J.B. Rutagarama  (New York, NY) was just a teenager in 1994 when a bloody genocide occurred in Rwanda. He was hunted by machete-wielding militias who wanted to kill him purely because of his Tutsi features. He did not expect to make it out of Rwanda alive; most of his relatives hadn't. For years, Rutagarama could not talk about what happened to him. But now he feels his story can help others--and serve as a message that it is possible to stop the cycle of warfare that grips much of the world today. It may be a cruel irony that it took a war to introduce Rutagarama to filmmaking, but he now believes this is his destiny. As he observed TV news cameras filming the genocide, he discovered the power of the moving image. After Rutagarama fled Rwanda, the two reporters who adopted him sent him to film school in England, where he graduated with honors. Afterward he moved to New York City and began working as a studio cameraman at a television network. Back Home, the only film about the genocide in Rwanda made by an actual survivor, is his first film, and making it was difficult. When Rutagarama returned to Rwanda to film, soldiers seized his camera and footage. Then many of his surviving relatives were too traumatized to recount everything that had happened to them. But now the account is complete, and the film has won multiple awards at festivals.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (Philadelphia, PA) is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, international lecturer, published writer and activist. An incest and rape survivor, she spent 11 years producing, writing and directing the award-winning documentary NO!, which explores the international reality of rape through the first-person testimonies, scholarship, activism, spirituality and cultural work of African Americans. Since its world premiere in 2006, NO! has been screened and distributed to racially and ethnically diverse audiences at international film festivals, community centers, colleges/universities, high schools, juvenile correctional facilities, rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters and conferences throughout the United States, and in Italy, Spain, Rwanda, South Africa, Hungary, Burkino Faso and Mexico. This past April, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) designated NO! as the featured event during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Simmons is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the 2007 Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community Media Award; the 2006 San Diego Women's Film Festival Audience Choice Award and Juried Award for NO!; the 2006 DC Rape Crisis Center's Visionary Award; a 2006 Ford Foundation grant to support the international educational marketing and distribution of NO!; Leeway Foundation's 2005 Transformation Award; an Artist-in-Residency at Spelman College's Digital Moving Image Salon; and production/post-production grants from the Valentine Foundation, the Bread and Roses Community Fund, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, and the Gloria Steinem Fund of the Ms. Foundation for Women. www.NOtheRapeDocumentary.org.

Glenn Stewart (Kansas City, MO) worked for KCUR-FM, an NPR affiliate in Kansas City, as a co-host and guest host for six years. She also produced and co-hosted WeekEnds, a national talk show, at KCMO-AM. During this time, Stewart worked as a talent for TV commercials, voiceovers and training videos. This experience provided a transition to field-producing for KMBC-TV a local ABC affiliate, where she created topics, found locations, set up shots and produced three segments a week for a local commentator. Her interest in field production led to preferring to stay behind the camera to create, produce and direct. Her emphasis is on short docs. Subjects include artists, jazz musicians and one of her favorite subjects: Jesus Malverde, a Mexican folk hero/outlaw from the early 20th century. Jesus Malverde: El Bandido Generoso took First Place Narrative and Audience Favorite in a Kansas City IFC Film Fest and has screened in North Hollywood at Exploding Cinema, The Other Venice Film Fest (Venice, California.) and Cinema on the Bayou (Lafayette, Louisiana), and is going to Quito, Ecuador this fall. A selection of Stewart's short jazz docs, including Riffs: A Kansas City Coda, The Taylor Project and OverSaxed, will also screen at Cinema on the Bayou. Last October, Stewart launched DocFeast, a Kansas City-based one-day festival that includes a seminar, and feature-length and short docs. Stewart is a member of AFTRA, and her interests and hobbies include independent and foreign films, documentaries, jazz and anything French. www.creativejuiceskc.com.

Linda Vester (New York, NY) is a documentary filmmaker and founder and president of Big Bear Productions. She started making docs after two decades as a broadcast journalist. While in television, Vester anchored numerous breaking news specials, including the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to that, she traveled constantly as a foreign correspondent, covering conflicts in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Kuwait, Somalia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland and Haiti. Before working in television, Vester studied as a Fulbright Scholar of Middle East Affairs in Egypt. She earned her BS magna cum laude in journalism at Boston University, also studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Now, however, she is a passionate filmmaker. Her first documentary, Back Home, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Ann Arbor Film Festival as well as Special Mention at the 2006 AFI Film Festival. Back Home is deeply personal to Vester, because she produced it with her adopted son as director. The doc is the true story of her son, J.B. Rutagarama (see above), and how he survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. More than that, though, Back Home is J.B.'s emotional journey back to his homeland to try to forgive the madmen who murdered his family. Vester's next doc is about a new charter school in New York for black and Latina girls.

