Frank Hudec was born into a family of bookies in the New Orleans French Quarter. He produced the award-winning feature Low, which traveled to over 30 film festivals worldwide and was a founding film of the Slamdance Film Festival. Andreas Becker from Der Tagesspiegel called his debut feature, Building Bombs “a great, ironic indie... a message from better and happier times.” While living in Berlin, he made the German/Russian language film, Der Tausch [The Exchange]. It debuted in the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival. During the 2020 Covid-19 quarantine, Frank made his WW1-set audio drama Craiglockhart completely over Zoom. Craiglockhart took both Platinum drama and audience awards at the 2021 HEAR Now Audio Fiction Festival.

Marquette Jones was an esteemed filmmaker and public interest attorney. An alumna of New York University's Film and Television Production program, Marquette transitioned from law to filmmaking. Her directorial works, including Sides, Tunk, Heroes Wanted, Streets 2 Suites, and Forgiving Chris Brown, showcased her storytelling prowess. Her final film, Ghosted, was directed in collaboration with her students at the University of Alabama. Marquette's films graced platforms like Amazon Video, PBS, Showtime, and more, and earned her accolades such as the Telly Award and Aurora Award. Her impact extended beyond film, with numerous awards recognizing her excellence, from New York University's Warner Bros. Production Award, Panasonic’s “P2 for a Cause” Grand Prize Winner, and victories in various film festivals.

Marina Shron is a Russian-American writer and director. She enjoyed a successful career as a playwright before turning to filmmaking. She’s a recipient of awards from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. Her writing for the screen has been selected for the Austin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, and honored with The Rising Star in Screenwriting Award at the Canada International Film among other accolades. Marina’s first short film as writer-director, Lullaby for Ray, won the Best Short Film Award in Toronto and screened in festivals worldwide. Her second film, Sea Child, premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival and was an official selection at film festivals around the globe. Both films are available on the Shorts TV International channel as well as Fandor and iTunes. A former Fulbright scholar, Marina teaches screenwriting at The New School University and Rhode Island School of Design.

Paul Rachman began his career as one of the industry's top music video directors at Propaganda Films in Los Angeles. By the late nineties he directed several award winning music videos and short films; Alice in Chains’ Man in The Box, Temple of The Dog’s Hunger Strike, Drive Baby Drive and collaborations with NPR storyteller Joe Frank Memories, The Hitchhiker, The Perfect Woman, Jilted Lover. Paul made his feature directorial debut with Four Dogs Playing Poker starring Forest Whittaker, Balthazar Getty, Tim Curry, and Olivia Williams. His seminal punk documentary American Hardcore premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and was released by Sony Pictures Classics. He is a co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, a graduate of Boston University, and based in NY and LA. Paul most recently co-produced the Sundance multi award winning documentary Daughters, streaming now on Netflix. He also produced the punk political documentary Something Better Change which will premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival in October.

Award-winning filmmaker-author Dan Mirvish directed and produced such features as 18½, Bernard and Huey, Between Us, Open House and Omaha (the movie). Dan’s films screened in over 100 festivals on 7 continents, sold to 150 countries, all had theatrical releases and played on everything from Netflix and Showtime to Virgin Atlantic and JetBlue. He co-wrote the critically-acclaimed novel I Am Martin Eisenstadt (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) and wrote two editions of The Cheerful Subversive’s Guide to Independent Filmmaking (Focal Press/Routledge). Dan has lectured at over 50 film schools around the world, and co-founded the Slamdance Film Festival.

Annika Pampel is a writer-director represented by Paradigm. After graduating from college, she received a Fulbright Scholarship and rounded off her education at the Savannah College of Art & Design with a Master’s degree. She worked for John & James Cameron at their tech company HHO as VP of Production. Annika published her first novel in 2022. She’s a genre-agnostic writer focusing on female-centric stories. She was a fellow for the SUNDANCE/WIF Finance Lab, a Nicholls Fellowship Semi-Finalist, and was named one of 25 Writers to Watch by the International Screenwriters Association. She’s currently adapting a YA book, and preparing to direct her first feature in 2023

Shari Berman is a filmmaker whose features include My Life As Abraham Lincoln, Sugar! and Detention 101. She edits all her films and began editing as a child by cutting puzzle pieces to make them fit as she thought best, creating some very strange pictures. Shari knew even then that she was on to something and has embarked on a life of making one weird picture after the next. She grew up in the Bronx, enjoys mentoring artists and strives to eat as much sushi as humanly possible. It’s suspected that she has mercury poisoning… her favorite character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has always been the Mad Hatter.

