Katy Chevigny is an award-winning filmmaker and a co-founder of Big Mouth Productions. She has produced and/or directed over a dozen documentary features and series. She is currently writing and directing the forthcoming feature, The Easy Kind, about a Nashville singer and songwriter. Most recently, she won an Emmy for directing two episodes of Home, a documentary series about innovative architects for A24 / AppleTV+, which were filmed in the Netherlands and France. With Marilyn Ness, she produced several films, including the 2023 documentary short Camp Courage (dir. Max Lowe), which was acquired by Netflix. Marilyn and Katy also produced the acclaimed 2020 documentaries Becoming (dir. Nadia Hallgren), and Dick Johnson is Dead (dir. Kirsten Johnson). Katy also co-directed (with Ross Kauffman) E-Team, which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. She also directed one of the storylines in Kartemquin Films’ documentary series Hard Earned, winner of a 2016 Alfred I. DuPont Award. Her work has been distributed by PBS, NBC, Netflix, AppleTV+, HBO, Arte/ZDF, VPRO and Channel 4, among others, and has played in theaters and at festivals around the world.

Since the start of his filmmaking career, Hasan Oswald has demonstrated an ability to capture the human experience through verité cinema. His unfettered access to and intimacy with his subjects creates a seamless veneer between the filmmaker and subject that heightens the immediacy and personal nature of his storytelling. He has covered the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (Forgotten USA), drug trafficking and homelessness in Camden, New Jersey (Higher Love), and the international diaspora of conflict refugees for National Geographic (Hell on Earth). His latest documentary, Mediha, follows a teenage Yazidi girl processing her trauma after being held captive by ISIS. Mediha won the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award (runner-up) at DOC NYC in 2023. Hasan was also named one of DOC NYC’s 40 under 40 documentary rising stars to watch, co-presented by HBO Documentary Films.

In August 2014, when Mediha was only nine years old, she was kidnapped by ISIS and sold into sexual slavery. She now dedicates her life to sharing her film and the story of the Yazidi people with the world.

Matt Moyer is a photographer and filmmaker dedicated to telling stories that raise awareness and work to improve our world. Matt covered 9/11 in NYC, and the Iraq war for The New York Times, and has photographed multiple feature stories for National Geographic magazine. As a National Geographic Explorer, Matt has photographed the looming water crisis in Egypt. He has directed short documentaries that have been featured by several outlets, including the National Geographic Society and PBS. Matt was named a Knight Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2008 and also received a Knight Fellowship at Ohio University in 2012. He teaches regularly for National Geographic Photo Camps, an organization that teaches photography to underserved youth throughout the world. Matt also sits on the Board of Advisors for The Siena School, a school for students with language-based learning differences, headquartered in Washington, DC.

Amy Toensing is a visual journalist committed to telling stories with sensitivity and depth. A regular contributor to National Geographic magazine for over twenty years, Toensing has photographed and reported on cultures and topics around the world, including indigenous communities and their connection to land, the impact of drought on communities in Australia, and land and social rights for women in Uganda and India. Her recent projects have centered around the human relationship to conservation efforts in the United States including a rewilding project in Montana and The Northern Forest Canoe Trail. Toensing has also co-directed two short documentary films, one about urban refugee children in Nairobi and the other on women’s land rights in Uganda. In 2018 Toensing was named the Mike Wallace Fellow in Investigative Reporting at the University of Michigan. She is currently a National Geographic Explorer and FUJIFILM Creator.

Curtis Ramsey is the key participant in Matt Moyer and Amy Toensing’s award-winning documentary, Inheritance. The film follows Curtis and his family over 11 years, exploring the underlying causes of the opioid epidemic in America through the life of one boy and five generations of his extended family. Curtis is currently participating in the film as it screens at festivals across the US and beyond.

Lindsey Megrue is a director and creative producer who strives to make documentary films that explore the pivotal issues shaping our world from an intimate and nuanced perspective. She has been working in film for nearly two decades. Her work has been shown theatrically on HBO, EPIX, MTV, and PBS, as well as on the websites of The New York Times and The New Yorker. She produced This is Home, a feature-length film about Syrian refugees resettling in Baltimore, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary. She was a Field Producer for the Emmy-nominated series Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. She has also directed for the highly-rated PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Other films include Each and Every Day, Koch, and eight episodes of the award-winning series American Experience. Lindsey’s current project, One South: Portrait of a Psych Unit, will premiere on HBO in the summer of 2024. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Documentary Producers Alliance, a 2017 Impact Partners Producing Fellow, and a graduate of Smith College.

Alexandra Shiva is an award-winning filmmaker known for crafting intimate character-driven cinema verité documentaries. Her previous film, Each and Every Day, about youth mental health, premiered on MTV in 2021. In 2018, Alexandra released This Is Home, a portrait of four Syrian refugee families arriving in Baltimore, Maryland, and struggling to find their footing. It won the Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and a Columbia-duPont award. She produced and directed How to Dance in Ohio, which follows a group of autistic teenagers preparing for an iconic American rite of passage — a Spring Formal. The Peabody Award-winning film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and aired on HBO to great critical acclaim. A musical adaptation of How to Dance in Ohio opened on Broadway in 2023. Alexandra’s other film credits include Stagedoor and her directorial debut, Bombay Eunuch. Her most recent project, One South: Portrait of a Psych Unit, is about an inpatient program specializing in treating college students and will premiere on HBO in the summer of 2024. Alexandra is an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science member and the Director’s Guild of America. She is a graduate of Vassar College.

Dr. Laura Braider, PhD, is a pediatric psychologist, Assistant Vice President at Northwell Health, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. She contributes to publications such as Psychology Today and Psychiatric Times and is frequently asked to share her expertise with national and local media.

Her clinical work focuses on the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD) and Tourette Syndrome, and she co-founded the OCD program at Northwell’s Zucker Hillside Hospital. Over fifteen years ago, Dr. Braider identified a pressing need facing families of college-aged students and established the Behavioral Health College Partnership (BHCP), a transformative and first-of-its-kind program that has developed new protocols to manage the mental health challenges on campuses better today. BHCP provides crisis transport, emergency evaluation, a specialty college inpatient psychiatric unit, and post-acute outpatient care. This innovative partnership has rapidly expanded and currently serves 96 colleges in New York state. It is featured in the HBO documentary One South: Portrait of a Psych Unit, premiering at DC/DOX.