MORE THAN DUST

Julia Weisberg Cortés is a writer and director based in Mexico City and Los Angeles. She became the first woman in her family to pursue a creative degree, earning her bachelor’s in screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University. Julia has gone on to pursue her passions as a filmmaker, directing and writing award-winning shorts, features, and television. Her work proudly integrates the survival stories of the women in her family with the often lost or overlooked voices of Mexican-American women.

MOTHER v. MARICOPA COUNTY

Kristin Atwell Ford is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and the proud recipient of the 2021 Arizona Governor’s Arts Award. Her most recent broadcast documentary, “The Weight of a Feather,” celebrates the significance of feathers in Indigenous cultural identity and won four 2023 Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards, including best Environmental Science program.

Her feature “Riders of the Purple Sage: The Making of a Western Opera” won four regional Emmys, including best Arts/Entertainment Program. Kristin also co-produced the world premiere opera and its companion international radio broadcast with Arizona Opera. Kristin directed, wrote, and produced “Castle Hot Springs: Oasis of Time,” which won a Rocky Mountain Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary, and produced the nine-part Arizona PBS series, “The Arizona Centennial Series with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.”

L’OCÉAN DANS LE COEUR

Margaux Isaia is a young French director. She grew up in Montpellier and first studied at Sciences Po Paris on the campus of Poitiers, where she developed an interest in gender, sociology and postcolonial studies. After several internships in documentary film production and distribution, and a year abroad in Beirut, she entered École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière film school. 

BARLEBAS

Malu Janssen is a screenwriter and director based in Amsterdam. After studying theater and film at the University of Utrecht, she enrolled at the Netherlands Film Academy, where she earned a degree in fiction directing in 2016. Her short films “Eigen,”  “Stuff,” “A Cappella in D Minor,” and “Barlebas” have traveled and won awards on the international film festival circuit.

Malu recently secured funding from the Netherlands Film Fund for her feature debut, “We are Light,” about a commune that strives to let go of food and live on light. The film is based on the acclaimed novel by Gerda Blees and produced by Family Affair Films.

SHARED WATERS, SHARED CRISIS

Jessica Plumb is a filmmaker and writer known for exploring the relationship between people and the land and waters that sustain us. She is the producer and co-director of the feature documentary “Return of the River,” which chronicles the Elwha River restoration. The film won numerous awards, including Best Storytelling at the International Wildlife Film Festival and Best Writing at the Science Media Awards. Collectively, her films have appeared in over 50 film festivals and garnered over 20 awards. 

Her video production company produces films on environmental topics for clients including HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, Nat Geo Learning, the Stanford Program on Water, Health & Development, the Clean Energy Transition Institute, Original Pursuit Inc. and numerous non-profit institutions. Her recent work includes a trilogy of short films addressing the shared extinction threat facing Southern Resident killer whales and Chinook salmon in the Salish Sea.

PERPETUAL CARE

Alex Royer (she/they) is a writer, director, and producer based in Los Angeles. They have written and directed several short films and produced many indie projects in LA. They wrote and directed “Tea,” starring Peter Vack and Ellie Sachs, and co-wrote and directed “Perpetual Care,” starring Bonnie Discepolo and Monique Coleman. Their essay “Here’s What It’s Really Like to Work in a Funeral Home” was published on HuffPost. They are in post-production on their first documentary feature, “Ignat,” which was filmed in Romania in the winter of 2025.

BEYOND BABY BLUES

Ashley Toh is an aspiring filmmaker from Singapore. She is currently studying at the School of Film and Media Studies at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, where she has taken on a wide range of projects, including narrative short films and documentaries. During her time in FMS, she has been placed on the Director’s List and received the Second Most Outstanding Performance Award in her first year. She also interned at Trinutty Studios, where she further honed her skills in both pre-production and production, taking on roles such as sound recordist and assistant director. Outside of school, Ashley pursues personal passion projects and enjoys documenting her travels through video and photography.

MONSTER SLAYER

Catie Skipp is a documentary filmmaker from Miami, Florida, whose work challenges preconceptions through intimate, character-driven storytelling. Her most recent film, “Florida Woman,” was included in Season 7 of PBS’ Reel South series and received an International Documentary Awards nomination for Best Curated Series. Her previous producing credits include the feature documentary “Las Sandinistas!,” Netflix’s “Trial By Media,” and Disney+’s Marvel’s 616. With a focus on illuminating overlooked narratives, Skipp’s films reveal the humanity behind misunderstood stories and empower marginalized voices. A University of Florida graduate, she currently resides in Los Angeles.

TENOR: I AM PATI

Rebecca Tansley works across documentary, drama and live performance. Her feature documentary “Tenor: My Name is Pati” premiered at the 2026 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Its New Zealand theatrical release reached number one at the box office, catapulting it into the short list of the country’s top-grossing feature documentaries. Rebecca’s previous documentaries “Crossing Rachmaninoff” and “The Heart Dances” have screened at festivals around the world, in cinemas throughout New Zealand and on platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ and HBO. Her opera film “Semele” won a 2022 NZTV award for Best Entertainment Program while her short film of the same year, “The Finding,” enjoyed more than a dozen international festival outings. Her second opera film, “The Strangest of Angels” won Special Mention at the 60th Golden Prague International Festival for Extraordinary Artistic Achievement.

