Zeba Blay is a cultural critic and curator born in Accra, Ghana, and based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work and interests reside at the intersection of cultural and personal identity. An NABJ-nominated writer and former Senior Culture Writer at The Huffington Post, Blay is known for her incisive critiques on the ways visual and popular culture interact with race, gender, and the representation of our collective experience. Blay's writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Bookforum, ESSENCE, SEEN Journal, Allure, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, Jezebel, Indiewire, and The Village Voice. From 2012 to 2016 she co-hosted the podcast Two Brown Girls. Blay has also written for the Webby Award-nominated MTV series “Decoded,” and has appeared as a cultural commentator on networks such as MSNBC and NPR. In 2021, she published her debut book of essays on Black women in pop culture, Carefree Black Girls.

​​Kyle Alex Brett is a Los Angeles-based attorney and is Director of Business and Legal Affairs at Blumhouse. Prior to his current role, Kyle worked as counsel at Netflix, as well as a few entertainment law firms and began his career in New York City as a corporate associate at Simpson Thacher. In addition, Kyle also serves as General Counsel for The Creative Collective and their flagship conference, CultureCon (the premiere conference for black and brown creatives) and their film and television division, CultureCon Studios. In 2021, Kyle was selected to attend a masterclass hosted by Ava DuVernay's production company, ARRAY, where a small a group of filmmakers were invited to study with legendary filmmaker, Haile Gerima. In his free time, Kyle watches a movie every single day and obsessively tweets his thoughts about them on Twitter, which he refuses to call X.

Robyn Citizen, PhD is the Director of Programming, Festival and Cinematheque at the Toronto International Film Festival since January 2022. Before joining TIFF’s programming team in 2018, she was a Lecturer at the University of British Columbia from 2012 to 2017. She has published essays in edited volumes and film journals, served on various film festival juries, programmed for the Human Rights Film Festival and was previously Board co-chair of the local Breakthroughs Film Festival.

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to The New York Times, IndieWire, and Screen Daily. He has covered film festivals around the world ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, Los Angeles Times, and TIME about Black American pop culture and issues of representation. He has served as a Gotham Awards nominating committee member since 2020.

Nia Hampton is a cultural worker from West Baltimore, MD. After starring in Al Jazeera America’s viral doc about the similarities in police brutality in Brazil and Baltimore she began a career in freelance journalism. Her written work has been featured in Vice, The Village Voice, Dazed Digital, Genius.com, Paste Magazine, GlitterMOB, and Griots Republic to name a few. Her photo and videography work has been covered by BESE, AFROPUNK and screened in the Baltimore Museum of Art. She founded the Black Femme Supremacy Film Fest in 2018 and has since screened thousands of films by and for black femmes.

Zia Anger works in moving images. In 2018 she began touring a performance that traces the last ten years of her lost and abandoned work, titled MY FIRST FILM. Since 2020 she has been working on a feature-length adaptation of the performance, which is currently in post-production.

Alex Huggins is a New York based filmmaker from Salt Lake City, UT. After moving to NY in 2017 to work under Josh and Benny Safdie at Elara Pictures, Alex became a screenwriting resident here at Indie Memphis in 2018. As a director and cinematographer, Alex has experience working in both large and small form commercial, documentary and narrative film. Alex has most recently worked as a staff writer on The Curse, a Showtime limited series by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie premiering this fall at the New York Film Festival.

A.E. Hunt (he/they) is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker from Illinois, a cameraperson in doc/narrative production, and a freelance theatrical booker, programmer, and film critic, in publications like Criterion, SEEN, Sight & Sound, and Rappler. He recently edited a two-volume memoir about writer/director Mike De Leon’s life during the first and second golden ages of Philippine cinema, "Last Look Back," and guest edited a writing series for Sentient Art Film's release of Lo Que Queda En El Camino to community spaces across the US-Mexico border.

Lydia Ogwang is a curator, writer, and cultural worker based in New York and Toronto. She is currently Programmer at Metrograph in New York City.

Clyde Folley is a video editor and film programmer living in New York City. He is on staff at the Criterion Collection and his programming credits include ’80s Horror and ’90s Horror on the Criterion Channel.

With over a decade of experience, Morgan Rhodes has music supervised some of the most groundbreaking series in television including Queen Sugar (OWN) Dear White People (Netflix) Unprisoned (Onyx/Hulu), Run The World (Starz) and Sony Pictures Animated forthcoming Young Love, as well as seminal films Selma (Paramount), Space Jam 2 (WB) and The Color Purple (WB) slated for release on Christmas Day 2023. With her background in music that began with a DJ stint at tastemaking station KCRW, Morgan has earned a reputation as a crate digging music supervisor with a keen ear for hidden gems. Her onscreen work is a testament to her deep musical knowledge and a commitment to research.

