Kimberly Ane Peirce is an American filmmaker, best known for her debut feature film, Boys Don't Cry (1999), which won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Hilary Swank's performance. Her second feature, Stop-Loss, was released by Paramount Pictures in 2008. Her film Carrie was released on October 18, 2013. She is a governor of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and a National Board member of the Director's Guild of America.
Joanna Priestley is a contemporary film director, producer, animator and teacher. Her films are in the collections of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Priestley has had retrospectives at the British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art and Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan. Bill Plympton calls her the "Queen of independent animation". Priestley lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Helen Wingard Hill was an American artist, filmmaker, writer, teacher, and social activist. When her final film, The Florestine Collection, was released in 2011, curators and critics praised her work and legacy, describing her, for example, as "one of the most well-regarded experimental animators of her generation."
Abigail Child is a filmmaker, poet, and writer who has been active in experimental writing and media since the 1970s. She has completed more than thirty film and video works and installations, and six books. Child's early film work addressed the interplay between sound and image through reshaping narrative tropes, prefiguring many concerns of contemporary film and media.
Bady Minck is a Luxembourgian filmmaker, film producer and artist.
Lilli Carré is a contemporary artist, filmmaker, and cartoonist from Los Angeles. She now lives and works in Chicago.
Athina Rachel Tsangari is a Greek filmmaker. Some of her most notable works include her feature films, The Slow Business of Going (2000), Attenberg (2010) and Chevalier (2015) as well as the co-production of Yorgos Lanthimos films Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2009), and Alps (2011). In her versatile work for cinema, she has also founded and been director of the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival. In 2014-2015, she was invited to Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies department as a Visiting Lecturer on Art, Film, and Visual Studies.
So Yong Kim is a Korean American independent filmmaker. She has made four feature films: In Between Days, Treeless Mountain, For Ellen, and Lovesong. So Yong Kim is a recipient of the New York Foundation’s Video Artist Grant, Puffin Grant, MacDowell Colony Media Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sleipnir Nordik Arts Travel Grant. She has exhibited her installations and films/videos in Austin, Chicago, New York, London, Marseilles, Reykjavik, Milwaukee, Gothenburg, Osnabruck, and Tokyo.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer whose films have screened worldwide in prestigious film festivals, museums, galleries, universities and microcinemas since 2005. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
Eliza Hittman is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer from New York City.
Terence Nance is an American filmmaker, writer, director, actor, musician and black nationalist from Dallas, Texas. He is best known for his directing debut An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, and as the creator of the avant-garde TV "program" Random Acts of Flyness, which is produced by his production company MVMT and airs on HBO.
Sasha Waters Freyer is an American filmmaker and a Professor of Film and Art Foundation at the #1 Public Fine Arts School in the country, Virginia Commonwealth University.
Larry Janiak is a Chicago filmmaker, animator and designer. Janiak was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Lane Technical College Prep High School where he collaborated with Wayne Boyer and Ronald Larson to create animated cartoon shorts. These high school films were recognized by the Chicago Tribune, Hollywood and the IIT Institute of Design. Janiak then attended the Institute of Design and learned under the influence of László Moholy-Nagy's principles of the "American Bauhaus". After school, Janiak began work in advertising, where he employed these principles of design, and the experimental practices he learned at Institute of Design in his industrial filmmaking. Janiak not only made advertising films, he also created documentaries, experimental films, animations, graphic design pieces, and worked as a professor at the Institute of Design from 1968 to 1980. Much of his work was inspired by his spiritual practices with the Vivekananda Vedanta Society in Chicago, which he was a member of beginning in 1965.
Amanda Strong is a Michif Indigenous filmmaker, media artist and stop-motion director based out of the unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has exhibited work and her films have been screened at festivals worldwide, including Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
Ja'Tovia M. Gary is an American artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York.
Sofia Bohdanowicz is a Canadian filmmaker. She is known for her collaborations with Deragh Campbell and made her feature film directorial debut in 2016 with Never Eat Alone. Her second feature film, Maison du Bonheur, was a finalist for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award at the 2018 Toronto Film Critics Association Awards. That year, she won the Jay Scott Prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association. Her third feature film, MS Slavic 7, which she co-directed with Campbell, had its world premiere at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in 2019. She has also directed several short films, such as Veslemøy's Song (2018) and Point and Line to Plane (2020).
Kevin Jerome Everson is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Catya Plate is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. She is best known for her stop-motion animated short-films The Reading, Hanging by a Thread and Meeting MacGuffin.
The Grand Bizarre is a 2018 American film by experimental animator Jodie Mack. The film is an examination of the global textile industry.
Deragh Campbell is a Canadian actress and filmmaker. She is known for her acclaimed performances in independent Canadian cinema. Her collaborations with filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz—Never Eat Alone (2016), Veslemøy's Song (2018), MS Slavic 7 (2019), and Point and Line to Plane (2020)—have screened at film festivals internationally. She has also featured in two of Kazik Radwanski's films, How Heavy This Hammer (2015) and Anne at 13,000 Ft. (2019), both of which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
