People

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

Neta Alexander is a doctoral student in the department of Cinema Studies at NYU. She earned her M.A. in Film Studies from Columbia University, writing about the cinematic depiction of suicide in Israeli and American films. She published articles and reviews in Film Quarterly, Film Comment and The Brooklyn Rail, among others, and served as an associated programmer at the Brooklyn-based micro-cinema UnionDocs, specializing in documentary and experimental works. Her book chapters are forthcoming in the anthologies “The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century” (Bloomsbury Publishing), and “Anthropology and Film Festivals” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Kelly Anderson is documentary filmmaker and an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York City. Kelly worked with Allison Lirish Dean on her most recent film My Brooklyn, a documentary demonstrating the ways city government and corporations colluded to reshape Downtown Brooklyn. It premiered at the 2012 Brooklyn Film Festival, where it shared the Audience Award with Su Friedrich’s film Gut Renovation. She also made the short film Never Enough, which discusses clutter, collecting, and Americans’ relationships with their stuff. It won an Artistic Excellence Award at the 2010 Big Sky Documentary Festival. In 2004, Kelly with the help of Tami Gold, produced and directed Every Mother’s Son, which won the Audience Award at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, aired on the PBS “Point of View” series, and earned Kelly a nomination for a national Emmy in Direction. Kelly also worked with Tami, on Out at Work in 1997. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on HBO, and won a GLAAD Award for Best Documentary.

Joslyn Barnes is a producer. Among the films she has been involved with producing since co-founding Louverture Films are the César-nominated BAMAKO,  Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner and Oscar nominated TROUBLE THE WATER, the international cult hit BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975, the 2012 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Peabody and Grierson winner THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, the award-winning CONCERNING VIOLENCE, and the forthcoming NARROW FRAME OF MIDNIGHT. She associate produced Elia Suleiman’s THE TIME THAT REMAINS, and the 2010 Cannes Palme d’Or winner UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. She is currently producing SHADOW WORLD for Johan Grimonprez and THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING for Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein.

Colin Beckett is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and contributing member of UnionDocs. He has written about film and video for Cineaste, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Moving Image Source, Idiom, and other outlets.

Nicola Benizzi is a NYC-based cinematographer. He has collaborated as a Director of Photography with Isabella Rossellini in a series called “Seduce me” broadcasted for the Discovery Channel and on a documentary called Animal Distract Me. Other documentary projects filmed by Benizzi were Hope Deferred, a documentary directed by Jimmy Siegel inspired by Brooke Ellison, about the first quadruplegic graduating from Harvard University and the crucial importance of stem cell research, Iʼm Secretly an Important Man directed by Peter Sillen, featuring Steve Jesse Bernstein a poet/artist/drifter who was influential for the grunge movement in Seattle, and The Dance of David, directed by Axel Baumann, featuring the story of the Ark of the Covenant and itʼs journey in Israel, Egypt, and Ethiopia.

David Bering-Porter is assistant professor of film studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.  Areas of research include film studies, new media, and the intersections of media and science studies.  His current book project is a study of undead media that examine the shifts in labor, knowledge, and power that have remapped our understanding of “life” in contemporary culture focusing on the uncanny vitality of the mediated body.

Created in 2001, Cinema Tropical is the leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the United States.

Annette Danto is a filmmaker, Professor in the Department of Film at Brooklyn College and Program Director of India: Documentary Production and Cultural Studies, a study-abroad course based in India. She is a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar in Filmmaking. Recent documentaries include: Reflections On Media Ethics (2011), which includes conversations with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, George Stoney, Baroness Warnock, and others on the topic of documentary ethics and issues of representation. Her documentaries are distributed by www.forwardintime.com Danto holds degrees from McGill University, Columbia University and New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Lyell Davies teaches film and media production and theory courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His scholarly research focuses on documentary filmmaking, media justice, and social movements. As a filmmaker and community-based media educator he has been involved in participatory projects engaging New York City youth, the homeless, and immigrant workers. His own documentaries include: Spoken By An Actor: Cinema Censorship and Northern Ireland (1993); Towards a Lasting Peace: Gerry Adams in the U.S. (1994); Making Ourselves Free (1994); Ireland’s Own Berlin Wall (1994); and Brain Injury Dialogues (2008).

Whitney Dow directed Two Towns of Jasper, I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, Unfinished Country and When the Drum is Beating. His producing credits include Freedom Summer, Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America, The Undocumented and Toots. He is the recipient of the George Foster Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont Award, Anthony Radziwill Documentary Achievement Award, and the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award as well as many film festival honors. He is currently in production on the Whiteness Project, Among the Believers and Bright Lights, Dark Minds, a series on mental illness.

