OUR PANELISTS

Eric Hynes is Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, where he heads up year-round programming as well as the annual First Look Festival. He is also a longtime critic and journalist, with outlets that have included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Film Comment, Rolling Stone, Slate, New York magazine, Sight & Sound, the Village Voice, and Reverse Shot, where he has been a staff writer since 2003 and writes a column on the art of nonfiction. 

Angel Ellis is a Citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has lived, worked, and played within the tribes' reservation boundaries most of her life. Growing up, her heroes had press passes rather than capes and inspired her to become a journalist.

Ellis became Director of Mvskoke Media in 2020. Not only did her advocacy help bring free press back to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, but she also advocated for the tribe's first FOIA law. In 2020 she joined the ranks of Elias Boudinot Free Press award winners. Ellis advocates for and educates on ethical coverage of Indigenous topics and communities. She currently serves as an Oklahoma Media Center board member, was recently elected to the Native American Journalist Associations Board of Directors, and serves on the SPJ Freedom of Information Committee.

Steven Bognar is an Academy & Emmy Award winning, Ohio-based documentary filmmaker, whose films include AMERICAN FACTORY 美国工厂, A LION IN THE HOUSE, THE LAST TRUCK: CLOSING OF A GM PLANT and 9TO5 – THE STORY OF A MOVEMENT, all co-directed with his late partner Julia Reichert.  Bognar’s solo films include PERSONAL BELONGINGS, PICTURE DAY, FOUNDRY NIGHT SHIFT and LAST REEL.

Tabitha Jackson is an independent film executive and arts advocate. She is the first woman and person of color to have been appointed  director of the Sundance Film Festival. As Festival Director she re-imagined and led two technologically innovative and radically accessible pandemic editions which expanded the possibilities of what a film festival can be, and who it can be for. Between 2013 and 2020  she led the  Documentary Film Program at the Sundance Institute, rethinking traditional project support in favor of more holistic artist-centered  models,  and advocating for bold creativity and formal innovation in nonfiction cinema.

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Throughout her 30 year career in film and public broadcasting in the UK and the US,  she has been committed to supporting the independent voice, championing the social and cultural power of artful cinema, and furthering the mission of uplifting a more expansive set of makers and forms. With her previous experience as an Emmy-winning director-producer, executive producer, commissioning editor and non-fiction author she has demonstrated an unshakeable belief in  the vital role of independent film, and the arts as a public good.

Peter Nauffts is a New York-based archival researcher and producer. Most recently, he co-produced Time Bomb Y2K, premiering at True/False Film Festival this year. Before that, he conducted archival research for In Silico, a 10-year film about a ten-year project to simulate the human brain, and as a co-story producer for The Me You Can’t See, a series composed of honest discussions around mental health. He has worked on projects for Apple+, ESPN, HBO, National Geographic, PBS, and Sundance TV, with premieres at True/False, Tribeca, DocNYC, and Montclair Film Festivals.

Maya Mumma, ACE, was an editor on the Academy Award winning documentary O.J.: Made in America for which she was honored with a Best Editing award from the LA Film Critics Association, an ACE Eddie, and a Primetime Emmy. She began her career in the edit room of the Academy Award nominated documentary Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

She has gone on to edit such films as Which Way Is the Front Line From Here, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley, the Peabody Award winning Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, A Journey of a Thousand Miles, the Emmy winning King in the Wilderness, the Emmy and Peabody Award winning True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, and the Emmy nominated Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. She has mentored for the Firelight Media Documentary Lab, the Open City Documentary Festival Assembly Lab, the TFI/A&E IndieFilms StoryLab, the Sundance Art of Editing Fellowship, and the Chicken & Egg Pictures (Egg)celerator Lab. She is the current president of the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship.

Marley McDonald is a filmmaker, animator and painter living in Queens, New York. In 2021, she was chosen as a Points North Fellow and worked as an additional editor on Penny Lane’s film Listening to Kenny G. Her associate editor work includes All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Spaceship Earth. She most recently directed and edited her debut feature Time Bomb Y2K for HBO.

Penny Lane has been making award-winning, innovative nonfiction films for over a decade. This includes six features – most recently Confessions of a Good Samaritan, premiering at SXSW 2023 – and over a dozen short films. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Lane has also received grants and awards from the Sundance Film Festival, Cinereach, Creative Capital, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, Wexner Center for the Arts and many others.

Penny has been honored with mid-career retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, San Francisco DocFest, Open City Documentary Festival and Cinema Moderne. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And yes, Penny Lane is her real name.

Joe Peeler is a Sundance award-winning director and editor whose work has appeared on NETFLIX, HBO, FX, ESPN, Hulu and CBS. Joe began his career apprenticing under legendary director Peter Bogdanovich, and from there edited Lucy Walker’s Academy Awards Shortlist documentary short The Lion’s Mouth Opens; multiple episodes of the Netflix original series Flint Town; and Margaret Brown’s SXSW premiere documentary short The Black Belt. Most recently, Joe co-directed Bad Press, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression.

Katyann Gonzalez is a documentary video editor, born and raised in New York. Her work has screened at Doc NYC, Big Apple Film Festival, New York Shorts International Film Festival, and more. She is also an experienced branded documentary and commercial editor. Her approach to editing is motivated by a genuine curiosity for the world and its inhabitants. She seeks to illustrate humanity on film and uncover universal truths through the profound, the banal, the absurd, or whatever else she sees in the footage. 

Jeanelle Augustin is a film programmer and funder of Haitian and German descent energized by opportunities to redefine investment and embrace risk. Currently, she leads the Original Voices Fellowship, presented by NBCU Academy in partnership with NBC News Studios, the NBC News documentary division, a new artist development and inclusion initiative for US-based independent documentary filmmakers who identify as – or showcase stories highlighting social issues affecting – women, LGBTQ+ folx, communities of color, and people with disabilities regardless of career stage or immigration status.

Born and based in New York City, her work is centered on the visual and sonic culture of the future — what does creative freedom look, sound, and feel like?

Brian Becker is a New York-based filmmaker who directed and produced his debut feature Time Bomb Y2K for HBO. He archival produced the films Free Chol Soo Lee, MLK/FBI, and Spaceship Earth. Brian also served as a co-producer on the series Bobby Kennedy for President and an archival producer on the series The Fourth Estate. He is a 2022 Doc NYC 40 Under 40 recipient, Impact Partners Producing Fellow, Points North Fellow, and a FOCAL Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year award nominee.

Jason Fox is a filmmaker, professor, and editor based between New York and Toronto. He has taught in the Graduate School of Cinema Studies at New York University, Princeton University, Vassar College, and CUNY Hunter College. He has worked as a film programmer in conjunction with The American Museum of Natural History, The Flaherty Seminar, and the Museum of Modern Art, among other venues. He is also the founding editor of World Records, published with New York University's Center for Media, Culture, and History.

Shelby Fintak is the associate producer on the upcoming HBO documentary Time Bomb Y2K. She also worked as an archival researcher on Matt Wolf's upcoming untitled Pee Wee Herman documentary, an electrician on the film Rare Objects, and as a writer and editor for College Magazine. Shelby is a Florida native and bi-costal filmmaker who is interested in cinematographic poetry, psychedelia, and weirdness.

Alissa Wilkinson is a senior culture reporter and critic at Vox and an associate professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in downtown Manhattan. She’s the author of Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women (Broadleaf, 2022) and We Tell Ourselves Stories (Liveright, forthcoming). Alissa was a 2017-18 Art of Nonfiction writing fellow with the Sundance Institute; she is currently a member of the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Writers Guild of America, East.

In addition to Vox, Alissa’s work has appeared at Rolling Stone, Bon Appétit, The Washington Post, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, Eater, The Atlantic, Books & Culture, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Paste, Pacific Standard, and many others. She’s served on juries at the Sundance Film Festival, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and others, and selection committees for groups including the Gotham Awards, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Documentary Development Initiative, and the Sundance Documentary Film Program. She holds an MA in humanities and social thought from New York University and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University, and lives in Brooklyn.

Bennett Elliott is an Emmy award-winning, Peabody award-nominated producer based in New York. She is the producer and co-director of COUPLES THERAPY (Showtime, Seasons 4 & 5), and the producer of Robert Greene’s PROCESSION (Netflix, 94th Academy Awards Short List), Kim Snyder’s US KIDS (Sundance 2020), Abel Ferrara’s SPORTIN’ LIFE (Venice Film Festival 2020) and Robert Greene’s Gotham Awards-nominated BISBEE ’17 (Sundance 2018).

Bennett was the co-producer of Greene’s multiple award-winning Sundance documentary KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016). She was selected as a 2017-2018 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow, a DOC NYC “40 Under 40” fellow, and has produced documentary films for David Byrne, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman and Nan Goldin.

Farihah Zaman is a queer Bangladeshi-American filmmaker, critic, educator, and curator whose award-winning work has screened at Sundance, Toronto, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, South By Southwest, and more. Her first feature was Remote Area Medical, followed by This Time Next Year, and the doc-fiction hybrid Feast of the Epiphany, as well as several shorts (Kombit, Nobody Loves Me, American Carnage, and To Be Queen, which is part of the Emmy-nominated New York Times Op-Doc series From Here to Home).

She produced the Sundance-award winning Netflix Original, Ghosts of Sugar Land, which was shortlisted for 2020 Academy Award nomination. Zaman has written for Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Elle, Huffington Post, Filmmaker Magazine, and AV Club, among others, and her diverse background in the film industry includes roles at independent distributor Magnolia Pictures, IFP, The Flaherty Seminar, and serving as the Production Manager for Laura Poitras-founded Field of Vision.

Zaman supports other filmmakers and the documentary community through equity driven collectives like Beyond Inclusion and Brown Girls Doc Mafia, where she is the Director of Grants and Programs, as well as teaching and mentoring roles over the years at SVA, NYU, Uniondocs, NYFF Critics Academy, University of Iowa, and others. She was the Documentarian in Residence at Bard College 2018-2019, has been named a Top 40 under 40 filmmaker by Doc NYC, was a Rockwood Justice Fellow and an Impact Partners Producing Fellow, and is a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.