Joshua A. Wilkinson (Los Angeles, CA). After graduating from Skyline High School in Oakland, California, Wilkinson moved to Mexico to learn Spanish and teach English. He subsequently completed a BA in theatre arts at Humboldt State University, studied Italian literature in Florence for a year, and most recently earned his MFA in cinema production from the University of Southern California. At USC, Wilkinson completed eight short films, including both fiction and documentary, and a 26-minute thesis documentary, Frank, Jeffry, Benji and Me, in which he uses his older son's birthday party as a motivation to bring together four generations of Wilkinson males for the first time and try to open lines of communication that have been shut down for decades. The film has played at numerous festivals in the US and Canada, and can be purchased for educational use at http://forwardintime.com. Wilkinson's other passion--and his means of supporting his wife (a full-time chemistry undergraduate at UCLA) and two boys--is production sound; he works as a production sound mixer/boom op/recordist and does post audio-editing and design out of his home. He has a long list of documentary and reality credits, and many local references. josh.sound@gmail.com.

Artemis Willis (New York, NY) is an independent media artist, programmer and curator. Her most recent film is about Kiharu Nakamura, an 88-year-old geisha living in Queens, New York. Willis began her career in the late 1980s in commercial and feature production with such directors as Michael Apted, Ed Zwick and Carol Ballard, and in theater with Sarah Caldwell's critically acclaimed Opera Company of Boston. From 2000 to 2004, Willis was director of distribution and special educational projects for the Checkerboard Film Foundation, a leading producer of films on the American arts. Presently she is vice president of the New York Film and Video Council. Recent programming activity has included a tribute to pioneering documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock, a series of showings of the works of nonfiction filmmaker Robert Gardner, a special presentation of Leonard Bernstein on film and a salute to Russian documentary filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya. Willis frequently speaks to students about her work at schools and universities, including The London School of Economics, New York University and Wellesley College, her alma mater. She is currently a master's candidate at Columbia University.

Winnie Wong (Studio City, CA) is vice president, entertainment and media division, at DeWitt Stern. Wong has 20 years of experience in the entertainment insurance industry. She has worked at various entertainment insurance brokerages and has represented a number of prestigious accounts such as MGM Studios, Universal Studios, countless television, commercial and documentary production companies. In addition, she has taught entertainment insurance at UCLA Extension--Entertainment Studies Department, IDA and Film Independent (FIND). Since joining DeWitt Stern, Wong has played a key role in developing value-added services such as certificates on line, film association errors and omissions insurance and other programs for the entertainment industry. She holds a bachelor of science degree in business administration from University of Pittsburgh.

Nisma Zaman (New York, NY) is an Emmy Award-winning producer who began her film/television career in 1992 with the nonprofit arts and culture documentary organization The New York Center for Visual History. Subsequently she worked for such renowned documentary filmmakers as Jennifer Fox on American Love Story, which profiles an interracial family, and Tina DiFeliciantonio and Jane Wagner on Walk This Way, which documents nine children's experiences of race and diversity. After serving as coordinating producer for Nickelodeon's Little Bill, a 52-episode digital animation series based on Bill Cosby's childrens' books, Zaman went on to co-produce a feature documentary profiling international women peace-builders in Afghanistan, Argentina, Bosnia, Burundi and the US. The award-winning Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines premiered at the United Nations in October 2003 and was broadcast on PBS the following summer. Zaman's own documentaries include Beyond Black & White, a short film exploring the complex identity issues of five mixed-race women. She holds a BFA in film, photography and visual arts from Ithaca College and among other honors, was the Dean's Award recipient for the School of Communications in her centennial graduating class. Zaman currently works full-time as a media and materials producer at the International Center for Transitional Justice (www.ictj.org). On the side, she provides consulting for documentaries and is in the post-production phase of a feature documentary on adult competitive figure skaters. Interests include figure skating, costume design, flamenco and traveling.