Carolina Arias Ortiz is a Costa Rican anthropologist and filmmaker. Her debut feature, Objetos Rebeldes, premiered at IDFA 2020 and received multiple awards, including the National Audiovisual Arts Award for Best Production, a Special Jury Mention at Viña del Mar in Chile, the iila-Cinema Award in Italy for Best Documentary, and the Basil Wright Film Prize in England. Her latest project, Like a Flame Lit in a Dark Night, received the IDFA Bertha Fund for development, participated in IDFA Project Space for Development in 2023, and was awarded Costa Rica’s national film fund, FAUNO. This year she is part of the EURODOC program.

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working across film and installation. Her montage-driven work examines categorical distinctions between human and animal, artifice and nature, and sense and nonsense. Her films have screened at festivals and venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Berlinale; New York Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Cinéma du réel, Paris; Viennale, Sundance Film Festival; ICA London; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York. Exhibitions include Bridget Donahue, New York; Cushion Works, San Francisco; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; MOCA Detroit; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; and DOCUMENT, Chicago. She has curated screenings and events at Anthology Film Archives, New York; school, Vienna; JOAN, Los Angeles; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

Alexandra Cuesta is an Ecuadorian filmmaker and visual artist who combines experimental film traditions with documentary practices. Her 16mm films and videos are portraits of public spaces, urban landscapes, and the people in them. Reminiscent of documentary practices such as street photography, Cuesta’s work is also grounded in the poetic sensibility of the avant-garde. Early films such as Recordando el Ayer, Piensa en Mí, and Despedida, which were filmed in the United States where Cuesta obtained her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, portray migrant neighborhoods and diasporic communities—primarily Hispanic—and do so with a poignant sense of longing and belonging. Recent works, including the autobiographical series Notes, Imprints (On Love) (2020-ongoing) and the Structural/Materialist Lungta (commissioned by FICUNAM in 2022), emphasize the filmmaking process itself. Manu, a visual album (2023), her second feature film, premiered in the Signed section of IDFA, while her Land Expanded (2023), a film and music collaboration with composer Tonia Ko, was performed live with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York. Her work has been screened at venues and festivals such as Cinema Du Reel, Viennale International Film Festival, FID Marseille, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Oberhausen, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Art Gallery of Ontario, and Punto de Vista, among others. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video.

Mike Gibisser is a filmmaker and artist interested in navigating the indefinite lines between essay, narrative, experimental, and documentary work. Over the past decade, he has completed two narrative features (Finally, Lillian and Dan and World of Facts), a feature film essay (The Day of Two Noons), as well as several experimental and non-fiction shorts. He has presented work at numerous cinemas and festivals around the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the International Oberhausen Film Festival, the Harvard Film Archive, the AFI Film Festival, the Images Film Festival, the European Media Arts Festival, and the New York Film Festival. His work has been featured in Artforum, Variety, and Cinemascope, amongst other publications.

Yasaman Baghban is a documentary and experimental filmmaker, and PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She holds an MFA from Duke University and an MA in Cinema Studies from Tehran University of Art. Her award-winning films have screened internationally, and her work spans directing, editing, photography, and teaching. She has taught at Duke University, UNC Wilmington, and Shiraz Art Institute. She has also curated film series and judged at festivals. Her creative practice explores memory, archive and, and storytelling across media and transnational contexts.

Laura Conway is a human woman, artist, filmmaker, and educator. Laura’s politically grounded moving image works use documentary forms, absurdity, and performance to grapple with the complexities of life in late capitalism. 

Her films have screened at Slamdance, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Antimatter Media Arts Festival, The Lucca Film Festival in Italy, Pitchfork, The Fader, Rolling Stone and The Chicago Underground Film Festival among others. She was a 2022-2025 resident artist at The Redline Arts Center. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s Department of Cinematic Arts. 

Eileen Roscina is an artist, experimental filmmaker and naturalist from Denver, Colorado. She holds an MFA in Art Practices from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a BFA from Emerson College in Boston, MA, and also trained at the School of Botanical Art and Illustration in Denver. She teaches at University of Colorado, Boulder and Metropolitan State University, Denver. Through biomimicry and the study of biophilia, her work examines human’s spiritual and social (dis)connection with nature, and seeks to raise questions about realizing a radically different metaphoric mapping of time, space and our place in the world. She has exhibited film and visual art internationally, and nationally at at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver Art Museum, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Museo de Las Americas (Denver), Vicki Myhren Gallery at University of Denver (Denver), Center for Visual Art (Denver), Arvada Center (Arvada), Dairy Art Center (Boulder), University of Colorado (Boulder), Salina Art Center (Kansas) and was the 2019 Resident Artist for the National Western Stock Show, a 2018-2020 resident at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver. She is represented by Walker Fine Art Gallery in Denver, CO.

rebecca shapass is an artist and researcher investigating documentary form and archival practice through the creation of film & video, photo, installation, and text. Her projects blend fact and fiction, abstraction and representation, to challenge the boundaries of traditional documentary forms. 

Her work has been exhibited and screened with institutions and festivals including Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), Microscope Gallery (NYC), SKF/Konstnärshuset (Stockholm), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, MI), Mimesis Documentary Festival (Boulder, CO), Motel/X Lisbon International Horror Festival (Lisbon, Portugal), amongst others. shapass holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BFA in Film & Television and Art History from New York University.