President

Toma Peiu is a filmmaker, visual artist, and scholar-educator with an ethnographic practice in documentary, fiction and installation. His work has been presented, published or exhibited in over 150 venues on five continents, from multiplex cinemas to churches, and from congress halls to television stations, teahouses and community centers; from film festivals to art galleries and academic conferences; and from peer-reviewed journals to neighborhood bulletin boards. He holds degrees from the National University of Drama and Film in Bucharest, The New School in New York and the University of Colorado Boulder. Toma is affiliated with the Melikian Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Arizona State University, co-founder of  production company Root Films in Bucharest, with Luiza Parvu and a founding member of the Entangled Films Collective in Munich, with fellow researchers at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Secretary

Amir Husak is a documentary media maker and Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Combining emergent and traditional media, essay and experimental techniques, Husak’s work explores documentary as social practice and investigates representations of economic infrastructures, borders and migration. His works have been shown at international venues including the Cinemateca Distrital (Bogota, Colombia), Sarajevo Film Festival (Bosnia & Herzegovina), Stadtmuseum Graz (Austria), and Crvena Association for Culture and Art (Sarajevo, Bosnia) among others. Husak also serves as an artistic director of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival in New York. He is a co-editor of a volume on socially engaged art and activist media in Bosnia-Herzegovina titled “Kriza, Umjetnost, Akcija” (Crisis, Art, Action; 2016) and holds a PhD degree from the University of Leeds, UK.

Treasurer

An award-winning filmmaker, Emilie is an alumna of the Rotterdam Producers Lab (2014) and a recipient of support from the Andy Warhol Foundation (2019) and the Puffin Foundation (2021). She began her filmmaking career while living in Trinidad and Tobago for ten years, where she served as Creative Director of the trinidad+tobago film festival and spearheaded initiatives including the Caribbean Film Database and the Caribbean Film Mart. In 2017, she released her debut narrative feature, Moving Parts, which examines human smuggling and sex trafficking in Port of Spain and is distributed by Indiepix. Centering female-driven stories, Emilie prioritizes women’s representation both on screen and behind the camera. She works with both professional actors and non-actors and is committed to close collaboration with the communities represented in her films.

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. 

Elizabeth Nichols is a writer, director and cinematographer of both non-fiction and narrative films. She currently lives in Tanzania, East Africa with her partner and their two daughters, and works at Orkeeswa where she teaches filmmaking and serves as the Director of Strategy. Elizabeth holds an MFA in Filmmaking from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in History and Literature and History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University. She has received several awards and scholarships in support of her filmmaking, including being recognized as one of the 25 New Faces in Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. Her short films have played at some of the top international film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Berlinale.