Her work's been nominated for a Guild of Music Supervisors Award and a Grammy and has been highlighted in Variety magazine and The LA Times. She co-hosted the prolific music podcast Heat Rocks and spent 3 years as one of the featured music critics on KPCC's "Tuesday Reviewsday".

She's a graduate of Clark Atlanta University.

Jamila Wignot is an award-winning Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Her body of work includes AILEY (Sundance '21); the Peabody, Emmy, and NAACP award-winning THE AFRICAN AMERICANS: MANY RIVERS TO CROSS; TOWN HALL a feature-length co-production with ITVS about the Tea Party movement; and for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE the Peabody Award-winning "Triangle Fire" and Emmy-nominated "Walt Whitman." Wignot’s producing credits include Sierra Pettengill’s RIOTSVILLE, USA (Sundance '22); “Hands On,” for The New York Times FX/Hulu series The Weekly; W. Kamau Bell’s directorial debut BRING THE PAIN: THE DOCUMENTARY; and the narrative A STRAY (SXSW ’16) by Sundance Award-winning director Musa Syeed. She is currently directing and co-producing an HBO docuseries about Memphis-based soul music label Stax Records.

Allison Inman is a filmmaker and education and engagement director at the Belcourt Theatre, Nashville's nonprofit film center -- a dream job that allows her to watch and discuss films with people of all ages. She hosts filmmaker Q&As, panel discussions, performances and film seminars and teaches visual literacy/cinema appreciation in schools and community centers with the Belcourt’s Mobile Movie Theatre. She previously worked in film engagement for ITVS and Rocky Mountain PBS, hosting public screenings and discussions of social-issue documentary films in Nashville, Denver and New Orleans, and as a corporate copywriter and communications consultant. In 2011, directed MUD ON THE STARS: STORIES FROM ELIA KAZAN’S WILD RIVER, a documentary about the first big studio film shot in Tennessee. She served as a producer of the Moving Picture Boys’ SAINT CLOUD HILL, which profiles a tent city in Nashville facing eviction, and which was broadcast on PBS’s Reel South in 2019. Most recently, she is working on a series of short documentaries with The Moving Picture Boys (Jace Freeman and Sean Clark), capturing middle Tennessee culture through portraits of workplaces. Carthage House of Beauty, which profiles a day in the life of a small-town beauty shop, and Hi Tech Service, about a beloved, now-closed stereo repair shop on Nashville’s Nolensville Pike, premiered at the Nashville Film Festival in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and aired together on Nashville Public Television in May 2023. Carthage House of Beauty was named Best Tennessee Short at the 2021 Nashville Film Festival.

Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Kristen's work is centered at the juxtaposition of racial representation and its place within the film and television industries in particular as it concerns issues of labor and employment. Warner’s work can be found in academic journals, a host of anthologies and online platforms such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Cut.

Rachael Valentine Acosta is a non-binary Venezuelan-American filmmaker and programmer rooted in Houston, Texas. After years of freelancing in film production, Rachael transitioned to film festivals and nonprofit endeavors. They've since worked at esteemed organizations like SXSW, ATX Television Festival, Austin Film Festival, Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), and SFFILM. Currently, they serve as the Marketing and Outreach Coordinator at the Houston Cinema Arts Society and volunteer with Friends of River Oaks Theater, The Big Queer Picture Show, and Dykes The World.

​​jeanelle augustin serves as Director of Original Voices Documentary Films for NBCU Academy, a new artist development and inclusion initiative for US-based independent documentary filmmakers making intersectional, formally innovative films that highlight stories by and about BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+ folx, femmes, and people with disabilities regardless of career stage or immigration status. Born and based in New York City, she works to create the conditions for artistic freedom. jeanelle was named a 2021 DOC NYC Documentary New Leader and selected for the 2022 Rockwood Documentary Leaders Fellowship supported by the Ford Foundation. jeanelle has film programmed for CIFF, True/False, and Big Sky, led filmmaker labs and seminars for BlackStar Projects, Firelight Media, and UnionDocs, and served on festival juries and funding panels for BAVC, BGDM, Chicago Media Project, Chicken & Egg Pitcures, Creative Capital, Define American, Doc Society, Film Independent, The Gotham, IDA, Indie Memphis, Mezcla Media, NEA, NOFF, NYU, Open City, Palm Springs ShortFest, SFFILM, and Sundance Institute. She is a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, the Advisory Council at Define American, and served as the Vice President of the Board of The Flaherty.

