Patricia Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication and the director of the Center for Social Media at American University in Washington, D.C. The author of such titles as Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999), Aufderheide has been a Fulbright and John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival. She won a career achievement award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association.

Jeff Barnaby (Mi’gMaq) was born and raised on the rural Mi’gMaq reserve of Listuguj, Quebec. A multi-disciplined artist, Barnaby has won several awards for his artwork, poetry, short stories, and films. His work provides a bare-knuckled view of the post-colonial Indian. His first short film, From Cherry English, won two Golden Sheaf awards and played at dozens of festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, Fantasia, Vancouver International Film Fest, and the Atlantic International Film Fest. The Colony, Barnaby’s third short, is a gritty depiction of deception, desolation, and decay.

Nanobah Becker (Navajo), a New York-trained, LA-based filmmaker, earned her MFA in directing from Columbia University in 2006. Her short films Flat and Conversion have been shown at numerous film festivals nationally and internationally, with the latter screening at Sundance 2007. She received a Rockefeller/Renew Media Fellowship in support of her feature screenplay Full, which is now in development. Nanobah is one of a growing movement of filmmakers currently emerging from the Navajo Nation.

Shane Belcourt (Métis) is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and musician based in Toronto. His feature film Tkaronto won the award for Best Director at this year’s Dreamspeakers Film Festival and the Talking Stick Film Festival, and has been sold to distributor Kinosmith Films, which will release the film across Canada in late 2008. Belcourt was also the recipient of the 2007/2008 IFC Mentorship Award and one of 22 filmmakers chosen for the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival Talent Lab. He continues to work as a director and cinematographer and has two projects in development: a half-hour documentary on problem gambling in Aboriginal communities, and a short animated documentary, Red Car, Blue Hood, about growing up the son of a Métis rights leader.

Kevin Lee Burton (Cree) is a director, film festival programmer, and freelance camera operator who is Swampy Cree from God’s Lake Narrows, Manitoba. One of the core members of the Aboriginal Media Lab, whose mandate is to challenge Aboriginal representation and presentation in the media art world, he has designed a niche in the film world by producing stories specifically in his ancestral tongue. Burton was awarded Best Experimental Video and Best Indigenous Language Production at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film Festival for his experimental film Nikamowin (Song). He has also worked for Native and Indigenous Initiatives at the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, programmed for the film festivals ImageNation and Out on Screen, co-edited the four-part documentary series Healing Blanket, and co-developed and written for Ispikison, a children’s Cree-language series.

Dustinn Craig (White Mountain Apache/Navajo), a filmmaker from Arizona, has worked on a handful of independent documentary projects for PBS, most recently directing, writing, and producing a historical documentary for American Experience. Craig, an artist whose work is featured in the exhibition Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, organized by NMAI and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, has been skateboarding on his four-wheel war pony throughout most of his life and hopes to do so well into the future. His biggest accomplishments are being husband to Velma Craig and father of their four children.

Tracey Deer (Mohawk) is rapidly gaining a reputation as one of Canada’s finest chroniclers of modern Aboriginal life. She co-directed the feature-length documentary One More River, about the 2003 agreement between the Cree and Quebec. In 2004 she made Mohawk Girls, a moving portrait of three teenagers coming of age at Kahnawake, her home reserve just outside Montreal. In 2000 Deer graduated from Dartmouth College, where she shot, directed, and edited three short films and received the 25th Anniversary Film and Television Award for overall achievement in film studies. Her films have been broadcast and screened across Canada.

Ben-Alex Dupris (Colville) is from the Enitat Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington State. He is an experimental multimedia artist who uses new technology to explore the theme of modernity vs. traditionalism. Dupris draws inspiration for his work from pop culture through the eyes of the reservation. “When I was ten years old,” he notes, "I could draw no distinguishable line between the influence of reservation life or American pop culture, they all blended together. I now see traditional Native elements in a game of Pac-Man, or modernity in buckskin moccasins. I am the Indian, not the objects that surround me."

Ramona Emerson (Navajo) is a filmmaker and member of the Navajo Nation. She received her degree in media arts in 1997 from the University of New Mexico and has worked as a professional videographer, writer, and editor for ten years. Her films have been showcased around the country, with her latest, A Return Home, receiving funding through The National Geographic All Roads Film Project and an award from the New Mexico Governor’s Cup competition. She and her husband, producer/actor/artist Kelly Byars continue to produce films through their company Reel Indian Pictures, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho) is an award-winning director and producer. While most of his films concentrate on contemporary Native American issues, Eyre’s pursuits involve all genres of film, television, and commercial work. He recently completed work on the five-part docudrama, We Shall Remain for PBS and will be directing an upcoming episode of Law & Order: SVU. His thoughts about working beyond the realm of Native America are simple: “I love making movies and telling people’s stories.” Eyre currently lives in Rapid City, South Dakota, with his daughter, Shahela.

Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware) is a professor of theater in the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA and current director of the university’s American Indian Studies Center. The founding artistic director of the internationally acclaimed American Indian Dance Theater, for the past ten years he has also served as the principal investigator for Project HOOP, the national initiative to promote development of Native American theater and performing arts. He was senior producer for the two-part documentary Indian Country Diaries, a production of the Native American Public Telecommunications Consortium, broadcast nationally on PBS in 2006. In March of this year, he staged the dance sequences for the critically praised Wakonda’s Dream at Opera Omaha. Geiogamah is the author and editor of a number of books and articles on Native American theater and performing arts and serves as series editor for the Native American Theater Series of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center Press. For Project HOOP, he is planning a national symposium entitled "Re-Imaging Native American Storytelling Traditions", to be held during the coming year with support from the Ford Foundation. His first collection of plays, New Native American Drama (Oklahoma), has been in print for 27 years.

Kevin Gover (Pawnee/Comanche) is director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. A former professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe, affiliate professor in the university’s American Indian Studies Program, and co-executive director of its American Indian Policy Institute, Gover received his bachelor’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University and his law degree from the University of New Mexico. Before joining the university faculty, Gover served as assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1997 to 2000. A presidential appointee, he was responsible for policy and operational oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he oversaw programs in Indian education, law enforcement, social services, treaty rights, and trust asset management. Gover also practiced law for more than 15 years in Albuquerque and Washington. He was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree from Princeton in 2001.

Terrance Houle (Blackfoot/Saulteaux) is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe. A graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design, Houle received his BFA in 2003. His groundbreaking art quickly garnered him significant accolades and opportunities, including the Enbridge Emerging Artist Award and an invitation to participate in the Thematic Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where he was one of 34 indigenous people from around the world exploring issues of colonization and communion. His short video/film work at the 2004 imagineNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto received the award for Best Experimental Film. Houle lives and maintains his art practice and Aboriginal Youth Mentorship in Calgary, Alberta.

Andrew Okpeaha MacLean (Iñupiaq) was born and raised in Alaska and holds an MFA in film directing from New York University. His film Sikumi (On the Ice) won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. His other films include Natchiliagniaqtuguk Aapagalu (Seal Hunting with Dad), which had its premiere at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and Kinnaq Niġaqtuqtuaq (The Snaring Madman), which won Best Short Film at the 2006 American Indian Film Festival. His documentary When the Season is Good: Artists of Arctic Alaska was a featured screening in the 2007 Arctic Summer Series at NMAI and was acquired for broadcast by ARTE, European Public Television. MacLean co-founded the Iñupiat Theater, the first theater company in the country dedicated to performing entirely in the indigenous Iñupiaq language.

Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree and member of the Siksika Nation) is curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where he is leading his curatorial team in the reinstallation of the Canadian galleries, opening November 14, 2008. From 2000 to 2004, McMaster was deputy assistant director for cultural resources and the director’s special assistant for Mall exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian. During his tenure at NMAI, he contributed to work on the museum’s permanent exhibitions, as well as curated First American Art (2004) and New Tribe/New York (2005). His awards and recognitions include the 2005 National Aboriginal Achievement Award and Canada’s highest honor, the Order of Canada.

Skeena Reece (Metis/Cree/Tsimshian/Gitksan) has been working in the arts since 1996. Her multidisciplinary practice includes performance art, spoken word, humor, sacred clowning, writing, singing, songwriting, video art, and arts administration. Reece has been a long-time affiliate of the Redwire Native Youth Media Society and is past director of the Indigenous Media Arts Group. She is also the founder of the Native Youth Artists Collective and co-director and principal actor of the movie Homestay (2007). Reece, who describes herself as someone who travels well, packs a good lunch, and would be an excellent pick to be stranded on a deserted island with, is set to release her first music album in 2008.

Gabrielle Tayac (Piscataway Indian Nation) is a historian in the Research Unit at the National Museum of the American Indian. With a doctorate in sociology and a background in international human rights, Tayac conducts research focused on Native American identity issues across the Americas. She also has an area of specialization on the Chesapeake Bay region. At NMAI, Tayac curated Return to a Native Place: Algonquian Peoples of the Chesapeake and co-curated the inaugural exhibition Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identity. She lectures widely and has published numerous articles as well as an award-winning children’s book, Meet Naiche: A Native Boy of the Chesapeake Region.

Christine Vachon produced Todd Haynes’s controversial first feature, Poison, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. Along with partner Pamela Koffler, Vachon runs Killer Films, which was honored on its tenth anniversary in 2005 with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Killer has produced such critically acclaimed movies as Far From Heaven, One Hour Photo, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Happiness, Velvet Goldmine, Safe, I Shot Andy Warhol, Go Fish, and Swoon. Killer movies have been nominated for eight Academy Awards and twenty Emmys, and won the Oscar for Hilary Swank’s performance in Boys Don't Cry. Recent Killer releases include I'm Not There, which earned Cate Blanchett an Academy Award nomination, and Savage Grace, An American Crime, and Then She Found Me. Vachon has received the Frameline Award for Outstanding Achievement in Lesbian and Gay Media, the prestigious Muse Award for Outstanding Vision and Achievement by New York Women in Film and Television, and IFP’s Gotham Award. She is the author of two best-selling books—Shooting to Kill and A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond.