Kimberly Ane Peirce is an American filmmaker, best known for her debut feature film, Boys Don't Cry (1999), which won Hilary Swank her first Academy Award for Best Actress. Peirce's second feature, Stop-Loss, was released by Paramount Pictures in 2008. Her third film Carrie was released on October 18, 2013. In addition to directing and writing, she is a governor of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and a National Board member of the Directors Guild of America.
James Allan Schamus is an American screenwriter, producer, business executive, film historian, professor, and director. He is a frequent collaborator of Ang Lee, the co-founder of the production company Good Machine, and the co-founder and former CEO of motion picture production, financing, and worldwide distribution company Focus Features, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal. He is currently president of the New York–based production company Symbolic Exchange, and is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University, where he has taught film history and theory since 1989.
Strand Releasing is an American film production company founded in 1989 and is based in Culver City, California. The company has distributed over 300 auteur-driven titles from acclaimed international and American directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gregg Araki, François Ozon, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Fatih Akin, Aki Kaurismäki, Claude Miller, Manoel de Oliveira, Gaspar Noé, André Téchiné and Terence Davies.
Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT website PlanetOut.com. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive, and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history was published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema from Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020, she was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list. In 2021, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. She also campaigned to have a barrier erected on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.
Outfest is an LGBTQ-oriented nonprofit that produces two film festivals, operates a movie streaming platform, and runs educational services for filmmakers in Los Angeles. Outfest is one of the key partners, alongside the Frameline Film Festival, the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival, and the Inside Out Film and Video Festival, in launching the North American Queer Festival Alliance, an initiative to further publicize and promote LGBT film.
Julie "J. D." Disalvatore was an American LGBT film and television producer/director and gay rights activist. She was openly lesbian.
Katherine Brooks is an American film writer and director. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America, a Jury Member for Samsung Fresh-Films 2007 and the recipient of the LACE Award for Arts and Entertainment. In 2011, she was named one of the "Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz" by POWER UP.
Shaz Bennett is an American writer, filmmaker, performance artist and film programmer.
Rosser Goodman is an American film and television director, writer and producer. Goodman founded her own production company, KGB Films in the 90's upon moving to Hollywood. Goodman's company is now called Circle Content in partnership with fashion designer and costume designer Oneita Parker.
The Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) is a non-profit arts organization based in New York City, founded in 2001 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff following the September 11 attacks as a means to revitalize the arts community in lower Manhattan. TFI launched its first program in 2002, the Tribeca Film Festival.
Michèle Stephenson is a Haitian filmmaker and former human rights attorney.
Victoria Mahoney is an American actress and filmmaker. Her debut feature was 2011’s Yelling to the Sky.
Wu Tsang is a filmmaker, artist and performer based in New York and Berlin, whose work is concerned with hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. In 2018, Tsang received a MacArthur "genius" grant.
Tanuj Chopra is an American film-maker. His debut feature film Punching at the Sun (2006) was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was also nominated for the Humanitas Prize. He has directed Netflix web series Delhi Crime 2 whose first part was nominated for International Emmy
Molly Macklin Fowler is an American television producer and documentary filmmaker who reframed her investigative and story-telling skills as a mitigation specialist for criminal litigation. She was Executive Producer of Red Darragh Films, LLC, and has been a supervising and co-executive producer for now-Governor Wes Moore and his Omari Productions since 2011 when she was paired with Moore for his debut as series anchor for "ABC News Beyond Believe on OWN." Together they produced the PBS mini-series “Coming Back with Wes Moore” with a grant from The Corporation for Public Broadcasting for Omari and Powderhouse Productions in Somerville, MA. In 2018, she founded Justice-Partners, Inc. a 501c3 charity initially established to make socially relevant films, the first of which was "Born To Be," the story of gender affirmation surgeon Jess Ting, M.D. which premiered at the 2019 New York Film Festival.
Eliza Hittman is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer from New York City. She has won multiple awards for her film Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which include the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the National Society of Film Critics Award—both for best screenplay.
Tina Mabry is an American film director and screenwriter from Tupelo, Mississippi. Following the release of her first feature film Mississippi Damned (2009), she was named one of '25 New Faces of Indie Film' by Filmmaker magazine and among the 'Top Forty Under 40' by The Advocate. Mabry was named a James Baldwin Fellow in Media by United States Artists.
Lisa Biagiotti is a filmmaker and journalist based in Los Angeles. She is the director and on-camera correspondent of On the Streets, a Los Angeles Times 12-part series and 72-minute feature documentary on homelessness in Southern California. She directed and produced deepsouth, an independent documentary about poverty, HIV/AIDS and LGBT issues in the rural American South. Biagiotti is a Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is of Italian descent from her father and Hakka Chinese Jamaican descent from her mother.
Andrea Weiss is an American independent documentary filmmaker, author, and professor of film/video at the City College of New York where she co-directs the MFA Program in Film. She was the archival research director for the documentary Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1984), for which she won a News & Documentary Emmy Award.
Jennifer Tiexiera is an American documentary filmmaker. She is known for directing the films P.S. Burn This Letter Please and Subject.