Xenia Matthews is an innovative film and visual artist whose glittering, hyper-saturated work explores personal experiences of black womanhood, the body, and the soul —externalizing what often only exists internally.

Her impactful work has been recognized by Filmmaker Magazine in “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and by festivals like BlackStar, Indie Memphis, and Sundance. In the future, she seeks to create immersive installation experiences and is currently working on her first feature film.

Blair Barnes is a director from South Central Los Angeles. He was formerly ¼ of the Staff Picks team at Vimeo, where he served as Curator. Prior to Vimeo, he contributed to the production and creative teams at Wieden+Kennedy and VIRTUE, the creative agency by VICE.

For almost 15 years, Alece has dedicated her career to guiding emergent filmmakers through her work in marketing, distribution, partnerships, and strategy at such organizations as Film at Lincoln Center, BAMcinema, Rooftop Films, Athena Film Festival, Fandor, and Good Deed Entertainment. Currently, as the Director of Industry and Festival Outreach at Columbia University’s Film Program, she advises hundreds of filmmakers on career paths in producing, directing, and writing. Alece is an esteemed alumna of Columbia University where she serves on their alumni board and a proud HBCU graduate of Winston-Salem State University. In her free time, she enjoys writing and telling stories in any format.

Christopher Makoto Yogi is from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. His debut feature film, "August at Akiko's", had its World Premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2018 to critical acclaim. Richard Brody in The New Yorker put it on his list of “Best Films of 2019”. His next feature film, "I Was a Simple Man", premiered in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Previously, it participated in the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, IFP Film Week, Film Independent's Fast Track, received a Jerome Foundation grant and a Cinereach grant. Chris' short films include the documentaries "Occasionally, I Saw Glimpses of Hawai‘i" and "Makoto: or, Honesty," and the fiction film "Obake (Ghosts)." His 2009 film "Layover, on the Shore" was awarded Best Hawaiian Short at the Big Island Film Festival. “I Was a Simple Man” and his short films are currently available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

Richard Jamal Echols is a multi-disciplinary artist predominately recognized as a painter. Richard is a proud native of Memphis, TN. Growing up in Memphis exposed Richard to various forms of art such as poetry, music, and visual art. Exposure to art early on sparked Richard’s interest in drawing people. From an early age, Richard had a strong interest in drawing people. With a passion for figurative art, he creates narrative paintings that depict black figures interacting within a diverse range of environments. This thoughtful representation is vital because contemporary art needs to see black representation to bring forth cultural awareness.

Throughout his artistic journey, Richard has drawn inspiration from artists, musicians, movies, and most importantly life experiences. This has allowed him to develop a unique artistic voice that blends classic painting techniques with contemporary subject matters.

Richard’s work has been exhibited at the Dixon Art Gallery, Crosstown Arts, Art Museum of the University of Memphis, and Memphis International Airport. In his ongoing artistic practice, Richard continues to explore the boundaries of painting, pushing the envelope and challenging conventional norms.

Kathryn Hicks is the Founder and Art Director of Creature Studio, a Memphis-based company specializing in crafting immersive experiences for businesses and brands. With a background that spans eight years in extended reality (XR)—an umbrella term encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed-reality technologies—Kathryn leads a team skilled in creating solutions that captivate audiences and solve real-world challenges.

Her journey in XR took off at Savannah College of Art and Design, evolving into a varied portfolio that includes healthcare, enterprise, education, gaming, and advertisement sectors. In 2017, she became an Oculus Launch Pad program alumna and later contributed to Mend, a Meta-funded project. This asymmetric VR co-op platformer allows flat-screen and VR players to co-exist in the same gaming environment.

As an official Snap Lens Network AR Creator, Kathryn has achieved distinct recognition, notably for a custom landmarker filter for the popular HBO show House of the Dragon—as part of a worldwide launch of 20 custom landmark filters to promote the show.

Guided by the ambition to turn myths into reality, Kathryn's work at Creature Studio transcends technological innovation. She aims to deliver high-quality, immersive experiences that inject a sense of magic into the everyday realm.

Allie Mounce is a lifelong Memphian and designer. She graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville with a BFA in Graphic Design in 2010, and has since created award-winning work in illustration, branding, and web design for creative agencies, national brands, and international clients under her own name and as part of her collaborative design studio, Pretty Useful Co.

Mounce’s clean, geometric illustration and branding style is influenced by mid century artists like Charley Harper. She primarily works digitally, but often translates her digital work to more traditional mediums including screenprints, painted murals, and fine art.

Past clients include: Meta, Paramount, FedEx, Critical Role, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Memphis Tourism, and more.