COLAGE is an organization created in 1990 by the children of several lesbian and gay parents and guardians who felt a need for support.
Angela Robinson is an American film and television director, screenwriter and producer. Outfest Fusion LGBTQ People of Color Film Festival awarded Robinson with the Fusion Achievement Award in 2013 for her contribution to LGBTQ+ media visibility.
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.
NewFest: The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival put on by The New Festival, Inc., is one of the most comprehensive forums of national and international LGBT film/video in the world.
The Inside Out Film and Video Festival, also known as the Inside Out LGBT or LGBTQ Film Festival, is an annual Canadian film festival, which presents a program of LGBT-related film. The festival is staged in both Toronto and Ottawa. Founded in 1991, the festival is now the largest of its kind in Canada. Deadline dubbed it "Canada’s foremost LGBTQ film festival."
The Frameline Film Festival began as a storefront event in 1976. The first film festival, named the Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films, was held in 1977. The festival is organized by Frameline, a nonprofit media arts organization whose mission statement is "to change the world through the power of queer cinema". It is the oldest LGBTQ+ film festival in the world.
The Iris Prize, established in 2007 by Berwyn Rowlands of The Festivals Company, is an international LGBT film prize and festival which is open to any film which is by, for, about or of interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex audiences and which must have been completed within two years of the prize deadline.
Julie "J. D." Disalvatore was an American LGBT film and television producer/director and gay rights activist. She was also an animal rights activist. She was openly lesbian.
Cruel and Unusual is a 2006 American documentary film directed and produced by Janet Baus, Dan Hunt and Reid Williams about the experiences of transgender women in the United States prison system. It was screened on television as Cruel and Unusual: Transgender Women in Prison.
Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College. Stryker serves on the Advisory Council of METI and the Advisory Board of the Digital Transgender Archive. Stryker, who is a transgender woman, is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture. She is a leading scholar of transgender history.
PJ Raval is a queer first-generation Filipino-American filmmaker known for his documentary films about underrepresented subcultures and identities within the LGBTQ+ community. Raval is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Robert Giard Fellow, a member of the Producers Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences. Raval was named one of Filmmaker's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2006 and was a featured creator in the 2010 Out 100. Today, he lives in Texas and is an associate professor of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the Moody College of Communication in the University of Texas at Austin.
Ronni Lebman Sanlo is the Director Emeritus of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center and an authority on matters relating to LGBT students, faculty and staff in higher education. She recognized at an early age that she was a lesbian, but was too afraid to tell anybody. Sanlo went to college then married and had two children. At the age of 31, Ronni came out and lost custody of her young children. The treatment toward the LBGT community and her rights as a mother are what gave Sanlo the drive to get involved in activism and LGBT politics.
Silas Howard is an award-winning American film and television director, writer, and actor. His first feature film By Hook or by Crook (2001) co-directed with Harry Dodge is a seminal trans masc feature. Howard earned an MFA in directing at UCLA and is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He began directing episodes during the second season of Transparent, making him the show's first trans director.
Stuart Timmons was an American journalist, activist, historian, and award-winning author specializing in LGBT history based in Los Angeles, California. He was the author of The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement and the co-author of Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians with Lillian Faderman.
Johnny Symons is a documentary filmmaker focusing on LGBT cultural and political issues. He is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he runs the documentary program and is the director and co-founder of the Queer Cinema Project. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA in documentary production from Stanford University. He has served as a Fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program.
Queens at Heart is an American short film described as both a documentary and an exploitation film in which four trans women are interviewed about their lives. It was produced in the mid-1960s. The film was digitally preserved in 2009 by the UCLA Film and Television Archive as part of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation. Andrea James and Jenni Olson were among those who worked on its restoration.
Queer Japan is a 2019 documentary film directed, edited, and co-written by Graham Kolbeins. The documentary profiles a range of individuals in Japan who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ). Queer Japan is produced by Hiromi Iida with Anne Ishii, written by Ishii and Kolbeins, and features an original score composed by Geotic.
Ahead of the Curve is a 2020 American biographical documentary film co-produced and co-directed by Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow, with music composed by Meshell Ndegeocello. The film is based on the true story of Franco Stevens, one of the most influential women in lesbian history, and the founding publisher of Curve Magazine, a leading international lesbian lifestyle magazine. Portraying themselves in the film are, Franco Stevens, Kim Katrin, Denice Frohman, Amber Hikes, Andrea Pino-Silva, Melissa Etheridge and Jewelle Gomez. The documentary premiered in June 2020 at the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
