Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.
Lourdes Portillo is a Mexican film director, producer, and writer.
Thomas Linden Neff -, known as Tom Neff, is an American film executive, director and producer, born in Chicago, Illinois. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sara Miller Driver is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.
Joyce Chopra is an American director.
Cinema of Palestine is relatively young in comparison to Arab cinema as a whole. Palestinian films are not exclusively produced in Arabic and some are even produced in English and French. Elia Suleiman has emerged as one of the most notable working Palestinian directors.
Leanne Pooley ONZM is a Canadian filmmaker based in Auckland, New Zealand. Pooley was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, she immigrated to New Zealand in the mid-1980s and began working in the New Zealand television and film industry before moving to England where she worked for many of the world's top broadcasters. She returned to New Zealand in 1997 and started the production company Spacific Films. Her career spans more than 25 years and she has won numerous international awards. Leanne Pooley was made a New Zealand Arts Laureate in 2011 and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year's Honours List 2017. She is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Renee Tajima-Peña is an American filmmaker whose work focuses on immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing and producing credits include the documentaries Who Killed Vincent Chin?, No Más Bebés, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women and the 5-part docuseries Asian Americans.
Debra Chasnoff was an American documentary filmmaker and activist whose films address progressive social justice issues. Her production company GroundSpark produces and distributes films, educational resources and campaigns on issues ranging from environmental concerns to affordable housing to preventing prejudice.
Whitney Keyes has served as a speaker sponsored by U.S. State Department on issues related to social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility and women in leadership, and is the author of Propel: Five Ways to Amp Up Marketing and Accelerate Business. With filmmaker Wyatt Bardouille, she co-hosted and produced WhitneyandWyatt.com, one of the first independent, online television talk shows for women. Keyes has been an adjunct professor of Global Reputation Management at Seattle University and a fellow of the Center for Strategic Communications. She is an American speaker, writer and has been a television host.
Melody Gilbert is an independent documentary filmmaker, and educator from Washington, D.C. now living in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She has directed, filmed, produced, and sometimes edited, seven independent feature-length documentaries since 2002. The Documentary Channel calls her "one of the most fearless filmmakers in contemporary documentary cinema." She is currently an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern State University.
Jed Riffe is an American filmmaker and founder of Jed Riffe Films + Electronic Media. For over 30 years his documentary films have focused on social issues and politics including: Native American histories and struggles and agriculture, food and sustainability issues. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tami Kashia Gold is a documentary filmmaker, visual artist and educator. She is also a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York in the Department of Film and Media Studies.
Soudabeh Moradian is an Iranian-American independent filmmaker. A number of her movies have been in official selection of various international film festivals and many of them won awards. She has made many documentary series about Iranian rural women, and some independent documentaries about "war and madness" such as "Doomsday Machine"," Story Of The Land On Ashes","Mahin", "Voices Against Them" and some other narrative and docufiction films and series like "The Leader of Caravan","My Name Is Tomorrow" and "Les Chroniques d'iran". She made her first full feature-length narrative called Polaris in 2014 in Los Angeles and Seattle starring Bahram Radan, Alicja Bachleda, Elisabeth Röhm and Coby Ryan McLaughlin. The subjects of her movies are mainly based on social issues, women and psychological impacts of war.
Dominica: Charting a Future for Paradise is a 2011 documentary short film about the history of the Commonwealth of Dominica and the challenges it faces as a young independent nation. The film has screened at the Africa World Documentary Film Festival in St. Louis and in Barbados, the Montreal Black Film Festival, and it received the award for Best Documentary Short at the 2012 Third World Independent Film Festival.
Erin Li is a Taiwanese-American filmmaker, writer, director and producer. She has directed and written the short films To The Bone, L.A. Coffin School and others. She has also served as an Associate Producer on the documentaries Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp (2012), The Girls in the Band (2011), America The Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments (2011), and Voices Unveiled: Turkish Women Who Dare (2009).
Sophie Deraspe is a Canadian director, scenarist, director of photography and producer. Prominent in new Quebec cinema, she is known for a 2015 documentary The Amina Profile, an exploration of the Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari hoax of 2011. She had previously written and directed the narrative feature films Missing Victor Pellerin in 2006, Vital Signs in 2009, The Wolves in 2015,
Alice Waddington is a Spanish film director, writer, photographer and costume designer having developed most of her work in the field of modern cinema. Her directing style is defined by a contemporary approach to the golden era of large-scale-studio horror films (1920s–1970s) in classical production companies such as Hammer Films or Universal's Creature Features; mixed with current surreal humor and sometimes including musical cinema.
Sophie Hyde is an Australian film director, writer, and producer based in Adelaide, South Australia. She is co-founder of Closer Productions and known for her award-winning debut fiction film, 52 Tuesdays (2013) and the comedy drama Animals (2019). She has also made several documentaries, including Life in Movement (2011), a documentary about dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke, and television series, such as The Hunting (2019). Her latest film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, premiered at the Sundance Festival on 23 January 2022, and was released on Hulu and in cinemas in the UK and Australia.
Kimberlee Bassford is an independent documentary filmmaker from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. In 2005, she founded Making Waves Films LLC, which is a documentary production company. She advocates for gender equity and diversity in films and television. Most of her work focuses on Asian American women and young girls, and her films actively seek to correct underrepresentation of those groups in the media.
