Ra'anan Alexandrowicz

Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is a director, screenwriter and editor. He is known for the documentary The Law in These Parts (2011), which received the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, a Peabody award, and numerous other prizes. His earlier documentaries, The Inner Tour (2001) and Martin (1999), were shown in the Berlin Film Festival's Forum section and MoMA's New Directors / New Films series. Alexandrowicz’s single fiction feature, James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003), premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and at the Toronto International Film Festival and received several international awards. Alexandrowicz’s films have been released theatrically in the United States and Europe, and broadcast by PBS, ARTE, the BBC, as well as other television channels. Ra’anan served several times as an editing advisor for the Sundance Documentary Fund and his film The Viewing Booth is supported by the Sundance Art of Nonfiction initiative

Kitty Green

An award-winning Australian filmmaker, Kitty Green’s debut documentary, Ukraine is not a Brothel, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2013, screened at over 50 film festivals internationally and won the AATCA award for Best Australian Feature Documentary. Her follow-up documentary short, The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul won the jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and her latest feature documentary, Casting JonBenet, was acquired as a Netflix Original, premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and 2017 Berlinale before also receiving the AACTA Award for Best Feature Documentary. Kitty Green was a 2017 Sundance Institute Art of Non Fiction Fellow.

Kirsten Johnson

Kirsten Johnson works as a director and a cinematographer. Her first documentary she produced, “Cameraperson,”  premiered at Sundance and won many awards. Her shooting appears in the Sundance 2012 Audience Award winner, “The Invisible War”. In the last year, as the supervising DP on Abby Disney and Gini Reticker’s series, “Women, War and Peace”, she traveled to Colombia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. She shared the 2010 Sundance Documentary Competition Cinematography Award with Laura Poitras for “The Oath”. She shot the Tribeca Film Festival 2008 Documentary winner, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell’. Her cinematography is featured in “Farenheit 9/11”, Academy Award-nominated “Aslyum”, Emmy-winning “Ladies First”, and Sundance premiere documentaries, “Finding North”, “This Film is Not Yet Rated”, “American Standoff”, and “Derrida”. A chapter on her work as a cinematographer is featured in the book, “The Art of the Documentary”. She is currently editing a documentary on sight that she shot and directed in Afghanistan. Her previous documentary as a director, “Deadline”, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at Sundance in 2004, was broadcast on primetime NBC, and won the Thurgood Marshall Award.

Marshalle Montgomery Favors

Marshalle Montgomery Favors is a film producer/director and expert facilitator in dialogues on racial equity, engagement and inclusion. For more than 20 years, Marshalle has been devoted to building cross-cultural relationships between diverse communities and developing collective strategies and solutions that affect social equity. Her specialties include Program Development & Management, Cross Cultural Collaborations & Partnerships, Multicultural Training, Implicit Bias Training, Cultural Competency Training and Leadership Development. As a filmmaker, Marshalle has produced six independent feature films and has written and directed 3 short films. Her passion for indie films inspired her to co-found the Trinity International Film Festival and Fearless Tribe of Fanatic Filmmaker in Detroit. Marshalle works in collaboration with other filmmakers to host film screenings, workshops, and networking events with industry professionals. Marshalle works purposefully to contribute to the growth of the film community in metro Detroit. Recently, she was the recipient of the 25 most Influential Women in Detroit Award. 

Brad Prager

Brad Prager is a Professor of German and an active member of the Program in Film Studies at the University of Missouri. Professor Prager has been a DAAD Guest Professor at the University of Paderborn, where he organized the conference "The Holocaust on Screen in the 21st Century." He has been a guest at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is the University of Missouri System Representative to the state's Holocaust Education and Awareness Commission. He is presently completing a book on Holocaust documentaries for Bloomsbury. Professor Prager is the author of The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007) and Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007).

Zia Anger

Zia Anger works in moving images. In 2018 she began touring a new solo performance that traces the last ten-years of her lost and abandoned work, titled “My First Film”. Her most recent short MY LAST FILM premiered at the 53rd New York Film Festival. In 2015 her short I REMEMBER NOTHING had its world premiere at New Directors/New Films and its international premiere at Festival del film Locarno. She has made music videos for various artists including: Mitski, Beach House, Maggie Rogers, and Jenny Hval; the latter of whom she also toured with - as a performer and stage director. Her work has been written about in various publications including: The New Yorker, The New York Times, Mubi, and Filmmaker Magazine,

Robert Greene

Robert Greene’s latest award winning film BISBEE ’17 premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. His previous film Kate Plays Christine won a Jury Award for Writing at Sundance 2016. Robert’s documentaries include the Gotham Awards-nominated Actress, Fake It So Real and the Gotham Awards-nominated Kati With An I. Robert was an inaugural Sundance Art of Nonfiction fellow in 2015 and is a three-time nominee for Best Director at the Cinema Eye Honors. The Independent named Robert one of their 10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2014 and he received the 2014 Vanguard Artist Award from the San Francisco DocFest. His first documentary, Owning the Weather, was screened at the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Robert has edited over a dozen features, including Her Smell (2018), Golden Exits (2017), Queen of Earth (2015) and Listen Up Philip (2014) by Alex Ross Perry, Amanda Rose Wilder’s award winning Approaching the Elephant (2014), Charles Poekel’s Spirit Awards-nominated Christmas, Again (2015) and Douglas Tirola’s Hey Bartender (2013). He has been a Sundance Edit Lab Advisor and was on the U.S. Documentary Jury for Sundance 2017. Robert writes for outlets such as Sight & Sound and serves as the Filmmaker-in-Chief for the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri.