TOUGH OLD BROADS

Stacey Tenenbaum is an award-winning producer and director. In 2014, she founded H2L Productions, a boutique documentary film production company specializing in crafting character-driven stories that are shot internationally. Her documentaries “Shiners,” “Pipe Dreams,” and “Scrap” have received multiple awards and have been shown on CBC, the Documentary Channel, PBS/Independent Lens, NHK (Japanese public television), TV5 (French public television), YLE (Finnish public broadcasting), ERT (Greek public broadcasting), and more. “Scrap” was nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards in 2023 for Best Original Music and Best Cinematography. Before turning her attention to film, Stacey worked in factual television for 16 years, producing and co-creating award-winning documentary series. In 2012, She was nominated for an International Emmy for “In Real Life III.” Stacey is passionate about making cinematic films filled with humor and heart.

CHICKEN SALAD

Cortney “CK” Thornton is a cinematic pictorialist with a decade of diverse film experience. A UC Santa Cruz alumna, she has worked on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and “Inherent Vice” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” She worked in art and set decoration for shows such as HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show.”

Thornton produced the web series “Talents” and “Simi Valley,” the documentary “In Search of Voodoo,” and the feature “The Dreams of Rene Sendam.” Her directorial debut, the short film “The Drop Off,” was a Toronto Women’s International Film Festival selection in 2021. Her short films “Mother Martyr Salt and Saint” and “Chicken Salad” Her second and third short films, “Mother Martyr Salt & Saint” and “Chicken Salad” both earned the Audience Award at Highland Park Independent Film Festival, and “Chicken Salad” also received the festival’s Juror’s Award.

ALL THE WALLS CAME DOWN / LAST FLIGHT HOME / DIG

In January 2025, filmmaker Ondi Timoner was overseas when wildfire tore through her Altadena home, destroying everything—decades of archival footage, personal journals, equipment, and irreplaceable family memories. “All the Walls Came Down” is an intimate short documentary that captures the aftermath of that loss and expands into a larger story of displacement, resilience, and the fight to save the town. As Timoner returns to recover what remains, she turns her lens outward—toward neighbors, many from long-established Black, Latino, and other communities of color who have called Altadena home for generations. These families now face not only the trauma of destruction, but increasing pressure from mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and opportunistic developers pushing them toward foreclosure or forced sales. What begins as a personal reckoning becomes a powerful portrait of a community under siege.

A LIFE ILLUMINATED

Tasha Van Zandt is an award-winning film director, cinematographer, Emmy-nominated producer, and explorer whose work spans all seven continents. Her latest feature documentary, “A Life Illuminated,” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows marine biologist Edith Widder on a groundbreaking deep-sea expedition into the darkest depths of the ocean in search of bioluminescent life. 

Van Zandt’s feature “After Antarctica” chronicles the longest crossing of Antarctica in history through the eyes of legendary polar explorer Will Steger. She directed “One Thousand Stories,” “The Gun Chronicles,” and “Tehachapi,” and served as cinematographer on “Paper and Glue” and “Art for Everybody,” films documenting French photographer and street artist JR’s projects around the world. Her work has been exhibited in museums worldwide and supported by organizations including the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, and SFFILM.

THE TIDE INSIDE

Lorena Villanueva is a Colombian director and producer based in Los Angeles with over a decade of experience in the film and television industry. She completed her Master’s in Film Direction in Spain and directed her first short film, “Fuoco Fatuo,” in Italy. She went on to direct two more short films, “Inés” and “Bed Smash,” which won Best Short Film at the 2024 Santa Fe de Antioquia Film Festival. 

Lorena produced the feature “Corozo,” which premiered at the 2024 Chicago Latino Film Festival, won the Audience Award at the Colombian Festival New York and is set for release in March 2026. She is the co-writer, director and producer of the short film “The Tide Inside,” and is currently developing her feature debut, “Gaira.” She is the producer of the feature “Teorema,” selected for the National Association of Latino Independent Producers Accelerator program.

DERIVE

Lianne Sonia Walden is a filmmaker, theater director, and storyteller whose work evokes a more expansive sense of possibility through its flirtation with the sublime, the serendipitous, and the surreal. Her films have screened at numerous festivals and won awards for Outstanding Directorial Style and Best Comedic Short. Lianne’s television pilot “The Pleasure Gap” was selected for development through the 2024 Orchard Project Episodic Lab, and she is currently in post-production on a documentary about the Shanghai Jews. Committed to fostering artistic collaboration and new work, Lianne runs an artist lab for filmmakers in NYC. She was a Drama League Director’s Fellow, a creative consultant for the producers of the immersive Shakespeare adaptation “Sleep No More,” Project Coordinator at the Foundation for Contemporary Art in Accra, Ghana, and Program Director at Arte Hacía la Vida in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she lived and worked as a director for several years.