Jeanne C. Finley has exhibited internationally including the Guggenheim Museum, SF and NY Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum and the George Pompidou Center.  She has received fellowships from Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Creative Capital Foundation, the NEA, and the Cal Arts/Alpert Award.  Since 1989 she has worked in collaboration with John Muse on numerous projects. Finley’s artists’ residencies include the Camargo Foundation, The Headlands Center, and an Arts-Link Fellowship with Lynne Sachs. Finley is a Professor of Film and Graduate Fine Art at the California College of the Arts.

Ben Foley is a graduate student in Sociology at Rutgers University. He is interested in the ideological and material contexts of humanitarian intervention. I examine how different logics and histories have been employed over time to authorize intervention, and how such projects shape the reality of both those who are saved and those who do the saving. I’m currently exploring how contemporary US based advocacy and empowerment programs (to save those both abroad and at home) draw on neoliberal and development discourse, notions of meritocracy and multiculturalism, and missionary ideology.

Marc Francis is a PhD student in the Film and Digital Media Studies program at UC Santa Cruz. His research includes queer spectatorship and its relationship to art-house cinemas in the U.S. and Europe post-WWII.

Su Friedrich has directed twenty-three films and videos since 1978, which have been featured in eighteen retrospectives at major museums and film festivals, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. The films have been widely screened at film festivals, universities and art centers, have been extensively written about, and have won numerous awards, including Grand Prix for Sink or Swim at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Her DVD collection is distributed by Outcast Films. She teaches video production at Princeton University.

Benj Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer working in film, video, and other public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. Based in Brooklyn, NY, he is currently Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Long Island University – Post.

Dan Geva (PhD) has made over 25 full length documentary films, winning world acclaim from festivals and broadcasters alike. He is a senior lecturer in documentary studies and teaches documentary philosophy, history and practice at Bet-Berl College, Witzo College of Arts and Sam Spiegel Film Institute, among other places. His 2006 film Description of a Memory – a homage to Chris Marker’s classic: Description of a Struggle (1960) has been announced as one of the Best Ten Documentaries of the 2000s, and was recently screened at the Marker-Planet World Exposition at Centre Pompidou. As a Schusterman Grant laureate He has served as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and MICA, MD (2010). He is the 2011 Dan David Prize for a Promising Researcher in Cinema and Society. His dissertation written in Tel-Aviv University (2014), titled: “The Extended Sign of the Documentarian.”

Steve Goodman is the founder and director of the Educational Video Center in New York City. Trained as a journalist at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Steve is also the author of Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Teaching Video, Literacy & Social Change (Teachers College: 2003) and teaches a course in youth media at NYU. EVC recently celebrated its 30th anniversary of offering award-winning documentary video education for underserved youth in NYC.

Irene Gustafson is a media maker and writer who teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the Film and Digital Media department. Her film/video work has screened nationally and internationally; her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Journal of Visual Culture, Spectator, and The Moving Image Journal.

Josh Guilford is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.  He works at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, and is the director of the Providence-based experimental film and video series Magic Lantern Cinema.

Barbara Hammer is a visual artist primarily working in film and video. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multileveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with four retrospectives in the last three years, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Toronto International Film Festival. HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, her book of memoirs and personal film theory, is published by The Feminist Press, City University of New York. She is represented by the gallery KOW-Berlin in Europe where she currently has a one woman exhibition entitled Dignity.

She is most well known for making the first explicit lesbian film, Dyketactics (1974), and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000). Her recent films A Horse Is Not A Metaphor (2009), Generations(2010), and Maya Deren’s Sink (2011) were awarded Teddy Awards for Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festivals. Lover Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2010) also was honored with a Teddy Award, and Resisting Paradise (2001) was showcased on the Sundance Channel. – From the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Julia Haslett makes expressionistic documentaries that interweave contemporary and historical subjects. Her most recent film An Encounter with Simone Weil premiered at IDFA, won the Special Founder’s Prize at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, and was a New York Magazine Critic’s Pick. Julia was a Filmmaker ­in ­Residence at Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics where she made Hold Your Breath, a PBS ­broadcast documentary about cross-­cultural medicine. She received her MFA from Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts program and is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Currently, she is developing Pushed Up the Mountain, a film about environmental history in China.

Poet, translator and visual artist Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. Fields of interest include representations of the welfare state and immigrant experience; cross-genre literature and film; translation; Asian American community activism. She is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College (CUNY).

