Journalist / critic
Nigeria

Aderinsola Ajao is a journalist and cultural projects manager. Her articles have appeared in publications including Chimurenga, Africiné, Awotele, Glänta, and La Furia Umana.
She is on the editorial committee of Awotele, a bilingual pan-African screen journal, and is part of the cinidb.africa team (a Goethe-Institut initiative cataloguing audiovisual professionals from Africa and its diaspora).
She also runs Screen Out Loud – Lagos, a film screening series in partnership with Alliance Française Lagos.

Filmmaker
Israel

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz is known for ‘The Viewing Booth’ (2019) and ‘The Law in These Parts’ (2011). His work in both the fiction and nonfiction realm has challenged political and formal conventions and was showcased at venues such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, TIFF and CPH:DOX, and received prestigious awards, among them a Grand Jury Award at Sundance and a Peabody award. His current scholarly work is focused on the relationship between the nonfiction image and its audience in the current media environment.

Programmer and Critic
Australia

Michelle Carey is a Berlin-based film programmer working with the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and New York Film Festival. She is also a co-founder of the Parenting at Film Festivals group, and an editor at the online film website Senses of Cinema. She was previously Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival from 2011-2018 and a Programmer for the Melbourne Cinémathèque 2002-2018. In 2017 she was recipient of the Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres from the French Government.

Director and Cinematographer
USA

Johnson’s camerawork appears in Academy Award winner ‘CITIZENFOUR’, Academy nominated ‘The Invisible War’, and Cannes Winner ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’. As a director, her film ‘Dick Johnson is Dead’ premiered at Sundance and won the Jury Prize for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling and made the Oscar shortlist. Her previous film, ‘Cameraperson’, named New York Times ‘Top Ten Films of 2016’ was also shortlisted for the Academy Award. She is one of the only 4% of women members of American Society of Cinematographers.

Producer, Critic / Editor
USA

Scott Macaulay is a New York-based producer and journalist. Among his recent producing credits at his company Forensic Films are Kitty Green’s ‘The Assistant’ and ‘Casting JonBenet’ and, previously films by Peter Sollett, Harmony Korine, Elisabeth Subrin, Alice Wu, Jesse Peretz, James Ponsoldt and Tom Noonan. He is also the co-founder and Editor of Filmmaker Magazine.

Artist
UK / France

Beatrice Gibson is a french-british filmmaker based between London and Palermo. Gibson is twice winner of The Tiger Award for Best Short Film, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was shortlisted for The Jarman Award for Artist’s film and the 2013–15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. In 2015 she won the 17th Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel. Gibson has recently had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen Mercer Union, Toronto and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Gibson’s work will be included in the Hayward Gallery’s upcoming British Art Show 9, 2021/22. 

Curator
USA

Rachael Rakes is a curator, researcher, and educator based in Amsterdam. She is the Curator of Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. She is also a Programmer at Large for Film at Lincoln Center—where she co-curates Art of the Real and advises for the New York Film Festival, and a Contributing Editor for the sonic research platform Infrasonica. With Onyeka Igwe and Laura Huertas Millán, Rakes organizes Counter-Encounters, a curatorial and research initiative on alternative ethnographies. Rakes has taught recently for Curatorial Studies at KASK, The New School, Harvard University, and the New Centre for Research and Practice. Rakes is co-editor of the publication Practice Space (2019, NAME/De Appel), and frequently publishes criticism and essays.

Artist
UK

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His film ‘South’ was awarded the New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2020. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at international festivals and art institutions. Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.

Filmmaker
Canada

Jennifer Abbott is a Genie and Sundance award winning filmmaker dedicated to filmmaking as art, philosophy and activism. She is best known as the co-director of ‘The Corporation’ (2003), still the top grossing and most awarded documentary in Canadian history. This year, Abbott’s sequel ‘The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel’ is screening at CPH:DOX.

While her primary interests lie in writing and directing socially engaged essay documentaries, Abbott almost always edits and frequently sound designs her own films. She is also migrating into narrative films and documentary-narrative hybrids.

