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Chris Burkard is an accomplished explorer, photographer, creative director, speaker, and author. Traveling throughout the year to pursue the farthest expanses of Earth, Burkard works to capture stories that inspire humans to consider their relationship with nature, while promoting the preservation of wild places everywhere.

Layered by outdoor, travel, adventure, surf, and lifestyle subjects, Burkard is known for images that are punctuated by untamed, powerful landscapes. Through social media, Chris strives to share his vision of wild places with millions of people, and to inspire them to explore for themselves.

His visionary perspective has earned him opportunities to work on global, prominent campaigns with Fortune 500 clients, speak on the TED stage, design product lines, educate, and publish a growing collection of books. Along with his team, Burkard is based out of his production studio and art gallery in the Central Coast of California.

Post-graduation from USC Film School, Liz spent several years directing for the PBS/Hulu series "Just Seen It." She also directed shorts and music videos at this time, including Beth Thorney's "You're So Pony." In 2015, her debut feature (which she wrote, directed, produced and cast), Bread and Butter, was released by The Orchard. It played on Hulu and airlines across the globe in addition to VOD platforms. HelloGiggles called it, "an absolute must-watch for women everywhere.” Her second feature (which she wrote, directed, produced and cast), Speed of Life, was called "delightful in just about every way" by noted film critic Tim Cogshell (of NPR's "FilmWeek") and is airing on Showtime. Liz directed Lina, starring Laura San Giacomo and Sandra Seacat which is currently screening at festivals. She’s attached to direct and help produce I CAN CHANGE, a sci-fi feature written by Amy Starbin, and starring Jennifer Carpenter. She is also the co-host of hit podcast Making Movies Is Hard!!! Liz Manashil specializes in feminist content with a whimsical twist.

Dorota is the Industry Programmer at Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, where she produces The Hot Docs Forum, a public pitching event aimed at garnering financing and co-productions for international documentaries. She is also the Doc Conference Programmer and a Programming Associate at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where she sources and screens international documentaries as well as fiction films from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Dorota holds a double M.A in Political Science and Gender Studies from McGill University. She speaks English, French, German, Spanish, and Polish, and splits her time between Toronto and Los Angeles.

Jerry Rothwell is a filmmaker whose work includes the award-winning feature documentaries: The Reason I Jump, based on the bestselling book by Naoki Higashida; How To Change The World, about the founders of Greenpeace; Sour Grapes (co-directed with Reuben Atlas) a film about a wine counterfeiter Town of Runners, about two girls in an Ethiopian village who aspire to be athletes; Donor Unknown, about a sperm donor and his many offspring; School In The Cloud, about radical educationalist, Sugata Mitra; Heavy Load, about a group of people with learning disabilities who form a punk band, and Deep Water (co-directed with Louise Osmond), about Donald Crowhurst’s ill-fated voyage in the 1968 round the world yacht race. His work has won numerous accolades including two Grierson Awards, a Sundance Special Jury Prize, an RTS Award, the IDA Pare Lorentz Award and a BAFTA nomination.

At Met Film Production, he has exec produced and worked as an editor on numerous feature docs including Dylan Williams’ Men Who Swim (now a fiction feature starring Rob Brydon), Sarah Gavron’s The Village At The End Of The World and Giovanni Buccomino’s forthcoming After A Revolution.

Born in Cumberland, BC, on beautiful Vancouver Island, K’ómoks First Nation territory. He now lives on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) on the island of Tiohtiá:ke, or Montreal, in la belle province, Quebec. He is settler scholar, curator, writer and critic of Dutch and English descent.

Currently a Visiting Scholar at Lakehead University, at the Reimagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL), where he is conducting research on Indigenous representation in Canada’s media arts and the ethical dimension of film circulation and reception. Recently an Assistant Professor of Film Studies (Visiting) at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Ezra completed a PhD in Communication Studies at Carleton University in December 2013. His research and teaching is focused on documentary, Indigenous film and media, alternative media, social movements and media, film festivals, and what he calls “screen ethics.” His dissertation research investigated the various elements that converge at the Hot Docs International Film Festival, with a focus on the culture of documentary and the logic of capital, expressed through three interlocking forces: circulation, consumption and resistance. A book version of my dissertation is currently under construction and will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (and in which I will add a fourth interlocking force: colonialism).

He is the co-founder (with Svetla Turnin) and Director of Programming of Cinema Politica, a non-profit media arts organization that is the world’s largest campus and community based documentary screening network

A contributing editor with POV Magazine where his work is published with some frequency. He is also the proud co-editor, along with Thomas Waugh and Michael Brendan Baker, of the 600-page door stopper Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Other recent academic contributions appear in Activist Film Festivals: Towards a Political Subject, The Documentary Film Book, the Canadian Journal of Communication, and Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication. More chapters, articles and books are forthcoming and are listed in my writing section.

José F. Rodriguez joined the Tribeca Film Festival as Programmer in 2020. Previously, he served as Director of Documentary Programs at the Tribeca Film Institute, where he oversaw the growth, funding & overall strategic vision for all documentary programs, as well as its filmmaker / industry market, TFI NETWORK. During his 10 years at TFI, he also led documentary workshops in the United States and throughout Latin America.

In the past three years, he has made two short films: the documentary short ADOLESCENCIA (Camden International Film Festival 2017, New Orleans Film Festival 2017, DOCNYC 2017, DOK Leipzig 2017) and the experimental short Mama,mama (Bushwick Film Festival 2018, Nitehawk Shorts Festival 2018, Guanajuato International Film Festival 2019).

Previously, José was a Senior Consultant for Points North Institute-CIFF, overseeing the Camden International Film Festival's film market and connecting Points North-supported filmmakers to invited film industry professionals.

Adam Cook is a film critic, curator, and scholar.

His current writing can be found on Substack at Long Voyage Home. Cook is a graduate student at York University where he is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary project on heightened embodiment in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. He holds the position of Film Programming and Content Lead at the South Western International Film Festival (SWIFF) where he has worked in multiple roles since 2017.

Between 2016-19, Cook curated Future//Present, a programme at the Vancouver International Film Festival dedicated to showcasing bold, original work from emerging Canadian filmmakers. Formerly, he was a Programming Associate at the Toronto International Film Festival; Programming Consultant for Hot Docs; Advisor on U.S. programming at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival; and Canadian Film Programmer for the Victoria Film Festival. He has also curated retrospective programmes for Doclisboa, TIFF Cinematheque, Northwest Film Forum, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, and Vancity Theatre. Cook has taught workshops on film and criticism with TIFF’s Reel Comfort programme and SWIFF. His bylines as a critic and journalist include The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, VICE, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope, Filmmaker Magazine, Little White Lies, and Cineaste among other outlets. He served as a Content Manager for MUBI from 2010-15.

Derrick is the content acquisitions manager for Prime Video Direct at Amazon. He studied at Northwestern University and worked at Bloomberg and the Associated Press before joining Amazon. He lives in Seattle.