Lonnie Isabel is an associate professor and director of the International Reporting program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. Formerly, deputy managing editor of Newsday, Isabel was responsible for supervising the national, foreign, state, Washington, health and science staffs. He was editor and supervisor of Dele Olojede’s Pulitzer Prize winning series on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and has overseen coverage of the Iraq War, the aftermath of September 11th and two presidential campaigns. Isabel is on the advisory boards of the International Reporting Project and the International Media Institute of India in Delhi. He has trained journalists in Jordan and India and was appointed a Poynter Ethics Fellow in 2006. Isabel received a B.A. in African Studies from Amherst College.

Dyfrig Jones is a Lecturer in Media Studies and Media Production at Bangor University, Wales. Previous to joining the School, Dyfrig worked as a producer-director on numerous TV and radio series, as a freelance journalist, and as the editor of the current affairs magazine Barn. He is also an elected member of the Gwynedd Council, representing the ward of Gerlan on behalf of Plaid Cymru.

Sabiha Khan is an independent multimedia producer and a Lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she teaches courses in digital media production, documentary production, and the history and theory of documentary.  She currently is directing a series of youth-produced animated documentary shorts about early modern European painting for the El Paso Museum of Art. She also is developing a multimedia documentary project on Hispanic and Native American youth rediscovering their ancestral foodways in the American Southwest.  Sabiha previously was Associate Producer at the Los Angeles bureau of Youth Radio, a youth media organization based in Oakland, California. She has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, specializing in the early modern period, from the University of Michigan.

Toby Lee is an artist and scholar working across video, installation, drawing and text. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, and is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning won a 1991 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and was included in New York Magazine’s 40th anniversary approval matrix, a “deliberately oversimplified guide to 40 years in the culture capital of the world,” right next to Annie Hall, Do the Right Thing, and Pauline Kael. Livingston’s films include Who’s the Top?, Hotheads, and Through the Ice. The LA Times called “Top?” “witty and accomplished:” it premiered at the Berlinale (2005), and had extended runs at Boston’s MFA and London’s ICA. Through the Ice was commissioned by WNET and played Sundance (2006). Livingston’s working on “Earth Camp One,” a nonfiction feature about losing 4 family members in 5 years; the film’s also a broad meditation on how our culture sees impermanence and fragility. It’s been funded so far by the Guggenheim Foundation, Netflix, the Rosenthal Family Foundation, FACT, and 540 Kickstarter backers.

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produced State of Emergency, an interventionist video project, in collaboration with more than 15 artists. They began working together in the mid-seventies with a performance about the Weather Underground and then made the two-screen situationist Super-8 Disaster (1976), recently restored on DVD. They produced two 16 mm anti-documentaries on the politics of crime, and a series of satiric semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the authoritarian structures indispensable to capital. Millner’s multimedia installations have explored domestic space as a battleground, first with the theory and practice of camouflage as the controlling aesthetic and then re-creating the designs and plans in U.S. army manuals on how to boobytrap the home. Larsen is also a novelist (Not a Through Street) and a media critic. Their conceptual video, 41 Shots, based on the police murder of immigrant street peddler, Amadou Diallo, examines the implicitly racist ‘broken windows’ theory of criminology. Their new video essay Rock the Cradle explores the fierce challenge posed by the Greek uprising of December ’08-January ’09 to the rule of global capital and the state, while relocating resonant aspects of the anarchist pasts of Barcelona and the Paris Commune within present-day struggles. Millner is also a professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY.

Charles Musser is a Professor of Film Studies at Yale University.

Jonathan Oppenheim is a documentary editor whose credits include the now ­classic film Paris Is Burning, Sister Helen and Oscar nominee, Children Underground. He edited and co­-produced The Oath, the second film in Laura Poitras’ post 9/11 trilogy. Most recently, he was the co-­editor of William and the Windmill, winner of the 2013 Grand Jury Prize at SXSW, and he edited and co-­produced Before and After Dinner, a film about Andre Gregory, theater director and co-­star of My Dinner With Andre. He also edited Arguing The World, an exploration of the intersecting lives of four New York Intellectuals over 50 years, for which he received a Peabody Award.

Andrew J. Padilla is a filmmaker, independent journalist and educator born and raised in El Barrio, NYC. His family immigrated to New York City from Puerto Rico during operation bootstrap and his work has centered around communities fight to and right to determine their own fate. Since premiering his film “El Barrio Tours: Gentrification in East Harlem” at the San Diego Latino Film Fest in 2012 he’s been screening and holding dialogues on gentrification and displacement across NYC. In the fall of 2013, he raised 12k from 240 people all over the world to take the film nationwide and begin creating a new film on the effects of gentrification and displacement across the USA.

Natasha Raheja is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University with a Certificate in Culture and Media.

