Artist and Author

Molly Crabapple is an Emmy nominated artist and author from New York. Her reportage has been published in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Filmmaker and Content Creator

Naser Al Azzeh is a Dancer, Filmmaker, editor and writer based in India. The youtube channel Jordindian that he co-founded with his partner now has 2.4 million subscribers with a total collective view count of 359 million and viewers from all across the globe.

Writer and Director

Philip Jamal Rachid is an Iraqi Kurdish writer & director from Amsterdam with an edgy, and dynamic style designed to captivate the eyes and ears, while defying expectations and pushing the traditional boundaries of genre. He is known for meshing high-end cinematic visuals with compelling emotive narrative storytelling.

Actress and Content Creator

Achara is an actress and content creator of Thai and English descent. She started her entertainment career in Thailand at the age of 12 years, acting in commercials, music videos, film and television and now creates videos for YouTube, analyzing films and trailers with fellow actor and content creator, Jaby Koay.

Producer/Casting Director/Actor

Ivor Gracias is a short film producer and a casting director. He has casted actors in television commercials, Bollywood feature films, Hollywood feature films, Netflix and music videos. Ivor has also acted in a number of television commercials and short films. Many of his films have won awards globally and have been featured in film festivals worldwide.

Director/Executive Producer

Nahla Al Fahad is considered as one of the leading Directors in commercials, entertainment, documentaries and music videos in the UAE and the Middle East. She has an extraordinary number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed credits to her name, either as a director, producer and writer. Nahla’s passion in the art industry was cultivated in the young age and her parents served as crucial groundwork for her artistic career.

Content Creator

Jaby Koay is a YouTube content creator with a combined following of over 2 million subscribers. He has a background in martial arts, stunts, acting, commercial casting and directing. His varied experiences help him to provide unique insight into his film and movie trailer reactions and reviews across his YouTube channels.

Film Director

Marco Grandia has been directing for more than 25 years and started with extreme sports like skateboarding and snowboarding. For the last 15 years he worked worldwide with a number of international clients and renowned people, ranging from Shar Rukh Khan and Christiano Ronaldo to Gwyneth Paltrow and Kobe Bryant. He specializes in postproduction-heavy commercials, but always aims to keep fun and humanity in the first place.

Actress

Sameera Asir Is an Arab-European award winning actress and theater director, striving to build bridges between the cultures she originates from. You may have seen her with a thick Cockney accent in Les Miserables as Madame Thernardier, or practicing Arabic magic in the desert in the TV Series ‘Shouq’. Sameera Asir made her acting debut in ‘Degrade’ directed by Arab & Tarzan Nasser, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Since then she has appeared in over fourty film, TV and theater productions.

Holistic Educator

Karuna Jenkins is passionate about channeling her creative energy towards spreading awareness and sharing stories about ways of living in harmony with our inner and outer natural environments and with one another. She taught organic farming, biology and yoga classes at Sholai School, an alternative school and eco-community inspired by the teachings of the educational philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti in the Palani Hills of Kodaikanal.

Business Facilitator

Taron is a business facilitator in the hemp industry. He is the CEO of The Bose Hemp Company, based in India with clients based across various continents. His prior work in the medical cannabis industry with The Stanley Brothers paved the way for his current work trajectory. Through storytelling, his main focus is to normalize the use of hemp throughout the world by emphasizing its historical and cultural aspects.

Music Producer and Audio Engineer

Beat Hierarchy aka Lubomir Jabbanda is an Experimental Music Producer out of Bangalore who was born in Ukraine to an Indian father and Ukrainian mother. He’s best described as a sonic potluck, Beat Hierarchy’s eponymous project brings together a motley bunch of artists for one big family dinner.

Actor / Director

Performer, musician, actor and director, Hervé likes to teach above the borders of disciplines. For years now, he is developing his own work centered on human experiences and interviews. With his company Eranova, he is the winner of the Maeterlinck Award for Best Direction with his last show L.U.C.A. Last Universal Common Ancestor. He is a passionate about languages and their ability to enter into someone’s identity. In 2009, he founded the international collective If Human exploring the borders between disciplines and performing languages.

