KNEW and the 2016 Sundance Special Jury Award Winner THE BAD KIDS. His directorial credits include INDIES UNDER FIRE: THE BATTLE FOR THE AMERICAN BOOKSTORE, which won awards at the Newburyport Documentary Festival and the Santa Cruz Film Festival, PURE, which premiered at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, and FINDING TATANKA which premiered at the 2014 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and is distributed by Passion River Films. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, where he teaches classes on editing and documentary filmmaking. He is the author of Documentary Editing: Principles and Practice (Focal Press/Routledge, 2017).

Jean Carlomusto is a filmmaker, activist, and interactive media artist whose work explores the complex nature of unique individuals and marginalized populations. Her films are often unorthodox investigations of LGBT history and HIV/AIDS. Her work has been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums and on television. She produced and directed HBO’s Emmy nominated documentary, LARRY KRAMER IN LOVE & ANGER (2015), which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.

Jean was an early pioneer in the AIDS Activist video movement. In 1987, she started the Media Unit at Gay Men’s Health Crisis. She was a founding member of DIVA TV (a video affinity group of ACT UP) and a member of the Testing The Limits Video Collective. The numerous works that she collaborated on, included: Doctors, Liars and Women: AIDS Activists Say No To Cosmo, Target City Hall, Seize Control of the FDA, Testing the Limits:NYC, and Women and AIDS. Her powerful documentary SEX IN AN EPIDEMIC tells the story of how the safer sex movement was born and how HIV prevention movements continue today. The film premiered on Showtime on World AIDS Day, 2011.

Her 1991 film L is for the Way You Look was featured in the very first season of Lesbian Looks, in Fall 1993.

Matthew Cassel is an independent multimedia journalist and filmmaker based in Istanbul. He spent five years covering the Arab world with the Al Jazeera network. His 2013 award-winning film for AJE, IDENTITY AND EXILE: AN AMERICAN’S STRUGGLE WITH ZIONISM, focuses on his personal journey from his hometown Chicago to the Middle East, where he has lived for the past decade. Cassel is co-editor of Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution: Voices from Tunis to Damascus (Penguin, 2013), a collection of essays on the 2011 uprisings by writers from across the Arab world. Cassel speaks fluent Arabic and has spent much of the past two years focusing on the plight of refugees seeking asylum in the EU.

»Interview with Matthew Cassel

»Interview with filmmaker Matthew Cassel re making of The Journey

Heather Courtney is a Guggenheim fellow and an Emmy-winning filmmaker. Her film WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM, won an Emmy, an Independent Spirit Award, and a SXSW Jury Award. The film received positive reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and was broadcast nationally on the PBS program POV. It made several Top 10 films of 2011 lists, including Salon’s Best Non-fiction, and was supported by many grants and fellowships including from ITVS, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the United States Artists Fellowship, and POV/American Documentary. Heather was also a fellow at the Sundance Edit and Story Lab. She has directed and produced several other documentary films including award-winners LETTERS FROM THE OTHER SIDE and LOS TRABAJADORES/THE WORKERS, which both focused on immigration issues, and were broadcast nationally on PBS. She has been funded by ITVS, the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, and the Austin Film Society, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship and an International Documentary Association award. Courtney’s film THE UNAFRAID (2018) co-directed with Anayansi Prado, 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.

Luchina Fisher is an award-winning director, writer and producer who works at the intersection of race, gender and identity. She is the founder and CEO of Little Light Productions. Her feature directorial debut MAMA GLORIA, about Chicago trans icon activist Gloria Allen, was nominated for a 2022 GLAAD Media Award. The film premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival and BFI Flare London; won numerous jury awards; and made its broadcast debut on World channel and PBS. Her short documentary Team Dream, executive produced by Queen Latifah, won the Audience Choice Award at the 2022 Chicago International Film Festival and Best Documentary Film at the 2022 TIDE Film Festival, qualified for Oscar consideration, and will air on BET. She recently co-directed her second feature about the barriers to Black homeownership, and her new documentary short THE DADS, about six dads of trans and LGBTQ kids on a weekend fishing trip, premiered at SXSW 2023.

Previously, Luchina co-executive produced and co-wrote the critically acclaimed feature documentary BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY, about the war on women’s reproductive health. It appeared in more than 70 theaters nationwide, qualified for Oscar consideration and streamed on Hulu. She has written and produced several nationally broadcast documentaries, including The American Presidency, with Bill Clinton. Her work has appeared on History, A&E, ESPN, ABC and Discovery and has been supported by Black Public Media, the Field Foundation, Firelight Media, National Endowment for the Humanities, Athena Film Festival, Brown Girl Doc Mafia, Sisters in Cinema, and the Queen Collective. Luchina is based in the New York City area and teaches documentary filmmaking at Yale.

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.