Hai-Li Kong is a video editor, producer, and researcher. Previously, Hai-Li worked as a qualitative researcher and media producer—helping companies better understand their customers’ needs and sharing those findings through video. Currently, she mainly works as Think!Chinatown’s Video Production Lead, where she hopes to help people better understand Chinatown through videos that highlight neighborhood artists, businesses, and the immigrant experience.

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Dave Haft is a filmmaker with 13 years of experience managing video production teams, promotional campaigns and software development projects. In 2008, he established the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube presence for the $50B U.S. Military Health System. Dave began producing documentary-style work in 2012 with the development of two films for the International Baccalaureate (IB) as part of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant. This kicked off a longer relationship with the IB, so he founded Social Grinder, a global collective of video and film professionals. His team has produced 200 short educational documentaries for the IB and other educational institutions; filming in 15 countries and editing in 10 languages. Other clients include The International Red Cross, the World Health Organization, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Maryland, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.

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Ashwin Budden is a filmmaker and global health consultant based in DC, who has worked in social and public health research for almost 20 years. He advises global health and social impact organizations, such as The Gates Foundation, USAID, and National Institutes of Health on design and evaluation of their health programs in Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. He has also worked in academic and non-governmental public health organizations. Ashwin is a social/behavioral scientist by training with a PhD in Anthropology and Cognitive Science from UCSD.

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Sarah Teagle brings her many years of research in child and adolescent public health, stigma, and cultural anthropology to documentary filmmaking. Her goal is to tell stories of people who defied the stereotypes placed on them by producing cinéma vérité style documentary shorts and short narrative profiles. In the past year, she has used Covid isolation to get up to speed on the basic mechanics of filming and editing by creating two narrative shorts for local artists. She is also a student at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

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Reveca Torres is an artist, filmmaker and disability advocate based in Prospect Heights, IL. She was a Kartemquin Films Diverse Voices in Docs fellow (2017) and selected for Kartemquin + Hulu Accelerator program in 2020. In 2020 Reveca was one of four fellows for International Documentary Association’s (IDA) newly launched Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellowship and was awarded the inaugural Craig Neilsen Visionary Prize for her work in art and advocacy. She is the founder and Executive Director of BACKBONES, an organization helping people with spinal cord injury and disabilities and co-director of ReelAbilities Film Festival Chicago. Reveca has curated touring photography and art exhibitions that showcase the work of people with disabilities and bring awareness to disability rights. She uses painting, illustration, photography, film, movement, and other media as a form of expression and a tool for advocacy and social justice.

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Rebecca Grossman is a documentary filmmaker most drawn to social themes like emergence after trauma and the stories of people who have been overlooked or misunderstood in mainstream media. Her personal experience of emergence is from her struggle with an eating disorder that she kept secret for many years. In her healing, Rebecca realized the freedom and power telling her story gave her. In her filmmaking, she wants to help others experience the freedom and power that storytelling brings. Rebecca’s work has been published on news outlets such as National Geographic and The Washington Post.

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Mari Kussman has diverse experience as a designer and technologist. Previously, she was the Chief Innovation Officer at New Lab in Brooklyn, where she created and oversaw a product development program for Fortune 500 companies. She is the former Creative Director for Nanotronics—the developer of an automated inspection system utilizing Artificial Intelligence. She has over a decade of experience in design; having worked as the co-founder of the fashion tech company Loomia and she has produced collections for the likes of Helmut Lang and Kimberly Ovitz. She has been featured in Wired, Fast Company, New York Magazine, Into the Gloss, Elle Japan, Monocle, Entrepreneur.com, Engadget, Ozy, Cool Hunting, 3DPrint.com and more. Her design work has shown notably at the V&A Museum, Tribeca Film Festival, Coachella and NY Fashion Week. Her passion lies in sustainability. She is Japanese/American, by way of Tokyo and the Pacific Northwest.

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Krishnan Vasudevan is an assistant professor in visual communication at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. He uses research and filmmaking to interrogate how capitalism shapes peoples’ lives through labor practices, consumer design and digital media. He also examines how members of marginalized social groups, such as taxi drivers, resist exploitation through the creation of alternative media, technologies and democratic organizations such as worker cooperatives.

Krishnan received his MA in News and Documentary from New York University and worked as a multimedia journalist for the New York Times and Slate. He received a 2015 Austin Film Society grant for the forthcoming transmedia project called “East of 35” (originally titled “Our Voices Matter”), that examines the work of Black Austin based artists to create space through their art for community celebration, healing and mourning.

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Ari Ali is a queer, Yemeni-American, filmmaker and producer. As a child of divergent cultures, her work seeks to elevate the stories of people, places, and historical events that have been overlooked or forgotten. For the last 15 years, she has created and led narrative, immersive, commercial, and animation based projects for a wide range of clients.

Some of her recent work includes: large-scale projection mapping of endangered species on the Empire State Building for the documentary Racing Extinction; collaborating with Freedom First on their multi-city human rights campaign to draw attention to violence against journalists; working closely with the United Nations on a campaign to raise awareness around the global impacts of climate change; and (a personal favorite) Fiat Lux: Illuminating Our Common Home, came from Pope Francis’s commissioning of a public art immersive experience on Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican to inspire change around the climate crisis. Ari’s work is oftentimes at the intersection of art, technology, and activism.

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