Peter Gilbert is an award-winning Producer/Director and DP. He has been a member of Kartemquin Films and an emeritus board member for 40 years. Peter is known for his work as one of the filmmakers of Hoop Dreams. Peter also DP’d Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning American Dream. He teaches in the MFA Documentary Film Program at Wake Forest University. Last year, a film he produced, The Easy Kind, screened at the festival. Peter moves back and forth between documentary and narrative films.

Daniel Kasman is the VP Publishing at MUBI, a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. Based out of MUBI’s New York office and one of the first to join the company over 19 years ago, Daniel oversees the curatorial writing for the streaming service and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of MUBI’s international film publication, Notebook. He also leads MUBI Editions, a new book imprint dedicated to cinema and the arts.

Madeline Whittle is a Programmer at Film at Lincoln Center, where she joined the team in 2016. A co-programmer of NYFF Talks since 2020 and lead programmer of FLC’s Scary Movies genre showcase, she also serves on selection committees for the annual festivals New Directors/New Films and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and has organized or co-organized numerous retrospectives and thematic repertory series. Her writing on film appears regularly in Film Comment.

Penelope Bartlett has worked across streaming platforms, festivals, and art-house theaters, for organizations including the Criterion Collection, Metrograph, Vimeo, Tribeca Film Festival, Full Frame Film Festival, Palm Springs Film Festival, and more. She is based in Durham, NC, and is the founder and co-director of Film Durham, an organization devoted to developing, promoting and celebrating independent film and creators in Durham and the Research Triangle area.

Thomas Southerland teaches filmmaking at Eastern Kentucky University. In the past decade, he’s created three hybrid feature films with the poet Katerina Stoykova and co-director S. Cagney Gentry that form a loose Bulgarian trilogy. Proud Citizen won the Jury Prize at New Orleans. Fort Maria won the Best Film and Cinematography award from Ashland. Their most recent film Other Houses premiered at the 2025 FFK and won the Best Director prize. He is dedicated to regional filmmaking.

Hillary Weston is a New York-based writer. For the last ten years, she has been the director of social for the Criterion Collection and a co-producer of their Closet Video series. In addition to writing for Criterion’s online magazine, she has also programmed collections for their streaming service, The Criterion Channel, and contributed to their disc releases. Her work has also appeared in Film Quarterly, BOMB, Interview, SSENSE, and other publications.

Jonathan Duffy is an award winning creative producer and co-founder of Ten Acre Films. Eleven of his films have premiered at Sundance, including Boots Riley’s 2019 Independent Spirit Award-winning Sorry To Bother You. Additional films have premiered at Cannes, Berlinale, Toronto, SXSW and Tribeca. Recent highlights include: What Happens Later, All That We Love, and The Senior. Duffy is a mentor for Stowe Story Labs and an alumnus of the Rotterdam Producing Lab, Cannes Producers Network, Sundance Producing Summit, Sundance Catalyst Program and SFFILM’s Producers Fellowship.

Tracie Laymon wrote, directed, and produced Bob Trevino Likes It, winner of the SXSW Grand Jury and Audience Awards for Best Narrative Feature. Starring Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo, the film earned over 40 awards, was sold to over 40 countries, and is currently available on Hulu and digital. She’s developing multiple features to also direct, including Tony the Tattooed Man for Mattel Studios.

Kristin Shrader is aan independent awards consultant working alongside the public relations teams at Warner Bros. Discovery, FOX Entertainment, and Netflix. Prior to launching her own firm, she oversaw communications for series and brand initiatives at the #1 entertainment cable network, USA. She previously held positions at Bravo, Oxygen Media, and Fuse TV where she executed unscripted series campaigns and corporate PR initiatives. Shrader began her publicity career at the original entertainment PR firm, Rogers & Cowan, where she worked with the biggest stars in Hollywood.

Kelly Williams is a creative producer and co-founder, with Jonathan Duffy, of Ten Acre Films. His credits include six features that have premiered at Sundance, including Light from Light, Sorry to Bother You (Independent Spirit Award winner), The Long Dumb Road, and Pit Stop (Independent Spirit Award nominee). Other films include: Mark, Mary & Some Other People (Tribeca 2021), No Future (Tribeca 2021), I Used To Go Here (SXSW 2020), and What Happens Later (2023), starring Meg Ryan and David Duchovny.

Eric Dawson is Manager of the Knox County Public Library’s Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection. Previously, he served as head of the Library’s A/V archive, TAMIS. He is a writer and archival filmmaker whose films include Electric Appalachia and Suttree.

Eleni Palis is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of the book Classical Projections: The Practice and Politics of Film Quotation (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Amanda Thornton works at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but her passion has always been movies. She previously managed film festivals nationwide for Regal and has volunteered at Nashville and Knoxville Film Festivals.