Pooja Rangan is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media in Eugene Lang College at The New School. Her book Immediations: Humanitarianism, Otherness, and the Documentary Logic of Intervention (forthcoming, Duke UP) examines the humanitarian impulse in documentary, and the discursive encounters among childhood, animality, ethnicity, and disability. Rangan serves on the board of the Flaherty Seminar and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in World Picture, Film Quarterly, differences, Camera Obscura, South Asian Popular Culture, and other journals and anthologies.

Mandy Rose is Associate Professor, Director of UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, co-convenor of the i-Docs Symposium and one of the curators of MIT OpenDoc Lab’s _docubase. A filmmaker and producer of interactive media; Mandy has led innovative participatory projects including the “mass observation” camcorder project – Video Nation (94-2000) and the pioneering digital storytelling project – Capture Wales (2001-2007). Mandy’s recent writing appears in The Journal of Documentary Studies (Intellect Books 1013), The Documentary Film Book (Palgrave 2013) and DIY Citizens; Critical Making and Social Media (MIT Press 2014.) Mandy blogs at CollabDocs@CollabDocs.

Lynne Sachs makes films, performances, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Lynne has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Arts-Link, and Jerome fellowships and grants from NYSCA. Lynne screened her 2013 film “Your Day is My Night” at the Museum of Modern Art, the Vancouver Film Fest, the National Gallery of Art and in Mexico, Argentina and Ecuador. Lynne was the co-editor of Millennium Film Journal’s experimental documentary issue. She teaches as an adjunct at New York University and The New School.

Paul Lloyd Sargent is a multidisciplinary artist, freelance video editor, and writer living between Brooklyn, Syracuse, and Wellesley Island, NY. Sargent’s art and research investigates the history and impact of the international shipping industry on the ecologies, economies, and communities along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River through a contemporary amalgam of new media art, radical cartography, grass roots activism, and sustainable culture as art practice. He received his MFA in video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. His video, photographic, and installation works have been presented internationally at such venues as ConFlux2009 and Proteus Gowanus in New York; Para/SiteArt Space and the Microwave Media Festival in Hong Kong; Gallery M in Berlin; BaseKamp in Philadelphia; Big Orbit and the University at Buffalo Art Gallery in Buffalo; Impakt Festival in Utrecht; Invideo Festival in Milan; OneTakeFilmFestival in Zagreb; FLEXFest in Gainsville; and Mess Hall, 7/3 Split, Dogmatic, Video Mundi, Onion City, CUFF, Hyde Park Art Center, and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Aparna Sharma is a documentary filmmaker and theorist. She works as Assistant Professor at the Dept. of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA. Her films document narratives that are overlooked in the mainstream imagination of the Indian nation. She has focused on Indian diasporas and the widows of Vrindavan previously. She is presently working in India’s northeastern region where she has completed a documentary on the Kamakhya Temple and where she is now documenting a tribal women’s weaving workshop. Aparna Sharma’s films combine techniques of observational cinema with montage practice. As a film theorist she is committed to writing about cinema practices that fall outside the normative narratives of mainstream Hindi cinema. She has previously written on Indo-Pak ties through documentary and the representation of gender in Indian cinema. Presently she is working on a book manuscript that explores non-canonical documentary practices from the Indian subcontinent.

Rachel Stevens makes projects that explore the materiality and affective qualities of images, media technologies and site. Her work has taken the form of internet archives, sculpture, photography, video, augmented reality walking tour and curatorial projects. She has exhibited and presented at conferences and festivals internationally including Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC, Viafarini gallery in Milan, ISEA in New Mexico, i-docs in Bristol, England, and Visible Evidence in NYC. She recently participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Building 110 residency on Governors Island in NYC. Her writing on art and visual culture has been published in Afterimage, Flash Art, Millennium Film Journal and other publications. Currently teaching in the Hunter College IMA MFA program, she has also taught media art and photography practice and theory at Brown University, the Brooklyn College PIMA MFA program and at the Rhode Island School of Design and worked as an associate curator for Creative Time. She has an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego and a BFA in Photography from the RISD.

Tess Takahashi is an independent scholar and a member of the editorial collective of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. Her writing has appeared there, as well as in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, MIRAJ, Millennium Film Journal, and Cinema Journal, among others. She is currently working on a book entitled Impure Film: Intermediality in the North American Avant-Garde (1968-2008).

Lora Taub-Pervizpour is the co-director of the HYPE youth media program in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She is an associate professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College and co-editor of Media & Social Justice (Palgrave MacMillan: 2012). Lora teaches youth media and documentary research at Muhlenberg, and edits the Youth Media Reporter.Lauren Treihaft is an MA candidate in Media Studies at The New School. Her research includes an examination of theories of cinematic time and their relationship to slow cinema practices and queer temporalities.

