Emily Faye Ratner is a media maker and lawyer based in New Orleans whose work focuses on state violence. She has organized with local groups to challenge law enforcement violence, incarceration, and occupation and imperialism, working with organizations including Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), New Orleans Palestine Solidarity (NOLAPS), and Jewish Voice for Peace. She has also co-convened Patois: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival, at times serving as Patois’ Festival Director and currently as a member of its organizing collective. Emily is a proud member of the National Lawyers Guild, the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Board of Directors of Junebug Productions.

Kate Trumbull-LaValle is a Peabody Award-winning non-fiction storyteller, filmmaker, artist, and educator specializing in narratives about rebellious women, motherhood, labor, immigration, and identity. She serves as Artistic Assistant Professor of Broadcast Journalism and Documentary at Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. Her directorial debut, Ovarian Psycos (2016), premiered at SXSW and aired nationally on PBS's Independent Lens. Kate produced and directed Artist and Mother (2018) and City Rising: The Informal Economy (2018) for PBS SoCal, both earning LA Press Awards and Emmy nominations. In 2020, she co-produced two episodes of PBS's Asian Americans series, receiving a Peabody Award. Her latest works include Killface (2024) and Space to Breathe (2025).

Jordan Flaherty is an award-winning journalist, producer, and author. His 2022 film Powerlands has won dozens of awards, including the 2022 Rigoberta Menchú Grand Prize. His first film as a producer, Chocolate Babies, has become a queer cult classic and was recently added to the Criterion Collection.He is the author of the books No More Heroes: Grassroots Responses to the Savior Mentality and Floodlines: Community and Resistance From Katrina to the Jena Six and has produced television documentaries and news reports for Democracy Now, teleSUR, The Laura Flanders Show, and Al Jazeera, including as a producer on the Emmy, Peabody, and duPont-award-winning program Fault Lines on Al Jazeera. You can follow Jordan’s latest work on his substack.

Guillermo E. Brown is a performer and artist who appeared most recently as a smiley face for Quip toothbrushes and over 1,000 shows as the drummer in the house band of Emmy-winning “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS, with Reggie Watts. In addition he is featured on over 50 full length recordings, and has appeared live, recorded and as drummer-vocalist-electronics/collaborator with David S. Ware, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Roy Campbell, Anti-Pop Consortium, Anthony Braxton, DJ Spooky, El-P, Carl Hancock Rux, Vernon Reid, DJ Logic, Latasha Diggs, Dave Burrell, George E. Lewis, Mendi & Keith Obadike, Victor Gama, Arto Lindsay, Spoek Mathambo, Jamie Lidell, Saul Williams, CANT, Mocky, Twin Shadow, Grisha Coleman, Suphala, Nia Andrews and Tunde Adebimpe among others.

Zak Margolis is an artist and animator based in Portland, OR. His work often explores the relationship between image and music, and how each illuminates the other. Thus, he has been involved in numerous fruitful collaborations with all kinds of different musical artists including Unwound, Tara Jane O’neil, Charlie Campbell, Alicia Jo Rabins, the Oregon Symphony, 45th Parallel Universe, Roomful of Teeth, and inti figgis-vizueta. Much of his career has been in support of the vision of other artists. With Jim Blashfield he helped create animation and design for numerous public video sculptures that offer mysterious clues about the history and culture of their surrounding landscapes. With Rose Bond he built animated environments of other worlds that form projections onto the windows of buildings, on the walls of concert halls, and in planetarium domes. He teaches animated arts at PNCA.

Ivy Liao is a Chinese-American Director and VFX Supervisor based in Los Angeles. Her award-winning short film Cupid's Paradise received accolades for Best VFX and Best Student Film, and secured a distribution deal with SHUDDER and DUST. Her frequent collaborators include DJI, Adult Swim, Warner Media, Bud light, Coca-Cola, and more. She is committed to helping filmmakers and brands tell stories that elevate communities and resonate universally.

Tim Tsai is a Taiwanese American filmmaker whose feature debut Seadrift chronicles the racial hostilities that erupted during the early days of Vietnamese refugee arrival on the Texas gulf coast. Seadrift premiered at Slamdance 2019 and was broadcast on PBS, garnering awards from the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, the Dallas International Film Festival, the Houston Film Critics Society, and others. Recent work includes editing Powerlands (AmDocs '22 Best US Feature), about global indigenous resistance against resource extraction, and directing Mi Casa Es Tu Casa (2023), a short documentary on the founders of Woodlake Botanical Garden. Tim holds an MFA in film production from U.T. Austin, served as the former executive director of the Austin Asian American Film Festival, and is a Firelight Media Documentary Labs alum. He is based in California's Central Valley.

Breanna Thompson is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative producer, and cultural strategist whose work spans installation art, film, and community-centered storytelling rooted in Black Southern and Creole traditions. Raised between New Orleans, LA and Pass Christian, MS, her practice explores the intersections of land, memory, spirituality, and identity—bridging rural lifeways with urban cultural expression.

