Laïssa C. Alexis (she/her) is a New Jersey-raised Haitian artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Her work as a documentarian seeks to capture Black and queer life as it exists now as ancestral preservation. Laïssa enjoys daydreaming about the future and hopes to use cinema to articulate these dreams.

Megan Martinez Goltz is a queer Chicanx storyteller from California. Their practice is rooted in creating immersive soundscapes woven with vibrant histories that span generations, borders, and languages. Their recent short docu-series “Historias de Cultura: Oaxaca en Santa Cruz” explores how immigrants preserve cultural identity through traditional food, medicine, and music. The series has since become an educational tool in classrooms, where Megan facilitates discussions to encourage cross-cultural understanding and the value of community storytelling. At Northwestern, Megan looks forward to connecting with the broader Chicago community and deepening their interdisciplinary approach to filmmaking. Passionate about Indigenous sovereignty, queer and trans liberation, and weaving medicine into media, Megan embraces storytelling as a pathway for ancestral and collective connection.

Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. She was born to a Filipino family in Japan, where she spent most of her childhood, and received a B.A. in Architectural studies and Cinema studies from the University of Toronto. Shireen was a 2022 Film Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program. Together with John Torres, she is a co-founder of Los Otros (Manila, Philippines), a platform dedicated to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product. As a duo, they realized the exhibition Cloudy with a chance of coconuts at Portikus (Frankfurt) in 2019.

Pom Bunsermvicha (they / them) is an independent filmmaker from Bangkok, Thailand. Their work spans documentary, hybrid, and fiction and explores how gender, culture, and tradition shape and define individual and collective bodies. Their films have been screened across Southeast Asia and abroad, including at Locarno, Rotterdam, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, SGIFF, and SeaShorts. Since 2015, they have worked to support the growth of independent cinema in Southeast Asia. Most recently, they co-initiated Rae–Nang, a volunteer-led cinema cooperative in Bangkok. They hold a B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

Kulsoom Rizavi is a filmmaker from Lucknow, India. She grew up in a Shia Muslim family, whose stories greatly influenced how she thinks about resistance, hope and imagination. Her practice is rooted in hope-filled stories, issues affecting young people, and experimenting with forms that reimagine documentary-making; from global storytelling that finds the same story across countries to docu-fiction, musicals, interactive media and physical installations (one of her artist’s books lives in the Rubenstein Library’s collection). Coming from a long line of public-school educators, Kulsoom is a big believer in mentorship. She loves people, talking with them and witnessing them realize their fullest potential (partly the reason she decided to make documentaries). She holds a BS in Computer Science and BA in Political Science from Duke University. She is also a Humanity in Action Fellow and Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar.

Amira Stone is a Midwest-based filmmaker who grew up in suburban Minneapolis. Since graduating from NYU Tisch with a BFA in Film & TV, she has focused on observational documentary directing and editing. Amira works to deepen, protect, and sanctify attention through patient and relational storytelling.  While at Northwestern, Amira is excited to evolve her practice of reciprocal, hyper-local filmmaking through social, environmental, economic, and creative investment in the worlds that she documents.

Jennifer Ru Zhou is a filmmaker. Her first film, Lan’s Garden, a work of fiction, screened at Slamdance and Indie Memphis. Her second film, Blackbook NYC, is a documentary essay about visual culture, following New York City’s most prolific artists. In between service jobs, she is a production designer and assistant editor. Her design work has been seen at festivals including Berlin, Tribeca, and SXSW, and on public television. Her aim is to make work on the global flow of people, materials, and thought. She was born to Chinese parents in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Photo courtesy of Laura Bregman)