Filmmaker and Director General (ARIJ)
Jordan

Rawan Damen is Director General of ARIJ (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism) and a documentary filmmaker and media consultant with over 20 years of experience. Her work includes the internationally renowned award-winning documentary series ‘Al-Nakba’, ‘The Price of Oslo’, and others. Rawan worked as a senior commissioning producer at Al Jazeera Media Network for 10 years (2006 – 2016), commissioning more than 250 hours of documentaries and investigations. Damen received the Media Creativity Award by the Arab Thought Foundation in Beirut, 2015.

Filmmaker
Norway

Tonje Hessen Schei is an award-winning Norwegian independent filmmaker. Tonje is the director of iHuman (2019), Drone (2014), Play Again (2010) and Independent Intervention (2005). Her films have received international awards including Most Valuable Documentary of the Year at Cinema for Peace, the Golden Nymph, and the Norwegian equivalent Oscar and Emmy for Best Documentary. Tonje’s films have screened at the UN and EU, Netflix and major film festivals worldwide. Tonje was a Chicken & Egg Award grantee in 2020, and she is a co-founder and director at UpNorth Film.

Director
Romania

Alina Manolache is a documentary film director based in Bucharest, Romania. Featured by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the top 5 female directors of IDFA 2020, Manolache has made films for The Guardian and VICE and has been honoured with premieres at IDFA, Visions du Réel, CPH:DOX and many more. Her filmography includes acclaimed titles such as ‘Lost Kids on The Beach’ which is screening at this year’s CPH:DOX and, ‘2020: A Covid Space Odyssey’. An alumna of Archidoc Lisbon – Paris – Nyon and Aristoteles Workshop – ARTE France, she now contributes as a mentor at various documentary labs for young filmmakers.

Festival Programmer
China

Emma Xu set up the documentary section of Shanghai International Film Festival since 2015 and serve as the documentary programmer since then. Before that, she worked for Shanghai TV Festival and Shanghai Media Group for more than ten years. She has worked as consultant for many documentary projects and film production companies. Her production works include ’The Broken Ridge’ which was in the competition at IDFA and ‘One Day’ which was in competition at the DMZ documentary film festival. She is currently producing the feature project Dancing Budgie, and documentary project Observing the West Lake.

Artistic Director
Canada

Bruno Dequen has been the artistic director of RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal) since 2015, after working there as a programmer since 2011. He is also editor-in-chief of the film magazine 24 images. From 2007 to 2015, he has also worked as a film teacher and an associate producer for documentary series.

Editor and critic
Australia

Annabel Brady-Brown is an editor, publisher and writer from Melbourne. In 2014, Annabel and Giovanni Marchini Camia co-founded the film magazine Fireflies, which relaunched this year as Fireflies Press, an independent publishing house dedicated to books on cinema. Through Fireflies, she has curated discussions and screenings internationally. She is the film editor at The Big Issue and a regular reviewer for ABC Arts, and her writing has appeared in places such as MUBI Notebook, The Monthly, cléo journal, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s journal Open Space,Senses of Cinema, and more.

Festival Programmer
South Korea

Young-woo Kim studied Visual Arts & TV at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA. In 2014, he joined the selection committee of Busan International Film Festival as a programmer in charge of Asian cinema. He has been a member of the selection committee of Asian Cinema Fund (ACF & AND) and involved Asian Project Market (APM) as well. Working closely with Korean independent cinema groups, he has been a member of the Association of Korean Independent Film & Video, and also is a board member of Seoul Independent Film Festival. Since 2019, he has now worked for DMZ International Documentary Film Festival(Korea) as a programmer, and also a program advisor of IDFA, and currently an advisor to Locarno Film Festival for Asian Cinema. 

Director
USA

Pacho Velez is a nonfiction director based in NYC. His most recent feature, ‘Searchers’, premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and is screening at this year’s CPH:DOX. His previous work has played around the world, including at the New York Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. His first feature, ‘Manakamana’ (2013, co-directed with Stephanie Spray), won the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the Locarno International Film Festival. In 2010, Pacho received his MFA from CalArts. At present, he is a professor of Screen Studies at The New School.