Courtney Symone Staton, from Greenville, NC, is an activist who uses poetry, film and photography to celebrate the everyday heroism found in protest and black identity. A graduating senior at UNC-Chapel Hill’, she serves as lead producer and impact producer of “Silence Sam,” a participatory documentary on the systemic silencing of student activism by university administrators during UNC-Chapel Hill’s most recent student-led movement to remove Confederate monument “Silent sam” from campus. A 2018 NeXt Doc Fellow, she hopes to use her art to drive viewers past the point of empathy to the point of action.

Kristy is a Korean-American filmmaker and writer interested in themes of power and belonging as they connect to land use, migration, and the imagination of boundaries. The framework of environmental justice has profoundly shaped her politics and continues to shape the way she sees the world as a documentarian.

Her work has aired on PBS NewsHour and has been published in Teen Vogue, Washington City Paper, DeSmogBlog and more. She is a Southern Exposure fellow and is currently directing a short documentary film on the North Birmingham communities in Alabama. She is also producing a documentary film with support from Glassbreaker Films on punk feminist legend Mimi Thi Nguyen.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and completed a multimedia DAAD Post-Graduate Fellowship at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She is a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the Asian American Documentary Network.

Maya Cueva is an award-winning director and producer for documentary films and radio. Her work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Latino USA, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, and NBC Nightly News. Maya’s documentary work has screened internationally and across the U.S., including SXSW, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Full Frame Documentary Festival, and the Ringerike International Youth Film Festival in Norway. Her short documentary, The Provider, was also awarded an Emmy at the College Television Awards in 2015. She is a 2019 Sundance Ignite Fellow part of the Sundance Film Institute and a Valentine and Clark Emerging Artist Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center.

Quyên Nguyen-Le (they/them) is a queer and gender nonconforming Vietnamese-American filmmaker, whose narrative and documentary films have been shown in various film festivals, universities, art galleries, community spaces internationally. In the past, Quyên was a recipient of the Emma L. Bowen Foundation’s Fellowship at Focus Features/NBCUniversal (2011-2013), Visual Communications’ Armed with a Camera fellowship (2016) and a finalist for the Barbara Hammer Experimental Filmmaking Grant (2017). Recently, Quyên participated in the National Minority Consortia’s documentary program with the Center for Asian American Media and Vision Maker Media. Their forthcoming documentary was a recipient of CAAM’s inaugural Documentaries for Social Change award. Quyên holds B.A. in Comparative Literature and Philosophy, Politics & Law from the University of Southern California.

Sonali Udaybabu is a filmmaker who works in the documentary and experimental modes. In her work, she is interested in the politics and dialectics of identity: gender, nationality, community, and in the human pursuit of freedom, agency and assigning meaning to lived experience. In the past, Sonali has worked as a cinematographer, assistant editor and assistant director on documentary and short narrative films. She has been involved with media activist and queer feminist organizations since her teen years; experiences and values gathered from this time inform her work. Her research interests include dialectics + film form, critical theory, postcolonial studies, globalization, gender theory, feminist studies, documentary film, ethnographic film, and visual anthropology. She is from India and lives in Philadelphia as an MFA student in Film and Media Arts.

Producer, writer/director, founder of the Brown Girls Doc Mafia
Iyabo Boyd is a screenwriter, director, and producer working in fiction and documentary film. She participated in Sundance Film Institute’s 2018 Screenwriting Intensive and Sundance Film Festival’s 2019 Talent Forum with her feature script Kayla and Eddie en Français, about an estranged black father and daughter reconnecting in Paris. Her 2014 short Forever Ally, about a gay black man writing letters to his recently deceased cat played the Seattle, Atlanta, and Boston LGBT Film Festivals. Iyabo’s latest short Me Time is a feminist comedy about masturbation, and is slated to play festivals in April 2019. As a producer, Iyabo was a Sundance Creative Producers Fellow and an Impact Partners Creative Producers Fellow in 2016 for the feature documentary For Ahkeem about a teenage black girl coming of age in St. Louis just after Ferguson, which premiered at the Berlin International and Tribeca Film Festivals. Iyabo is also the founder of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, a collective for women filmmakers of color working in documentary, which has 2,500 members globally.

Director, Whose Streets?

A radical truth teller who still believes that love and compassion can save humanity, Sabaah Folayan made her directorial debut at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival with the feature length documentary Whose Streets?. Nominated for Peabody , Gotham and Critic’s Choice awards, the film chronicles the experiences of activists living in Ferguson, Missouri when Michael Brown Jr. was killed. Whose Streets? was distributed theatrically by Magnolia Pictures, and supported by the Sundance Documentary Film Program, Tribeca Film Institute, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation among many others.

Sabaah uses written and visual media to bring a hopeful yet unflinching perspective to the urgent questions of our time. Born in Los Angeles, raised on Maui and educated in New York City, the challenge of thriving in vastly different environments has made Sabaah an expert at resilience. She attended Columbia University as a premedical student and graduated with a degree in biology. Outside-the-box thinking and passion for social good then drew her to the non-profit and grassroots sectors where she honed strategic planning and community organizing skills before becoming a filmmaker. Having gone from homelessness to global recognition, Sabaah’s outlook on social change is heartfelt, experience based, and fearlessly inclusive.

Editor (Harlan County, USA, Trouble the Water, Queen of Versailles…)

Mary Lampson is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker and editor. Lampson co-edited the Academy Award–winning documentary classic Harlan County, USA. She has worked with documentary legends like Barbara Kopple, Emile de Antonio, Ricky Leacock, and D.A. Pennebakbr. She also produced and directed Until She Talks, a 40-minute dramatic film that aired on the PBS series American Playhouse, and 25 short live-action films for Sesame Street.

Recent projects include: Trouble the Water (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal), Kimjonglilia (NC Heikin), Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield), This Changes Everything (Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein), The Islands and the Whales (Mike Day), The Bad Kids (Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe), Eating Animals (Christopher Quinn) and Generational Wealth (Lauren Greenfield.) She has been both a fellow and advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Editing and Story Lab and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Director of Narrative Film, Kickstarter

Based in New York since 2015 and currently Director of Narrative Film at Kickstarter. Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. A home for film, music, art, theater, games, comics, design, photography, and more. Prior to this, 8 years working with documentary filmmakers at Doc Society (formerly BRITDOC), a nonprofit Foundation based in London and New York that develops, implements and evaluates innovative models for informing and engaging communities through documentary film.