Rick Goldschmidt is the official Rankin/Bass Historian/Biographer for Rankin/Bass Productions and has written six books on the subject. He has worked with Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass for over thirty years. He has been all over the country at conventions and has been a part of many projects based on the Rankin/Bass TV Specials and films. He writes for ReMind and RetroFan magazines too. 2024 will be the 60th anniversary of Rankin/Bass Productions’ landmark TV special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and Rick is the expert on it – the longest-running, highest-rated TV special of all-time!

Josh Lawrence is a critically acclaimed trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and recording artist who serves as Director of Jazz Studies at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

A "preeminent voice among young composers" (Downbeat 2017), Lawrence has received awards from and produced commissions for the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (From the Vine), American Composers Forum (Mind Behind Closed Eyes), Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (Life Mosaic), Revive X Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harlem Suite), Chamber Music America (Lost Works Live), Come Hear North Carolina (We Insist! FCO + Melanie Charles), and Festival of New Trumpet Music (Philly Twisted).

Lawrence has recorded five solo albums with Posi-Tone Records, two albums with Ropeadope Records co-leading the Fresh Cut Orchestra, received two Grammy Award nominations with pianist Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band and Smoke Sessions Records, and can be heard on albums by Boyz II Men, Erykah Badu, Jazmine Sullivan, Laurin Talese, Jonathan Michel, Caleb Curtis, Tarbaby, Adam Baldych, and Brian Marsella’s Imaginarium.

Lawrence holds a Bachelor degree from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, a Master degree from the Juilliard School in New York, and studied with legendary pianist Barry Harris. In 2021, Lawrence was named Director of Jazz Studies at Interlochen Center for the Arts where he now leads the Arts Academy and Summer Camp programs and conducts the Interlochen Jazz Orchestra.

Alan Amtzis is Director of the M.Ed. Instruction program at The College of New Jersey where he also teaches a course called “Terms of EnQueerMent: A history of LGBTQ film and media.” He holds a master’s degree in Film Studies from Columbia University where he wrote his thesis on Max Ophuls’ “The Earrings of Madame de…” His lifelong love of movies began at age 5 when he saw his first film in a movie theater (Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”). Prior to becoming an educator, he worked as a script reader and as a casting director for films, music videos and commercials. He appeared briefly as a featured extra in the costume party scene of Jonathan Demme’s 1993 “Philadelphia” as “The Pope”, but don’t blink or you’ll miss his moment! He is a proud member of the County Theater and is thrilled to be part of Renew Theaters’ Deep Focus series.

Aidan Levy is the author of Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins and Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed, and editor of Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Interviews and Encounters. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, JazzTimes, and The Nation. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Dan Buskirk has worked in public and community radio for 40 years, formerly as a researcher for the Peabody Award-winning “Fresh Air” and for over twenty years programming & hosting “Jazz & Beyond” on WPRB-Princeton. Dan teaches cinema studies classes at Fleisher Art Memorial and curates a monthly screening series “Bright Bulb Screenings” at The Rotunda on the University of Pennsylvania campus. He has written and lectured about music and film for various outlets including the Philadelphia Weekly, The Princeton Public Library and The Philadelphia Museum of Art and has contributed to various DVD commentaries and liner notes. He also produces the Fun 2 Know Podcast, interviewing writers, atists and musicians about their lives and work.

Associate Professor of Critical Sexuality Studies and Film/Media at Concordia University in Montréal, QC. In 2021, he served as a Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair at Carleton University. Keegan has written extensively on transgender and queer affects, ontologies, and phenomenologies as articulated through popular media formats, platforms, and genres. He is author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and co-editor of Somatechnics 8.1 and the JCMS In Focus dossier, "Transing Cinema and Media Studies," among other works.

Matthew has been the director of patron services at the Majestic Theater in Gettysburg PA for just over a decade. He is a transplant from San Francisco, where he managed art house cinemas for Landmark Theatres and Sundance Cinemas. In addition to facilitating events such as the San Francisco International Film Festival, he was also a Master Technician Installer for IATSE in the SF Bay area, specializing in 35mm and Digital projection. He’s a borough councilman in Gettysburg, a community organizer, and an accomplished musician.

Matthew Specktor is the author of two novels, as well as multiple nonfiction titles, including one on The Sting. Born in Los Angeles, he received his BA from Hampshire College in 1988, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2009. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Paris Review, Tin House, Black Clock, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Lucas Hilderbrand is professor and chair of film and media studies at UC Irvine. He is the author of The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After (out in early 2024), Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, and the Queer Film Classics book on Paris Is Burning.