Art Curator

Frank Schlichtmann was born to a German father and a Bengali mother. After studying Documentary Filmmaking in London, he moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he worked as filmmaker, journalist and also pursued hospitality concept development projects. In 2008, he moved to Himachal Pradesh, India, where he founded the 4tables Project. The 4tables Project hosts a number of popular and innovative contemporary art events, residencies and exhibitions such as ShopArt ArtShop and IN THE WOODS. Frank also initiated a natural design and architecture bureau, the Four Directions.

TV Presenter / Explorer

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical, Sarah Begum is an Immersive Investigative Journalist, Anthropologist-Explorer and Public Speaker. Sarah has been exploring the world, studying tribes and different ways of life whilst investigating current affairs and making a humanitarian effort to help people along the way through her work. Sarah became the youngest person to make a first film in the Amazon jungle at the age of 21 with a premiere of “Amazon Souls” held at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013.

Executive Director / IDEA New Rochelle

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist, creative director, and organizer who develops cultural communities at the intersection of art, technology, and advocacy. Amelia is the executive director of IDEA New Rochelle. She is a member of the 2017-2018 cohort at NEW INC (the New Museum’s cultural incubator). She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters. Her art is part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the McCord Museum. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

VR Producer & Co-founder / ONA STORIES

Tulanana is the co-founder of @OnaStories, an Africa first graphic journalism hub. OnaStories is an #innovateAFRICA 2017 winner exploring the intersection of mobile-first content x digital video with an Africa-first perspective. Ona Stories is a founding member of 360 Afrika, a partnership of creators in the immersive media space in East Africa. Tulanana has shared her ideas on the TED platform via TEDxIlala, about how mobile technology is changing the way content is created and shared on the African continent. She was also the first digital lead in Tanzania, as Senior broadcast journalist/producer for the BBC World Service.

Founder / DO BIG GOOD

Mary Joyce is the founder of Do Big Good, a consulting firm that borrows from the tech sector to rapidly bring clear, beautiful, fairly-priced strategies to change agents in the social sector. Previously new media operations manager for President Obama’s 2008 campaign, she co-founded the Digital Activism Research Project at the University of Washington, is the editor of the 2010 book Digital Activism Decoded, and has worked globally as a consultant at the intersection of digital media, strategy, and social change for the past 10 years.

Filmmaker/Author

Marta Effinger-Crichlow is an interdisciplinary artist whose body of work reflects her desire to use film, theatre, and literature to tell stories about black women and girls. She is the past recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. She also received a Pittsburgh Multicultural Arts Initiative grant for her multi-media collage “The Kitchen is Closed Startin' Sunday”. For her play “Whispers Want to Holler,” Marta collaborated with noted jazz saxophonist Billy Harper. Marta is a Women Make Movies Production Assistance Program recipient for her documentary film project LITTLE SALLIE WALKER.

Director / MILA Film

Cinzia Angelini is a writer, story artist and director who has worked in the animation industry for more than twenty-five years. After working in London and Munich for Amblimation and then Warner Bros, Cinzia moved to Los Angeles to start the American chapter of her career. While her first Hollywood studio was Dreamworks, she eventually followed a path that would lead to a series of collaborations as animator and story artist, with all of the major studios, such as Sony Imageworks, Walt Disney Animation, Warner Bros, Illumination Entertainment and Cinesite Studios.

Executive Producer / Dinner Party

Laura Wexler is a Baltimore-based writer and producer who creates narrative projects based on little-known true stories. She is the co-writer and executive producer of DINNER PARTY, a virtual reality thriller that won a $100,000 Alternate Realities Grant and world premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival before screening at SXSW and Tribeca film festivals. DINNER PARTY is the pilot episode for INCIDENT, a VR series dramatizing true-life supernatural events. Producing credits include The Stoop Storytelling Series, a popular Baltimore-based live show and podcast featuring “ordinary” people telling the extraordinary true tales of their lives.

Journalist & Documentary Filmmaker

Nyasha Kadandara is a Zimbabwean-born journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Nairobi. She focuses on a broad spectrum of subjects including breaking news, criminal justice, education, conflict, and sports in East and Southern Africa. She directed the award-winning documentary "Through the Fire" and her short doc "Queens & Knights" won first prize at the 2016 NBC Sports film contest. She holds a master's degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from the Columbia Journalism School. Her work has been featured on NBC Sports, Al Jazeera, PBS, BBC, ZDF, and EPIX. Nyasha produced the first virtual reality hackathon in East Africa and is now a New Dimensions artist developing her first virtual reality film Chad. Most recently Nyasha has been reporting on migration in Uganda and South Sudan as an IWMF fellow for the Great Lakes Reporting Program.

Managing Director/ MIMIC PRODUCTIONS

Hermione Flynn is the CEO of 3D character studio, Mimic Productions, and the Founder/Art Director of 3D creative agency, Synthetic Studio. As a trained performance artist and a prolific business woman, Flynn has excelled in both the artistic and commercial industries, having won several prestigious awards in the fields of fashion, film and performance, as well as single-handedly negotiating clients such as Warner Brothers, Nike and Clinique. Furthermore, during her 5 year (and counting) tenure at Mimic Productions, Flynn has accommodated clients and talent such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Roger Federer, Marina Abramovic, Jeff Koons and Kanye West, to name a few.

Director of Crowdfunding / SEED & SPARK

Christina Raia is a New York City based Writer/Director, the Founder of CongestedCat Productions, and the Director of Crowdfunding at Seed&Spark. Her work, a collection of short films, a web series, and two feature films, has gained a large online following through multiple crowdfunding campaigns. Her projects and approach as a filmmaker have been covered by various press outlets, such as Indiewire, BuzzFeed, and AfterEllen. Her work can currently be viewed on Amazon Prime, Vimeo, VHX, and Youtube. She also turned her desire to foster collaboration and engagement in the local film community into IndieWorks, a monthly film screening series showcasing and supporting the work of other independent filmmakers in New York; currently in its sixth year.

Creative Producer / ELECTRIC SOUTH

Caitlin Robinson is a creative producer and entertainment strategist. At Electric South, an incubator for African digital immersive content, she explores emerging technology’s influence on how stories can be told and how stories can reach audiences. Her work spans critically-acclaimed documentary films; investigative journalism for TV (BBC, Al Jazeera, and DStv); branded content (Spotify, Unilever and Pepsi); and new media. Her most recent project, WATERTIGHT (IDFA, 2017), is a documentary portrait series told through volumetrically-captured 3D prints. In addition, Caitlin has worked on the distribution of narrative film and documentaries at the Academy Award®-winning studios FilmNation and A24; directed grassroots marketing and distribution campaigns for indie films including CRONIES, executive-produced by Spike Lee; and led the distribution strategy for ZERO DAYS VR (Sundance, Tribeca 2017).

Founder / AUBURN STUDIOS

Claire Cunningham is an award-winning immersive creator and developer. With commercial, corporate and feature film experience in London before recently setting up base in Dublin. Her VR start up was backed by Enterprise Ireland and awarded a place on the New Frontiers Accelerator Program, a second immersive AR start up led her to win Accenture's "Leaders of Tomorrow" competition and is also a current participant in their start up academy. She is currently developing a narrative VR project on Oculus that will be launching to the store this December. With feature film and documentary shooting experience with Getty, she has developed solid visual and storytelling skills now being utilised in VR. Combining expertise in different disciplines from film, games and tech, Claire has experience in critical and design thinking methodologies, with a proven ability in rapid prototyping and agile workflows.