Prisma

Emily Cohen Ibañez is a Latinx filmmaker with Colombian and Syrian Jewish heritage. She earned her doctorate in Anthropology (2011) with a certificate in Culture and Media at New York University. Her film work pairs lyricism with social activism, advocating for labor, environmental, and health justice. Her directorial feature documentary debut, Fruits of Labor premiered at SXSW 2021 and will be having its international premiere at HotDocs 2021. Emily was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007-2008 based in Colombia, South America; she screened her film Bodies at War in 22 rural Colombian municipalities affected by landmines in partnership with the Colombian Campaign Against Landmines. Emily regularly makes commissioned short films for venues like The Guardian, The Intercept, and Independent Lens. She also contributes cinematography to independent films including Bronx Obama (2014) directed by Ryan Murdock which won a “Best in Fest” award at AFI Docs. She is recipient of multiple fellowships and grants including JustFilms Ford Foundation, Firelight Media Doc Lab, 4th World Indigenous Media Lab, Field of Vision, Berkeley Film Foundation, and BVAC National Media Maker amongst others.

Born in Harlem to Dominican parents, Raquel Cepeda is a writer, director, producer, and author. Cepeda‘s latest film, La Madrina: The [Savage] Life of Lorine Padilla was accepted into the Tribeca Film Festival and had its its virtual North American premiere at DOC NYC on November 11, 2020, and also won the festival’s Audience Award. Directed, written, and produced by Cepeda, the documentary follows a beloved South Bronx matriarch and former “First Lady” of the Savage Skulls gang as she struggles to remain visible in a rapidly gentrifying community she helped rebuild in the 1980s. Employing rich never-before-seen archives of the borough that gifted the world both salsa and hip-hop culture, we will go on a complicated and, at times, surreal journey through five decades of Bronx history and resilience in La Madrina’s own words. Cepeda‘s documentary film, Some Girls, focuses on a group Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, the white supremacist narratives about American history they’ve been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. Cepeda‘s first documentary feature, Bling: A Planet Rock, is about American hip-hop’s obsession with blinging and how that intersected itself into the decade-long blood-diamond conflict.

Larissa Lam is the director, writer and producer of Far East Deep South. She previously directed the award-winning short film, Finding Cleveland and was selected for the Smithsonian’s History Film Forum Emerging Filmmakers Lab. She has also produced TV shows such as “Top 3” for JUCE TV, music videos and A Day in the Life of an Engineer for Intel‘s “Stay With It” campaign. She also produced and directed a series of PSAs for a national suicide prevention campaign. Her work has been featured on NBC News, PBS, and NPR. Prior to making films, Lam carved out a distinguished career in music. Lam began her career as the CFO of NSOUL Records and has written music for film, TV (The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Oz) and video games (Konami, Square Enix). Lam is also an award-winning singer whose song, I Feel Alive won the Hollywood Music in Media Award. A UCLA graduate and native of Diamond Bar, CA. Lam is passionate about empowering and inspiring others through the arts. A TV/radio host and dynamic speaker, she’s been a keynote speaker on the Asian American experience, diversity and inclusion at TEDx, Leadercast and numerous universities including Yale and MIT. She also co-hosts the podcast, Love, Discovery and Dim Sum with her husband, Baldwin Chiu.

Professor Dipti Gupta is a teacher, researcher, and independent documentary filmmaker with special interest in social and women’s issues. She teaches in the department of Cinema-Communication at Dawson College and in the Department of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. For four years she was Director of Montreal’s South Asian Film Festival and she serves on the board of Teesri Duniya Theatre – a Montreal based culturally diverse theatre company.