Chris Holmlund is Professor Emerita of Cinema Studies, Gender/Sexuality/Women’s Studies, and French at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her books include (as author) Female Trouble (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017) and Impossible Bodies (Routledge, 2002), (as editor or co- editor) The Ultimate Stallone Reader: Sylvester Stallone as Star, Icon, Auteur (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2014), American Cinema of the 1990s (Rutgers University Press, 2008), Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream (Routledge, 2004) and Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Her most recent articles explore transnational vs. regional understandings of genre (Transnational Screens 12.2), Swedish actors in action (Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 10.3), and transgender elders (Jump Cut 59).

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She is a core faculty member in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU (1991) and attended the Whitney Independent Studio program as a videomaker (1988). Dr. Juhasz has taught at NYU, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Claremont Graduate University, USC, Pitzer College, and Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY: about YouTube, media archives, activist media, documentary, and feminist film and video as well as media production, history and theory. Dr. Juhasz writes about and makes feminist, queer, fake, and AIDS documentary. Her current work attends to fake news, poetry, online feminist pedagogy, YouTube, and other more radical uses of digital media and their archives. Her work as media artist, curator, and writer engages with linked social justice commitments, including COVID-19, AIDS, black queer and lesbian media, feminist and queer/trans film, and activist archives and collectives. She publishes about her cultural and political commitments in scholarly and more public platforms including Hyperallergic, BOMB, MS, X-tra, and Lamda Literary Review.

Noted American film scholar and critic who coined the term “New Queer Cinema.” B Ruby Rich is Professor, Film + Digital Media Department, and Director, Social Documentation M.A. Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching documentary and film studies. Rich is the author of New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut (Duke, 2013) and Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke, 1998). She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the British Film Institute Film Classics series (Palgrave/Macmillan) and the Advisory Board for the St. Andrews Film Studies book series. Rich was honored in 2012 with the first Frameline Award to be awarded to a critic since Vito Russo received the inaugural award in 1986. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded her its highest honor, the Distinguished Career Achievement Award for lifetime contributions to the field. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian (UK), The Nation, Village Voice, New York Times, Sight and Sound (UK), San Francisco Bay Guardian, Elle, Mirabella, Chicago Reader, and other publications. Long active in film festivals internationally, Prof. Rich was International Curator for the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival; has served on juries at the Sundance, Toronto, San Francisco, Oberhausen, Havana, Sydney, and Guadalajara film festivals.

Maggie Hennefeld is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and McKnight Presidential Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press) and of two volumes: Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke UP, 2020). She is also a curator of the 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set, Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), which includes 99 archival feminist silent films.

Patricia White is Centennial Professor of Film and Media Studies and Coordinator of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College. Her books include the BFI Classic on Rebecca; Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. She is also coauthor with Timothy Corrigan of The Film Experience. A member of the editorial collective of the feminist film journal, Camera Obscura, and the boards of Film Quarterly and Women Make Movies, she served on the programming committee of New Fest, the New York LGBTQ film festival, in the 1990s.

Kinohi Nishikawa is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (Chicago, 2018) and of several essays and book chapters on Black print culture and publishing history. For the American Studies Program, Nishikawa teaches an undergraduate course titled “Black and Asian in America,” which examines cross-ethnic relations in literature, film, and culture from the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 to today.

Samantha N. Sheppard is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). She has published in academic and popular venues such as Film Quarterly, The Atlantic, Flash Art International, and Los Angeles Review of Books as well as been featured on Turner Classic Movie's Black History Month programming and Sunday Silent Nights. She was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Michael B. Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His recent work has appeared in liquid blackness, The Criterion Collection, and Film Quarterly. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.

AE Stevenson is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA. Her dissertation argued that Black women and girls have fundamentally changed the visual language of the Internet. Her current work expands on her thesis and she continues to explore Black women and girls’ impact on social media. She has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Feminist Media Histories and Catalyst.

RODNEY EVANS is a fiction and documentary film writer, director and producer. His latest feature length film, VISION PORTRAITS, had its World Premiere in the Documentary Feature Competition at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival and won the Jury Award for Best Documentary at Frameline - The San Francisco Int'l LGBTQ+ Film Festival. It was released theatrically at the Metrograph in NYC in August 2019 and went on to play to universal critical acclaim in major U.S. cities.

Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., joined Bryn Mawr Film Institute as its founding director of education in July 2005, four months after its opening. Since that time, the institute has offered more than 250 distinct classes, seminars, and discussion series, and the film studies curriculum and other education initiatives have grown to the point where BMFI educates over 5,000 people a year. In 2020, BMFI launched Film Studies Online, a trove of film lectures, lessons, discussions, and more, available to everyone for free. In addition, BMFI opened its Remote Classroom, where recordings of its diverse slate of Cinema Classics Seminars are readily available in a rent-to-stream format.

Andrew has lectured at a number of institutions, including Johns Hopkins, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition, he has held a real Oscar, been used as an excuse for his grandmother to meet Robert Redford, and was dressed down by Harrison Ford, whom Andrew still thinks is America’s greatest living movie star.

Dennis Doros started working in film in 1979 as the President of the Athens Film Society at Ohio University and soon was promoted to programmer for the Athens International Film Festival. In 1984, he started working at Kino International where he restored Queen Kelly and Sadie Thompson, both starring Gloria Swanson. In 1990, Doros co-founded Milestone Films with his wife Amy Heller. Working with film archives and labs around the world, they have restored and distributed independent films, including works by Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Kathleen Collins, Ayoka Chenzira, David Hockney, Kent Mackenzie, Eleanor Antin, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Milestone is currently working on restoring “lost” films by Nancy Savoca and Charles Burnett. For the last fourteen years, he has been a consultant to Turner Classic Movies. Dennis and Amy have been awarded the Arthouse Convergence Spotlight Lifetime Achievement Award, Denver Silent Film Festival Career Achievement Award, National Society of Film Critics' Special Archival Award and its Film Heritage Award (five times), the NY Film Critics Circle's Special Award (twice), the LA Film Critics Legacy of Cinema Award and the Film Preservation Honor from Anthology Film Archive. He is a 23-year member of AMIA and a four-term member of the Board of Directors. He recently completed two more terms as AMIA’s President, and was the winner of AMIA’s William O’Farrell award. In 2022, Dennis and Amy co-founded Missing Movies, an organization to help filmmakers clear their lost rights and find their original materials.

Amy Heller is co-founder (with husband Dennis Doros) of Milestone Films, an independent distribution and restoration company. After studying American history at New York University and Yale, she began her career in film distribution in 1985 at First Run Features and later at New Yorker Films. Heller and her newlywed husband started Milestone in 1990 in their one bedroom New York City apartment. For the last 22 years they have run the company from their New Jersey home.

Committed to rediscovering and restoring lost, overlooked, and underappreciated films, with a focus on those made by and about women, African Americans, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, Milestone’s releases include Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep; Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles; Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back, Africa; and the films of Shirley Clarke. The company has received awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the International Film Seminars, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Fort Lee Film Commission, Anthology Film Archive, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the Art House Convergence.

Heller has written about challenging and expanding the cinematic canon for the Walker Art Center’s Soundboard and Caligari magazine. She is a founding member of Missing Movies, an organization dedicated to educating and advocating about the problem of lost films and to working with filmmakers and the entertainment industry to making these titles available.

Bill Ware is an accomplished, vibraphonist, composer, bassist and producer.

Bill was an innovator of the burgeoning acid jazz scene as an original member of Groove Collective, the band dominating the Giant Steps scene in New York City. While with Groove Collective, Ware was ‘discovered’ by renowned producer Gary Katz who introduced Bill to Steely Dan, and from 1993-95, Ware toured with the Dan for its first live dates in a generation, recording the album Alive in America along the way.

Beyond performance, Bill has made important inroads as a composer in both contemporary classical music and film scoring. Ware’s film compositions, alone and in collaboration with Roy Nathanson, include scores to Martin and Orloff, Raising Victor Vargas, Undefeated, Excess Baggage, Singularity, and Hal Wilner’s A Tribute to Harold Arlen.  He also arranged the Jazz Passengers’ music for their live performances set to the Universal cult classic, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In 2019, Ware composed an original score for the animated German, silent film by Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and in 2021 he composed and created a new original score for The Spanish Dancer (1923), commissioned by Milestone Films and the Eye FilmMuseum, to be released on BluRay in 2022.

