Lioness

Meg McLagan is a New York-based documentary filmmaker and cultural anthropologist. Her half-hour film, Tibet in Exile, which she co-directed, produced, and shot, portrays the experience of displacement through the eyes of Tibetan refugee children smuggled into India. It aired on public television and was screened at festivals and museums in the U.S. and Europe. McLagan also worked as producer on Paris is Burning, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance and both the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Circle Award for Best Documentary. She received a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from New York University, where she taught anthropology and documentary production in the Program in Culture and Media from 1998 to 2005. In addition to her film work, she is co-editor of Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Politics (forthcoming from Zone Books).

Daria Sommers is a director, writer, and producer of documentaries and narrative films. Her work includes the award-winning Eastern Spirit Western World, a portrait of Chinese American artist Diana Kan, which was broadcast nationally by PBS, CBC, and the BBC and premiered at the Smithsonian Institution; Duncan’s Shadow, a dramatic short which premiered at the Georgetown Film Festival; and the Audience Award-winning half-hour drama Ready to Burn, which received a New Director’s Award from Panavision. Sommers began her career at PBS. Her work has garnered awards from the NEH, NEA, and CPB. She has served on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Program for Art on Film review panel and has been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony and at the Content + Intent Documentary Institute at MassMoCa. She recently completed Sawadika American Girl, a feature-length screenplay about Americans living in Bangkok in the shadow of the Vietnam War. She lives in New York and is a graduate of Oberlin College.