Rashaad Newsome (director/producer/director of photography/director of visual effects) is an award-winning filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and innovator whose work defies conventional boundaries, blending film, performance, technology, and community organizing. Through his visionary approach, he crafts immersive experiences that challenge outdated narratives and create new spaces for Black, queer, and trans stories to thrive. Rashaad’s previous works include critically acclaimed projects that merge animation, sculpture, music, and artificial intelligence. His films reflect a philosophy of collage—both in form and content—deconstructing and reimagining the world through expansive, inclusive lenses. A recipient of an honorary doctoral degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut, Newsome has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including Hayward Gallery (London), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), The Sundance Film Festival, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC). He has created more than 15 short films that have screened in arts institutions, festivals and on PBS. Recent awards for his work include the 2022 NEWFEST Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award and the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award For Computer Animation.

Johnny Symons (director/producer/cinematographer) is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker who has directed and produced multiple award-winning LGBTQ-themed feature documentaries. His films include Daddy & Papa, which premiered at Sundance, broadcast in more than a dozen countries and garnered 12 festival awards, Out Run, which premiered at Full Frame and aired on public television, and Ask Not, which broadcast nationally on PBS and screened at the US Capitol. His work has screened at more than 200 international film festivals and received support from funders such as Sundance, Tribeca, ITVS, Catapult, HBO, Frameline, and the California Council for the Humanities. He is a former Fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and longstanding member of New Day Films. Johnny is co-producer of the Academy Award-nominated Long Night’s Journey Into Day, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and streamed on Showtime, and executive producer of Pray Away, which premiered at Tribeca and is streaming on Netflix. He graduated with honors from Brown University and has a master’s in documentary production from Stanford. Currently, he is Professor and MFA Coordinator in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.

Ash Verwiel (editor) is a trans & queer filmmaker and editor from the Netherlands, based in Oakland. With a focus on documentary film, often through an experimental lens, he also makes deeply personal work. Experimental short doc HEART WHISPERS (2020), which has won various festival awards, voices the struggle to find oneself as a trans person and immigrant from a rural small town.

Keenan Newman (cinematographer) is a queer California-based director and cinematographer focused on documentary, fiction and commercial work. He recently spent six months in rural Alaska filming Newtok, a feature documentary about the acute impact of climate change on a Yup’ik village, which premiered at DOC NYC.

M Jamison (composer) is an interdisciplinary producer and musician based out of Minneapolis, MN. Her practice centers the narratives of Black trans/queer artists through record production, sound composition, film scoring, and community arts organizing. M’s production and engineering work on Ms Boogie’s debut album The Breakdown received positive reviews from them, The Cut, Pitchfork and Paper Magazine. Her collaborative compositions have been shown and performed in institutions such as The Shed, Walker Art Center, ArtCenter College of Design, and Park Avenue Armory, where she composed the original music for the Assembly performance. Assembly is M’s debut as composer for a feature length film.