Paul Joseph Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic. He first received widespread recognition through his screenplay for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). He later continued his collaboration with Scorsese, writing or co-writing Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader has also directed 24 films, including Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), and First Reformed (2017); the latter earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Schrader's work is known for its frequent depiction of alienated men struggling through existential crises, a premise he dubbed "God’s lonely man."
Eugene Jarecki is an American filmmaker and author. He is best known as a two-time winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, as well as multiple Emmy and Peabody Awards, for his films Why We Fight, Reagan, and The House I Live In.
Jonathan Raymond is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for writing the novels The Half-Life and Rain Dragon, and for writing the short stories or novels for the films Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and First Cow, all directed by Kelly Reichardt, with whom he co-wrote the screenplays.
Lisa Cholodenko is an American screenwriter and director. Cholodenko wrote and directed the films High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), and The Kids Are All Right (2010). She has also directed television, including the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014) and Unbelievable (2019). She has been nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe and has won an Emmy and a DGA Award.
Allison Anders is an American independent film director whose films include Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca and Grace of My Heart. Anders has collaborated with fellow UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television graduate Kurt Voss and has also worked as a television director. Anders' films have been shown at the Cannes International Film Festival and at the Sundance Film Festival. She has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant as well as a Peabody Award.
Debra Granik is an American filmmaker. She is most known for 2004's Down to the Bone, which starred Vera Farmiga, 2010's Winter's Bone, which starred Jennifer Lawrence in her breakout performance and for which Granik was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and 2018's Leave No Trace, a film based on the book My Abandonment by Peter Rock.
Ramin Bahrani is an American director and screenwriter. Film critic Roger Ebert ranked Bahrani's Chop Shop (2007) as the sixth-best film of the 2000s, calling him "the new director of the decade". Bahrani was the recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Bahrani is a professor of film directing at his alma mater the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Mary Sweeney is an American director, writer, film editor and film producer. She was briefly married to American film director David Lynch, whom she collaborated with for 20 years. Sweeney worked with Lynch on several films and television series, most notably the original Twin Peaks series (1990), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Sweeney is the Dino and Martha De Laurentiis Endowed Professor in the Writing Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She was formerly the chair of the Film Independent board of directors.
Eric Daniel Metzgar is a filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco.
Marshall Curry is an Oscar-winning American documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. His films include Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Point and Shoot, and A Night at the Garden. His first fiction film was the Academy Award-winning short film The Neighbors' Window (2019).
Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. He is currently working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities..
Israela Margalit is an American concert pianist, recording artist, playwright and television writer.
Jeanne Jordan is an American independent director, producer and editor. She was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards.
Steven Ascher is an American independent director, producer and writer. He was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards. His book The Filmmaker’s Handbook is a bestselling text.
Azazel Jacobs is an American film director and screenwriter. He is the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. His short films include Kirk and Kerry and Message Machine, and his features include the acclaimed Momma's Man,Terri,The Lovers, and French Exit.
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an American documentary filmmaker. She was the director, along with her husband, Jimmy Chin, for the film Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film profiled Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017.
Michael Chandler is an American film editor of feature and documentary films, and a producer, director, and writer of documentary films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for the film Amadeus. He also won the BAFTA Award for Best Editing for the same film, which he shared with Nena Danevic. He is a two-time winner of the American Cinema Editors (ACE) Eddie Award, for Best Edited Feature for Amadeus and for Best Edited Documentary for the ABC production Can’t It Be Anyone Else?
Jeremiah Hayes is a Canadian film director, writer and editor. He is most noted as co-director, co-writer and the editor of the film Reel Injun, for which he won the Gemini Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Program at the 25th Gemini Awards in 2010. Hayes is also recognized for his work editing Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, for which he won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Editing in a Documentary at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018. Reel Injun won a Peabody Award for Best Electronic Media in 2011 and Rumble won the Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. In 2020, Rumble received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary. In 2021, Reel Injun is featured in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures core exhibition of the Stories of Cinema.
Marilyn Ness is a documentary film producer and director based in New York City She is known for social justice documentaries, including Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale (2010), Cameraperson (2016), and most notably, Charm City (2018). Her recent projects include Netflix Original documentary Becoming with Michelle Obama, which was nominated for four Primetime Emmy awards and Netflix Original documentary Dick Johnson is Dead, which was on the Academy Award Shortlist for Best Documentary in 2021. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University.
Joe Maggio is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is best known for his work on the films Virgil Bliss, Paper Covers Rock, Bitter Feast, and The Last Rites of Joe May. He is also one of the founding editors of the NYC-based literary and culture tabloid The Brooklyn Rail.
