Karen Bennett, has a degree in Film Scoring from Berklee College of Music. She worked as a music editor with John Williams, Danny Elfman, Tim Burton, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg before returning to school to become an educator. In 2011 she founded the Cinematic Arts Program at Millikan Middle School and Performing Arts Magnet in Los Angeles, where her students won awards from all over the world for their films (and she began to win honors for her teaching). Since 2017 she has been teaching filmmaking to high school students at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano. (Her students there won the top prize at NFFTY’s “48-Hour Film Off” in 2019.) “Teaching the Art of Filmmaking,” her first book, is currently available from Amazon.

Matt Lawrence had twenty years of professional experience in radio, TV, and film before founding Ballard High School’s Digital Filmmaking Program in 2001 and co-founding the Media Educators Excellence Team, an inter-district consortium of Puget Sound media teachers, that same year. He has won teaching awards and honors from the Washington Association of Career & Technical Education, the Washington State PTA, ParentMap magazine, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and the National YoungArts Foundation. Two of NFFTY’s three co-founders, Jesse Harris and Kyle Seago, were his students.