Christine Vartoughian is an award-winning Armenian-American writer and director whose work has shown at Lincoln Center, the Museum of the Moving Image, and whose feature film about love and suicide, Living with the Dead: A Love Story, has been awarded the Audience Choice Award at Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, Best Feature Film at Aberdeen Film Festival, and is available on Apple TV and Amazon, in the United States and internationally. She is a member of Lincoln Center Theatre Director’s Lab, SAG-AFTRA, and the female filmmaker collective, The Film Fatales, as well as the co-founder of (Screen)Play Press, a publishing company for unproduced film scripts.

Evgenia Peretz is a screenwriter and journalist. She co-wrote Juliet, Naked, an adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel (starring Ethan Hawke) and Our Idiot Brother (starring Paul Rudd). She has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 2000 and has written over sixty features for the magazine. Her most recent article was Scene Stealer: The True Lies of Elisabeth Finch.

Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of twelve novels including The Ancestor and The Mentor and the five-book Desire Card series. He has been published in multiple languages and was nominated for the Prix du Polar. Since receiving an MFA from The New School, he’s contributed pieces to CrimeReads, Pipeline Artists, LitHub, LA Review of Books, The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor, Mystery Tribune, The Big Idea, Monkeybicycle, Fiction Writers Review, Cagibi, Necessary Fiction, Hypertext, If My Book, Past Ten, Dirty Boulevard, The Montreal Review, The Adirondack Review, The New Plains Review and Maudlin House. He is the co-curator of The Guerrilla Lit Reading Series and lives in NYC.

Enid Zentelis is an award-winning writer, director and podcast creator. Her feature films are distributed worldwide and have screened at many festivals including Sundance, Tribeca and the New York Film Festival. Her film Evergreen starring Mary Kay Place was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and won the Best First-time Director Prize at Sonoma IFF. Bottled Up stars Oscar-winner Josh Hamilton and was nominated for Tribeca's Nora Ephron Prize. Zentelis recently sold her acclaimed non-fiction podcast How My Grandmother Won WWII to North Road/Red Arrow Studio’s Kinetic Content, where she is developing it as a scripted series.

Glass ceiling-shattering writer and director Jan Eliasberg is known for nurturing great performances in film, television and theatre from some of the best actors of our time: Frances McDormand, John Turturro, Michael B. Jordan, Michelle Williams, Tony Shalhoub and George Clooney. She has directed pilots for CBS, NBC and ABC, as well as hundreds of hours of dramatic film and episodic television. Most recently, Eliasberg sold her debut novel Hannah’s War to Little, Brown (Hachette); the book has sold over 50,000 copies and has been translated into seven languages. Hannah’s War was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (Fiction).

Ari Gold has directed four Sundance films and has won over fifty prizes, including best film at SXSW twice, the Student Oscar, and Best Director at the American Cinematheque/ARPA. He is in production on his third feature Helicopter, which expands on his student-Oscar-winning short film about his mother’s death, and which features legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Ari’s most unusual distinctions include a High Times Magazine “Stoner of the Year” award, and a Guinness World Record for commanding the largest air-drum ensemble on earth. In 2023, in addition to film and music projects, Ari is releasing a book of poetry and an ecological graphic-novel-plus-zine called Fogtown.

Annie J. Howell is a screenwriter whose focus on family, race and identity has led her to develop distinct, diverse characters and scenarios. Her credits include the co-written screenplay for Yellow Rose (distributed by Sony Pictures Worldwide and the winner of eight festival grand jury prizes), the original screenplay for Little Boxes (a Netflix acquisition out of the Tribeca Film Festival), and two films co-written and co-directed with Lisa Robinson: Small, Beautifully Moving Parts and Claire in Motion (both SXSW premieres that led to theatrical runs and distribution on streaming platforms). She is an alumni of NYU's Grad Film and TV program, and lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Eva Aridjis is a Mexican-American director and writer. She has directed, written and produced five feature-length films, including the narrative films The Favor and The Blue Eyes and the documentaries Children of the Street (Niños de la Calle), La Santa Muerte and Chuy, The Wolf Man (Chuy, el hombre lobo). Her prize-winning films have screened at dozens of festivals around the world including Sundance, Edinburgh and Morelia, and have been nominated for Arieles (Mexican Academy Awards). She has written on shows including Narcos: Mexico, and co-wrote the novel Monarca, published by Harper Collins in 2022. Eva got her B.A. at Princeton University, where she studied Anthropology and Comparative Literature, before attending NYU’s Graduate Film and TV program, where she also taught Screenwriting.

Sean Gullette is a director, screenwriter, producer and actor. His feature Traitors, shot in Morocco, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, won top festival awards and had an international release. In his upcoming movie Upland (adapted from Nobel prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe’s novel), a group of teenage prisoners are evacuated into the militia-dominated mountains of near-future West Virginia. Sean played the lead in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, on which he shares story credit, going on to act in 20+ films. He has collaborated with leading filmmakers, networks and studios in the U.S. and Europe, and plans to develop Tangier—initially cast with Kristin Scott Thomas and Jeremy Irons— as a limited series.