For nearly a decade, Breanna has worked as a production designer and art director for independent films, narrative shorts, and experimental media, crafting immersive visual worlds that foreground Black Southern aesthetics and ancestral knowledge. As a creative producer, she collaborates closely with directors, artists, and cultural workers to shape projects that are visually bold and thematically grounded in liberation, care, and community.

She is also the founder of BT Art Marketing, a creative services studio offering brand and marketing strategy for artists, cultural institutions, and purpose-driven businesses. Specializing in website development, design, and maintenance as well as social media management and content creation for artists, cultural institutions, and purpose-driven businesses, Breanna supports others in telling their stories with clarity, beauty, and integrity.

A certified Master Gardener and active volunteer with the Greater New Orleans chapter, she is committed to land stewardship, horticultural education, and community-based growing. Her work is rooted in the belief that art, land, and collective imagination are interdependent forces for transformation and belonging.

Bron Moyi is an award-winning Cinematographer and Camera Operator based in Los Angeles. He is a member of IATSE Local 600 and the SPORAS collective. He was a cinematographer for I am a Virgo, from Boots Riley. Before turning to cinematography, he worked in design departments, including for Queen Sugar and Girl’s Trip.

Bridgette Simpson is a justice-impacted abolitionist, organizer, and advocate who co-founded Barred Business and serves as its Executive Director. A 2025 Galaxy Gives Fellow, 2024 Canary Impact Prize recipient, and 2023 Soros Justice Fellow, she founded The Protected Class Network, working to make justice-impacted people a legally protected class. In Atlanta, she launched the S.T.A.B.L.E. reentry program for women and the Google Career Skills initiative for impacted individuals. Bridgette also serves on the City of Atlanta’s Human Relations Commission and was instrumental in passing a local protected class ordinance for formerly incarcerated people. She is a certified life coach and entrepreneur who brings her lived experience as a survivor of incarceration, poverty, and violence into her leadership. Bridgette is passionate about building national coalitions and advancing systemic change that centers equity, healing, and liberation for all people harmed by the criminal legal system.

Robert Saleem Holbrook is the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center. Saleem is a former “juvenile lifer” who served 27 years in Pennsylvania’s adult state prisons (including a total of 10 years in solitary confinement) after being sentenced to life without parole for an offense he was involved with as a 16-year-old child. He was released in 2018 after The Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional. While incarcerated Saleem studied liberation movements and was mentored by older political and politicized prisoners. Saleem started organizing against the criminal punishment system while still inside, including co-founding the Human Rights Coalition, a group of people in prison and their loved ones outside, formed to advocate for themselves against the abuses they were experiencing.

kai lumumba barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Together with her muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth and Merriment, she experiments with abolition as an artistic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, environmental installations, and sculptures are sited in traditional and non-traditional spaces to transgress ideological, geographic, and carceral borders. Using materials associated with Black women’s labor, the work performs queer, Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre. A social-movement organizer for over forty years, barrow has worked with numerous grassroots organizations including SLAM!, FIERCE!, Critical Resistance, UBUNTU, and Southerners on New Ground.

Nish Newton (they/them) is a creative artist who utilizes their background as an educator of History and Sociology to wage a better world. They are also a practicing gender doula whose work is informed by the old ways of our elders and the new ways of our descendants.Their distinct approaches have led them to facilitate social justice spaces alongside Sonya Renee Taylor, adrienne maree brown, Dr. Angela Davis, and other beacons of transformative change.

Roger Guenveur Smith is an actor, director, and writer. Smith has collaborated with Spike Lee on several works, such as School Daze, Do the Right Thing, King of NewYork, Panther, Malcolm X, Poetic Justice, Get on the Bus, Eve's Bayou, He Got Game, and Summer of Sam. During the 1990s, he had a recurring role on A Different World.In 1996, he starred in the self-written and produced A Huey P. Newton Story, a one-man theatre performance based on the life of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton. Smith received an Obie Award,and a performance was later filmed by Spike Lee and released in 2001. In addition to his performances in major studio productions, Smith continues to work in and support independent film projects, such as this one.

Walidah Imarisha is a filmmaker, educator, writer, public scholar and spoken word artist. She edited the groundbreaking anthology Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and her nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces: ThreeStories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. Imarisha has taught in Stanford University’s Program of Writing and Rhetoric, Pacific Northwest College of the Art's Master in Fine Arts inCreative Writing and Master in Critical StudiesProgram, Portland State University's Black Studies Department, and Oregon State University's Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department. She was one of the founders and first editor of the political hip hop magazine AWOL.

Juicebox P. Burton (they/them) is a black, trans-fem multi-disciplinary artist living in New Orleans. Juicebox is a world-builder who frames narratives of trauma in the context of horror and sci-fi in order to heal the collective spirit of the black community. Their work gains its power from its self-taught nature, fostering the collaboration of other creators of color/Black creators whose collective story combats the aristocratic gatekeeping of the mainstream art industry.