Nitin Sawhney is an assistant professor in the New School School of Media Studies. His research, teaching, and creative practice engage with the critical role of technology, artistic interventions, and DIY cultures among communities in contested spaces. Sawhney established Voices Beyond Walls, an initiative to conduct digital storytelling and youth media workshops in Palestinian refugee camps. He recently began a pilot research study in the West Bank and Gaza on the role of participatory media in building resilience and civic agency among children and adolescents. His recent documentary film Flying Paper explores the participatory culture of kite making among children in Gaza.

Samuael Topiary is an interdisciplinary media artist whose documentary projects, media performances and installations have been presented in theaters, festivals and galleries in New York City, San Francisco and beyond. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College and is currently a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz in the theory/practice Film & Digital Media program.

Hope Tucker transforms what we know as a daily form of narrative through The Obituary Project, a compendium of contemporary salvage ethnography that documents the passing of cultural markers and ways of being. She has animated cyanotypes of American downwinders; recorded mobile phone footage of the last public phone booths in Finland; retraced the path of protest that closed the only nuclear power plant in Austria; and written the text of a video out of paper clips, a Norwegian symbol of nonviolent resistance. Screenings and exhibitions include the 21er Haus, Vienna; ar/ge kunst Galeria Museo, Bolzano; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; International Film Festival Rotterdam; New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde; Punto de Vista, Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra; Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia; Zagreb Dox; and the 40th, 41st, 50th, and 51st Ann Arbor Film Festivals.

Andrea Weiss is an award-winning filmmaker and nonfiction author. Her many film credits include the documentary classics Paris Was A Woman, International Sweethearts Of Rhythm, and Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award). She teaches documentary film at the City College of New York, where she is Co-Director of the MFA Program in Media Arts Production and Founding Director of the Documentary Forum: CCNY Center for Film, Journalism and Interactive Media. Weiss was recently awarded a Fulbright for 2015 to produce her next film in Spain.

Brian Winston was the first Lincoln Chair of Communications at the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. He is also a former Vice Chancellor and Dean of Communications. Winston is also the former head of the faculty of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. He is a former dean of the College of Communications at Penn State University (State College, PA) and former Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University. Winston was also a founder member of the Glasgow Media Group and a co-author of its first two books Bad News (1976) and More Bad News (1980). In 1985, he won an Emmy for documentary script writing. He has worked on television current affairs and features and as a print journalist. He is also known for being one of the first to write on the subject of documentary and ethics. His book Media Technology and Society was named the best book of 1998 by the American Association for History and Computing.

Jody Wood’s work is time-based and performative, utilizing video, installation, performance, and community organization to engage with socially charged content. Primarily focusing on transitional moments of death, trauma, and social isolation, her work aims to unpack and meaningfully interpret these issues by working one-on-one with members of her community to create contexts and situations that should be lived or experienced in common at a particular moment. Her work has recently been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council Grants and through artist residencies with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally and she has recently held performances at El Museo del Barrio in Bronx, NY and Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY. She is currently a Socially Engaged Art Fellow with A Blade of Grass, NYC.

Betty Yu is a NYC based filmmaker, multi-media artist, media educator and longtime community organizer. For over 4 years, Betty managed the national network, Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net), a project of the Center for Media Justice. Her documentary “Resilience” about her garment worker mother fighting against sweatshop conditions, screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Ms. Yu’s interactive multi-media installation, “The Garment Worker” was part of a 5 week art exhibit in Chinatown in 2013, and featured at Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive 2014. Ms. Yu’s work has been exhibited and featured at the International Center of Photography, The Directors Guild of America, The Eastman Kodak Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Betty was a 2012 Public Artist in Residence at The Laundromat Project collecting oral histories, teaching photography and video to Chinese immigrants in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Betty has served on the Board of Working Films, Deep Dish TV, and Third World Newsreel. Ms. Yu is currently seeking her MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.

Xin Zhou is an independent curator, writer and translator based in Brooklyn, NY. He has curated programs and exhibitions at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Spectacle Theater (Brooklyn), UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art (Brooklyn), and The Wooster Group (NYC). His writing has appeared in Artforum.com.cn, The Brooklyn Rail, Film Comment, Indiewire, Modern Weekly and elsewhere. He also has worked with several film festivals and arts institutions in a variety of capacities, including the China Independent Film Festival (Nanjing), the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (New York) and Wu Wenguang Studio (Beijing). He holds a MA in Cinema Studies from New York University.