Filmmakers

Garland McLaurin is a Peabody-Award winning filmmaker; his love for storytelling comes from its power to artistically explore the complex and conflicting social and psychological layers of people and society. His web series POPS explores fatherhood for African American men, and was funded by ITVS Digital and National Black Programming Consortium. He… Show more co-directed/produced the Peabody-winning documentary series, 180 Days a Year Inside an American High School and Hartsville that aired on PBS. He served as co-cinematographer on Wes Moore’s Coming Back documentary series, highlighting veterans, and for award-winning documentary filmmaker Yoruba Richen's The New Black (Independent Lens), which explores the fight for marriage equality in the African American community. His other professional credits include: field producing on CNN’s Black in America 4, producer/shooter for WAMU 88.5 American University/BET’s special Homecoming: The Killing of DJ Henry. Additional past digital media work includes work for Black Public Media, Time.com, NY Times video division and video editing at the National Geographic digital news division. He holds a BA in Radio-TV-Film from Howard University and an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate film school. Show less

Loira Limbal (Director/Producer) is an Afro-Dominican filmmaker and DJ interested in the creation of art that is nuanced and revelatory for communities of color. She is the Senior Vice President of Programs at Firelight Media. Firelight is committed to making films about pivotal movements and moments in the U.S. Firelight's flagship program - the… Show more Documentary Lab - is a fellowship that provides mentorship, funding, and industry access to emerging filmmakers of color. Limbal’s current film, Through the Night is a feature documentary about a 24 hour daycare center. Through the Night was part of the 2019 Sundance Edit & Story Lab and was selected for world premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. Her first film, Estilo Hip Hop, was a co-production of ITVS and aired on PBS in 2009. Additionally, she co-produces and helms the popular Brooklyn monthly #APartyCalledRosiePerez. Limbal received a B.A. in History from Brown University and is a graduate of the Third World Newsreel's Film and Video Production Training Program. She is a Sundance Institute Fellow and a former Ford Foundation Justfilms/Rockwood Fellow. She lives in the Bronx with her two children.  Show less

Bing Liu moved from China to Alabama to California to Illinois before he was eight. He received a B.A. in English literature from UIC in May of 2011. Since July 2011, Bing has been a member of the International Cinematographer's Guild, working on projects including Shameless, Empire, and Chiraq to fund his documentaries. In 2015, his short film about two… Show more Vietnamese immigrants, Nuoc, won Best Directed Documentary at the Collected Voices Film Festival. Since September 2015, Bing has been a Story Director and DP for a documentary mini-series on race and education directed by Steve James. He has taken his directorial feature, Minding the Gap, through Kartemquin’s Diverse Voices in Documentary, Tribeca All Access, Firelight Media’s Producer Lab, and Chicago Media Project’s DOC10 pitch session. Show less

Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose directing credits include the nationally televised documentaries, Calavera Highway (PBS), "The Mexico Story" of The New Americans series (PBS), My Journey Home (PBS), Labor Women (PBS), My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha (PBS), The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel), The Best Hotel on Skid Row… Show more (HBO), and Who Killed Vincent Chin? (PBS). Her films have premiered at festivals around the world including Cannes, San Francisco, Sundance, Toronto, and the Whitney Biennial. Among her honors are a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, International Documentary Association Achievement Award, and two Rockefeller Foundation fellowships in documentary film. Tajima-Peña is a USA Broad Fellow in media arts, and a professor and graduate director of the social documentation program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.     Show less

Daresha Kyi: Daresha writes, produces, and directs film and television in Spanish and English. In 2018 she directed "Trans In America: Texas Strong" as part of an ACLU web series on transgender rights, which won two Webbys, garnered over 2 million views on YouTube, and premiered at SXSW in 2019. She also directed a series of shorts for the Family… Show more Independence Initiative about their work empowering families to escape poverty. In 2017 she co-directed the multiple award-winning film, "Chavela." Currently a Chicken & Egg and Creative Capital fellow, this former Firelight Documentary Lab fellow has produced programming for FX, WE, AMC, Oxygen, E!, Telemundo, Bravo, and FUSE, among others. Show less

An award-winning filmmaker, Phil Bertelsen works in both fiction and non-fiction. Most recently he produced and directed EveryOther, a social satire about racial identity that was featured in the PBS series Matters of Race. His last film, The Sunshine, won numerous awards and is included as part of the Full Frame Documentary DVD Collection. Bertelsen… Show more also wrote and directed Outside Looking In, examining transracial adoption in America and airing on public television. Additionally, he was a writer/director fellow at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and has an M.F.A. from New York University where he won a Student Academy Award for his dramatic short Around the Time. Show less