Cheryl Green, MFA, MS is a multimedia digital artist, captioner, audio describer, a 2017 AIR New Voices Scholar, and a Member-Owner and the Digital Operations Lead at New Day Films. She brings her lived experience with multiple invisible disabilities to creating media that explores politically- and culturally-engaged stories from cross-disability communities. Her audio and written blog, transcribed podcast, and documentary films are at www.WhoAmIToStopIt.com. She reported and produced one episode for the Peabody-nominated Season 2 of 70 Million.

Jade Bryan graduated with a BFA degree in film production from one of the world's top film schools at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Jade founded DeafVision Filmworks, Inc. and Jade Films and Entertainment, LLC, and has produced and directed such award-winning documentaries as “Listen to the Hands of Our People", ”On and Off Stage: The Bruce Hlibok Stories”, “9/11 Fear in Silence: The Forgotten Underdogs” and “Reaching Zenith: A Black Deaf Filmmaker’s Journey.” Jade completed her first feature, “If Your Could Hear My Own Tune”, which toured the festival circuit from 2010-2012. She worked tirelessly on the film for nine (9) years, which she produced in 2001. Jade in talks about producing it into a musical play (staged reading) this summer/fall of 2018. The new title is “Feel My Song.”

"The Shattered Mind” is her most recent feature film she completed in 2014 and toured 47 film festivals around the globe. “The Shattered Mind” won 17 awards; included Best Sound, Audience Award, Special Jury Prize, Best Exhibition Film and Best Narrative Feature and Short. One of Jade’s projects, "The Two Essences", a comedy sitcom pilot, will be her first television series. She is also pitching another pilot, “The Innocent Project,” about deaf female hero complex. And she is also working on a documentary, “Black and Deaf in America”, about various issues regarding deaf (African-Americans) who were impacted by police brutality, racism, black erasure and oppression in the educational system. Jade believes in promoting inclusion, awareness, and positive representation of Deaf Talent of Color in television and film. She created the #DeafTalent® Movement on social media in 2012.

Delbert Whetter is the Chief Operating Officer and Head of Business Affairs for Exodus Film Group. He served as the lead business affairs executive for numerous entertainment and digital content providers for nearly two decades. Delbert negotiated talent and production agreements including acquisition, development, and film financing arrangements, and licenses of intellectual properties. Delbert earned his law degree from the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., and his MBA from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management.

Delbert serves on the Board of Directors of RespectAbility, a national non-profit organization that works with Hollywood to promote inclusion, representation, and authentic portrayals of people with disabilities in media. He also serves on the Disability Advisory Board of SFFILM. He was appointed in 2018 by the City of Santa Monica to serve a four-year term on its Disabilities Commission and currently serves as its Vice Chair.

Day Al-Mohamed is an author, filmmaker, and disability policy strategist, and founding member of FWD-Doc. She is co-author of the novel Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn, is a regular host on Idobi Radio's Geek Girl Riot with an audience of more than 80,000 listeners, and her most recent novella, The Labyrinth’s Archivist, was published in 2019 from Falstaff Books. She is a member of Women in Film and Video, a Docs in Progress Film Fellowship alumna, and a graduate of the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. However, she is most proud of being invited to teach a workshop on storytelling at the White House in February 2016.

Day is a disability policy executive with more than fifteen years of experience. She presents often on the representation of disability in media, most recently at the American Bar Association, SXSW, and New York Comic Con. A proud member of Coast Guard Auxiliary (5th District Southern Region), she lives in Washington DC with her wife, N.R. Brown. The Invalid Corps, a documentary about disabled veterans' contributions during the Civil War, was her first documentary as a blind filmmaker.

Emily Beitiks is Associate Director at the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University. Founded in 1996 by historian and scholar-activist Paul Longmore, the Longmore Institute uses public education and community events to teach disabled and nondisabled people alike how disability can enrich our world, from technology to the Arts. With a PhD focused on disability studies, Beitiks is an expert on access, assistive technology devices for disabled people, and disability in popular culture. She is a regular blogger, has published op-eds, appeared on live radio, and has offered many quotations for online and print media.

Reid Davenport is in production of his sixth and seventh documentaries exploring the perspective of people with disabilities. The feature film, I Didn’t See You There, dives into the historical and personal baggage that arises when a circus tent goes up outside his Oakland apartment. I Didn’t See You There has been awarded the Doc Society’s New Perspectives Grant and was selected to be included in the 2020 IFP Week. Davenport was named a 2020 Points North Fellow and a 2020 Bay Area Video Coalition MediaMaker Fellow in connection to the project. He is a 2017 TED Fellow and gave a TED Talk at the annual conference in Vancouver. His film awards include the Enerson Foundation Production Grant (RAMPED UP), the Artistic Visions Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Festival (“A Cerebral Game”) and Best Short Documentary at the 2013 Awareness Film Festival (Wheelchair Diaries). He received a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film & Video from Stanford University in 2016.

Rodney Evans has been making award-winning films and videos that explore the convergence of race, class, sexuality and history in the lives of African Americans and/or LGBTQ+ individuals for over twenty years. Evans is the writer, director, and producer of the feature film Brother To Brother, which won the Special Jury Prize in Drama at the Sundance Film Festival and four Independent Spirit Award nominations including Best First Film and Best First Screenplay. His second narrative feature, The Happy Sad, has played at over thirty film festivals throughout the world and had its U.S. theatrical premiere in August 2013 at the IFC Center in NYC and the Sundance Sunset Cinema in Los Angeles. Evans’ latest feature-length film, Vision Portraits, had its World Premiere at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival and won the 2019 Jury Award for Outstanding Documentary at Frameline-The San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Vision Portraits played theatrically in major cities across the U.S. from August to October 2019 to universal critical acclaim. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008); Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2008); Frameline Award for Career Achievement (2019); and a Sundance Momentum Fellowship (2020).

Brenda is an award-winning filmmaker and educator. Born and raised in Mexico City, her films mostly focus on transnational immigrant stories between Latin America and the U.S. Her work has been showcased at HotDocs, Lakino Berlin, HBO, Fusion Network, and more. Brenda recently completed fellowships and labs with BAVC's National MediaMaker, NALIP, DOCS-MX, and the National Multicultural Alliance. She currently serves on New Day Film's Steering Committee as the team lead for Equity & Representation and is also a programmer for the Watsonville Film Festival. She received a Master’s degree in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz in 2013 and is still an active member of the film and education community in the area.