Robert Kolodny

Robert Kolodny is an Emmy Award winning Director, Writer and Cinematographer based in New York City. He is the founder and Creative Director of House of Nod, a full service cinematic production company. He is the Director of the upcoming feature length non-fiction film SERAFIM (2019). His short film FLY ON OUT (2013) screened at the Court Métrage at the 67th Festival de Cannes, won first prize in the of the AbelCine/Vision Research Phantom High-Speed Challenge and the Audience Choice Award (short form) at the HBO/BET Urbanworld Film Festival. In 2013 he won a New York Emmy Award for his Direction on the series FRANKIE COOKS. His short film SHELTER (2010) was the recipient of a Human Spirit Award from the National Board of Review, a Golden Reel from the Tiburon International Film Festival and Best Director (Short form) from the First Glance Film Festival. Robert has contributed cinematography to Josh & Benny Safdie’s LENNY COOKE (2013) as well as Robert Greene’s BISBEE ‘17 (2018) and KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016) – both of which had their premiers at the Sundance Film Festival. He has worked on over 100 commercials as director for clients including Vogue, Esquire, A&E, and Adult Swim.

Alexander Nanau

Alexander Nanau is a German-Romanian filmmaker born in Romania who studied directing at The Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). His documentary film, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ION B was awarded an International Emmy Award in 2010. His feature documentary film TOTO AND HIS SISTERS was a European Academy Award nominee 2015. The film had a wide international distribution and played successfully in festivals worldwide. Alexander served as Director of Photography for the French/German documentary NOTHINGWOOD (Sonia Kronlund) that was shot in Afghanistan and premiered in Cannes as part of La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in 2017. His latest feature length documentary COLLECTIVE will premiere at the Venice IFF 2019- as part of the Official Selection - Out of Competition and is a co-production with Samsa Film (Luxembourg) and HBO Europe.

Katherine Reed

Katherine Reed joined the journalism faculty in 2004 after a five-year stint in Prague, Czech Republic, where she was the editor-in-chief of Prague Business Journal and an instructor at the Center for Independent Journalism. She taught news writing and reporting at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va., where she also worked as a copy editor and film/theater reviewer for the Roanoke Times. Reed has done work with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University and the Disaster and Community Crisis Center at MU. She now teaches a standalone trauma reporting class for undergraduate and graduate students. For nine years, Reed has also taught the cornerstone reporting class taken by undergraduate and graduate students who are pursuing degrees in photojournalism, magazine and print and digital media. She is an editor at ColumbiaMissourian.com where she supervises students covering public safety (crime and the courts) and health care.

Kamau Bilal

Kamau Bilal's father was born in St. Louis and he himself grew up in Columbia, Missouri. He attended TV and radio classes at Webster University nearby back in his father's hometown but did not make it into their film program. He used the editing skills he had learned at Webster toward video production and later making commercials. Kamau Bilal is now a filmmaker and educator at the University of Missouri. His short documentary Baby Brother had its premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Eric Hynes

Eric Hynes is a New York-based film critic and reporter, as well as Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image. He has written for the New York Times, Film Comment, Rolling Stone, IndieWire, Slate, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York. Since 2004 he has been a staff writer for the online film journal Reverse Shot, where he's also the host and co-producer of the Reverse Shot Talkies video series.

Cristina Mislán

Cristina Mislán is an assistant professor of journalism studies in the Missouri School of Journalism, where she teaches courses in cross-cultural journalism, gender and media, qualitative research methods, and critical theory. Mislán’s research focuses on areas of media history, critical/cultural studies, and transnational/globalization studies. She draws on critical/cultural studies to examine how various forms of alternative media have influenced national and transnational dialogues around race, class, and gender politics. Some of her current work also examines media representation, particularly as it relates to race and gender identities.

Mislán has published in several journals, including Social Movement Studies, International Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies and Communication, Culture, and Critique. Her research has won a number of awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA). 

Sierra Pettengill

Sierra Pettengill is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Her most recent film, The Reagan Show, an all-archival documentary which she co-directed and produced, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival, and broadcast on CNN in 2017. Her short film Graven Image, produced for Field of Vision, premiered at the True/False Film Festival before airing on POV, and is in the permanent collection at the Equal Justice Institute’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. She produced the Oscar-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer, which also won an Emmy. Her archivist credits include Jim Jarmusch's Gimme Danger and Mike Mills' 20th Century Women, among many others. She writes on film for frieze magazine and Film Comment and she was a 2017/2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow.

Bill Ross IV

The Ross Brothers are an American filmmaking team whose credits include the award-winning films 45365 (2009), Tchoupitoulas (2012), Western (2015), and Contemporary Color (2017)