Sharon Lockhart (USA) is a photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964. Celebrated for her highly conceptual yet elegant work, Lockhart’s practice involves collaborations that unfold over extended periods of time, often incorporating architectural elements, extensive periods of research, and long-term relationships with her subjects and collaborators. She received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute (1991) and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design (1993). Since 1997, she has completed more than 15 films which have screened at festivals and museums around the world, including Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gladstone Gallery, Blum & Poe, Bonniers Konsthall, The Power Plant, Baltimore Museum of Art, Venice Biennale, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, Viennale, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Jeu de Paume, Toronto International Film Festival, and Media City Film Festival. Her work is in permanent collections of institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty Foundation, Tate Modern, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Yokohama Museum of Art. She is a recipient of Radcliffe (2007–08), Guggenheim (2001), and Rockefeller (2000) Fellowships, as well as a Herb Alpert Award (2015). She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she teaches at CalArts.

Rhayne Vermette (Canada) is a filmmaker and multimedia artist born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba, in 1982. Her work employs collage, photography, and analogue filmmaking techniques, emphasizing themes of place, time, and rhythm through layers of fiction, animation, re-enactments, and what the artist describes as “divine interruption.” She received a BA in Literature from the University of Winnipeg (2005) and studied architecture at the University of Manitoba. Her films, including take my word (2012), Black Rectangle (2014), Extraits d’une famille (2015), and Domus (2017), have screened at museums, festivals, and galleries internationally including New York Film Festival, Canadian Film Institute, Melbourne International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Viennale, Jeonju International Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective. She is the recipient of a Mosaic Film Fund Award from Winnipeg Film Group (2011), a PLATFORM Photography Award from PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (2019), and her first feature film Ste. Anne (2021) was awarded the Toronto International Film Festival’s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award; her accompanying exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada continues to April, 2025. She lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Razan AlSalah (Palestine/Canada) is a Palestinian filmmaker, artist, and teacher born in Beirut in 1987. Her films engage with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives, and histories in colonial image worlds. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects, sounds, and the unknown. She received an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University (2017). Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including HotDocs, Melbourne International Film Festival, Glasgow International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, New Filmmakers New York, FIDMarseille, Prismatic Ground, Beirut International Film Festival, Sharjah Film Forum, and Wexner Center for the Arts, winning awards from Ann Arbor Film Festival and Days of Cinema Palestine, among others. She was a Knight Foundation New Frontier Fellow at Sundance Film Festival (2018), an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Grantee (2020), and a mentor at the CAMRA Mellons Fellows Program at the University of Pennsylvania (2018). Her films are in the permanent collections of Sursock Museum in Beirut. She has curated film programs for Cinémathèque québécoise and contributed articles to C-Mag and other journals. She lives and works in Montréal/Tiotiake, where she teaches Intermedia and Moving Images at Concordia University.

Ja’Tovia Gary (USA) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation born in Dallas in 1984. Gary’s multivalent works seek to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, applying what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving images. She received her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014). Her work has been exhibited at festivals and museums worldwide including The Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Austrian Film Museum, New Orleans Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Open City Documentary Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, winning awards from Locarno Film Festival and BlackStar Film Festival, as well as from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Block Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has taught courses in direct animation and cameraless filmmaking at Mono No Aware in Brooklyn and was a founding member (2013) of New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women filmmakers. She lives and works in Dallas, Texas.