Patricia Aufderheide — University Professor at American University’s School of Communication and Director of the Center for Social Media. Aufderheide is the author of Documentary: A Very Short Introduction, The Daily Planet, and Communications Policy in the Public Interest.

Deirdre Boyle — Associate Professor at The New School and Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Documentary Studies. Boyle is the author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997).

Bill Hirsch — Project Producer of The Waiting Room. Hirsch, a founder of Peer Review Films, has produced Reversion, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, and is working on a number of other projects. Bill has been a renowned plaintiff’s class action attorney for over 20 years.

Simon Kilmurry — American Documentary | POV. Kilmurry is the winner of an Emmy Award for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking, a Primetime Emmy Award, three News and Documentary Emmy Awards.  

Karina Longworth — Film editor and critic for LA Weekly and a founder of Cinematical, the film culture blog. Longworth has won two 2011 LA Press Club awards, and has also written for The Huffington Post, IndieWIRE, and The Village Voice.  

Stephen Maing — Korean-American filmmaker and artist based in New York. His recent work in China looks at decentralized media and the conflict between personal and political identity. He is a 2011 Fellow of the Independent Feature Project Labs program, a 2010 Fellow of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Storytelling & Edit Lab, a grant recipient of the MacArthur Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and Sundance Documentary Institute. Stephen works as a freelance director/d.p. and editor.

Donal Mosher — Photographer, writer, and musician. Co-director, with Michael Palmieri, of October Country. Mosher’s visual work has been shown in Los Angeles, New York, Portland, and San Francisco’s SF Camerawork. His fiction and non-fiction writings have appeared in Instant City, Satellite, Frozen Tears, and elsewhere.

Peter Nicks — Director of The Waiting Room. Nicks is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced projects for network, cable and public television exploring topics such as immigration, journalism and technology. He worked as a staff producer for ABC News in New York and as a producer for the innovative PBS documentary series Life 360. Peter Nicks earned his Masters in documentary filmmaking from UC Berkeley in 1999.

Michael Palmieri — Director, cinematographer, and editor. Palmieri’s first documentary feature October Country, co-directed with Donal Mosher, won the grand jury prize for best US documentary at Silverdocs and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best documentary in 2009. He has directed music videos for Beck, The Strokes, Belle and Sebastian and many others.

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin — have produced, directed, edited and photographed five feature documentaries: Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), Kamp Katrina (2007), Intimidad (2008), Invisible Girlfriend (2009) and, most recently, Girl Model (2011). Mardi Gras: Made in China was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Kamp Katrina and Intimidad both premiered at Museum of Modern Art and the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival.

Michael Renov — Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Professor of Critical Studies. Renov is the author of The Subject of Documentary (2004) and Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (1988).

Tom Roston — Roston, who now writes the Doc Soup blog for POV at PBS.org, spent ten years at Premiere magazine, where he was a Senior Editor. He started his career in journalism at The Nation and then Vanity Fair. Roston has also written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, New York, Elle and other publications.

Lynn True — True is a New York-based filmmaker whose documentary films include Ithemba|Hope (2005), about an HIV+ choir in South Africa; LUMO (2007), about a young woman recovering from rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Summer Pasture (2012), about a young family of nomads in the high grasslands of eastern Tibet. True is also a programmer at New York’s Maysles Cinema In Harlem where she and Nelson Walker are co-founders and directors of the Tibet in Harlem and Congo in Harlem film festivals.

Nelson Walker — Walker began his career working on documentaries for Discovery Channel, History Channel, and PBS’s Nova. His directorial debut, Ithemba|Hope aired on Sundance Channel in 2005. His second film, LUMO, won a student Academy Award for Best Documentary, the President’s Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and aired nationally on PBS’s P.O.V. series in 2007. His latest film, Summer Pasture (2012), received nominations from the Film Independent Spirit Awards and IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards.