Giselle Bonilla graduated with Honors from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film and Television Production. Her thesis film, Virgencita, won the Horizon Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, received the Adrienne Shelly Grant, and won the Audience Award at NFFTY in 2019. Giselle also directs music videos which have premiered on the digital platforms of Rolling Stone India and The Fader. She is currently a 2020 Sundance Ignite Fellow, and based in Los Angeles.

At 20 years old, Quinn Shephard wrote, directed, and starred in Blame, which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival--making her the youngest female filmmaker to ever screen a feature there. She received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay for the film. Now 25, Quinn is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list maker, and has developed an original series at FX Networks alongside EP Noah Hawley, as well as an original miniseries and feature at new studio MakeReady.

Sean created and oversees the Creative Culture program for filmmaker fellowships and residencies at the Jacob Burns Film Center. His producing credits include Matthew Puccini’s Lavender (Sundance, Fox Searchlight), Crystal Kayiza’s Edgecombe (Sundance, POV), and Emily Ann Hoffman’s Nevada (Sundance, Vimeo Staff Pick). These shorts and many more were produced within Creative Culture – a program connecting filmmakers to the film industry and to one another through a guiding philosophy of inclusion and collaboration. He is a former director with the Upright Citizens Brigade and got his start directing films in the Private Cabin Collective. Sean holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a BA in Cinema Studies from SUNY Purchase College where he continues to teach.

Phillip Youmans is a filmmaker from the 7th Ward of New Orleans. At 19, Phillip became the youngest and first African-American director to win the Founder’s Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival for his feature-length debut, Burning Cane, which he wrote, directed, shot and edited during his final years of high school. Phillip is also the youngest director to ever have a feature film compete at the Tribeca Film Festival. Distributed by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY Releasing, Burning Cane opened in select theaters on October 25th, 2019 and was released on Netflix on November 6, 2019. Phillip was nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director and a Film Independent Spirit Award for his work on the film. Recently, Phillip wrote, directed and edited a short film for Hulu’s Black History Month titled Imagine a Moon Colony, about a black family in 1970 Los Angeles that imagines the year 2020 through a black lens and creates abstract visuals based on their predictions.