New Yorker Alicia Svigals the world's leading klezmer violinist. She has performed with and written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, Debbie Friedman, Osvaldo Golijov, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, filmmaker Judith Helfand, poet Allen Ginsberg and many others. Her CD Fidl (1996) reawakened klezmer fiddle tradition. Her newest CD is Beregovski Suite: Klezmer Reimagined, with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer — an original take on long-lost Jewish music from Ukraine.

Donald Sosin is one of the world’s top silent film musicians. He grew up in Rye, New York and Munich, and has performed his scores for silent films, often with his wife, singer/percussionist Joanna Seaton, at Lincoln Center, MoMA, BAM, the National Gallery; and major film festivals in New York, San Francisco, Telluride, Hollywood, Pordenone, Bologna, Shanghai, Bangkok, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and Jecheon, South Korea. He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone and Flicker Alley, and his scores are heard frequently on TCM. Sosin has had commissions from MoMA, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He lives in rural Connecticut with his family.

Dina Paulson is a poet, essayist, and entertainment writer. In 2017, she founded Aqua Editing, a storyteller for creative thinkers. She published her chapbook, Parts of love, with Finishing Line Press, which placed in their New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her writing appears in Collider, Cine Suffragette, FanFare, The Rumpus, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others. Before starting Aqua Editing, she worked with startups, nonforprofits, and schools as a content writer and taught writing and second language learning in English and Spanish.

Alan Amtzis is Director of the M.Ed. Instruction program at The College of New Jersey where he also teaches a course called “Terms of EnQueerMent: A history of LGBTQ film and media.” He holds a master’s degree in Film Studies from Columbia University where he wrote his thesis on Max Ophuls’ “The Earrings of Madame de…” His lifelong love of movies began at age 5 when he saw his first film in a movie theater (Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”). Prior to becoming an educator, he worked as a script reader and as a casting director for films, music videos and commercials. He appeared briefly as a featured extra in the costume party scene of Jonathan Demme’s 1993 “Philadelphia” as “The Pope”, but don’t blink or you’ll miss his moment! He is a proud member of the County Theater and is thrilled to be part of Renew Theaters’ Deep Focus series.

Kelley Conway is Professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her PhD at UCLA, a master’s degree at the University of Paris III, and a BA at Carleton College. She is the author of Chanteuse in the City (2004), a study of 1930s French cinema and popular song, and Agnès Varda (2015), an exploration of Varda’s key films and modes of production. She teaches courses on French and francophone film, global art film, and female authorship and feminist film theory. She is currently researching a book on postwar French ciné-club culture and co-editing a collection of essays on global movie magazines. Conway is the Director of the Wisconsin Film Festival and advisor to the UW Cinematheque.

Carrie Rickey is a film critic and art critic who has served time at the Village Voice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Artforum and Film Comment. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts (1980), from the LA Press Club for Film Commentary ("What Happened to the Women Directors, 2017) and a regional Emmy Award for Best Documentary (Before Hollywood, 2018). She is writing a biography on French filmmaker Agnes Varda.

Erin Y. Huang is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is broadly interested in the aesthetics and politics of Chinese and Sinophone cinemas. She is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility. Her second book introduces an archipelagic and oceanic approach to continental Chinese studies, and is tentatively titled Islands of Capital: The Aesthetic Life of Zones in Sino-Capitalism.

Sylvia Chong is Associate Professor in English and American Studies and the Director of the Asian Pacific American Studies minor at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Duke UP, 2012), co-editor of (Re)Collecting the Vietnam War (AALR, 2015), and has written articles and book chapters on American exceptionalism, hopelessness, orientalism, the Virginia Tech shootings, and Samuel Peckinpah. She is currently working on a history of cinematic yellowface and racial performance.

Paul Nadal is assistant professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. He teaches and writes about Asian American literature and the history of Philippine-U.S. literary and economic relations.

Denise Cruz is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she teaches an introduction to Asian American literature and culture. She writes and teaches about gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures.

She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina, a book that uses Philippine print culture to argue that the early to mid-twentieth century period was dominated by a fascination with transpacific Asian women—figures who were connected to both nationalist movements in Asia and the global women’s suffrage movement.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, award-winning film scholar and filmmaker, is Dean of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote The Proximity of Other Skins (2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012) and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007) and co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (2018). Her latest film The Celine Archive (2020) won several festival awards. She is currently finishing her next book The Movies of Racial Childhoods, forthcoming from Duke University Press and is in post-production for her next film 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance in the Aftermath of World War II Family Incarceration. For more, go to www.celineshimizu.com.