Shalon Buskirk is a community leader who has dedicated her life to protecting, helping, and saving young adults from violence within her community. She was born and raised in Allentown, PA. After the tragic death of her first born son, Parris, she started to work towards a nonprofit for young adults that engages them with the resources they need for success. She was a driving force behind the first major funding in the city for youth violence prevention. She is a storyteller, a mother of eight children, and the CEO/Founder of the Parris J. Lane Memorial Foundation. She was a Visiting Fellow at Skidmore College’s MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute in 2020 and recently the co-author of United Hearts for Autism: Stories from Caregivers and Self-Advocates. She is a board member for Community Bike Works, and on the advisory council for Allentown’s Salvation Army and Youth Teen Renovations. 

Drew Swedberg is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, educator, and basketball coach. Through a collaborative process and poetic approach, his filmmaking orbits around the everyday dreams, relationships, and forces that shape his home in Eastern Pennsylvania. Drew is the founder of Collaborative Media Expressions, a digital storytelling initiative focused on engaging, supporting, and cultivating emerging artists in Allentown, PA. He is an Adjunct Professor in Lafayette College’s Film and Media Studies Department and leads the independent film curation for the Civic Theatre, Allentown’s local arthouse cinema. Drew currently teaches an array of film classes from elementary to college classrooms, most recently as an instructor for PBS39’s Middle School Media Lab and professor for the LVAIC Documentary Storymaking Capstone. He was a Visiting Fellow at Skidmore College’s MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute in 2020 and an Artist-in-Residence for the Cultural Coalition of Allentown in 2019 and 2021.

Nandini Sikand is a filmmaker, dancer-choreographer, writer, and cultural anthropologist. Her interdisciplinary work is informed by the fluidity of working between and within the fields of film and media, and dance and performance, in both India and the United States. She has published articles on cinema, performance, a book on Odissi dance, and made films on subjects such as immigration, nationalism, sex work, breast cancer, and counter-culture music. Sikand’s films have screened and won awards at over 100 domestic and international film festivals, and aired on PBS. Her work has been recognized by The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Center for Asian American Media. She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, the co-founder and co-director of Sakshi Productions, the Associate Director/Choreographer for Harmattan Theater, and has served on the board of directors of Women Make Movies from 1997-2006. Sikand is an Associate Professor of an interdisciplinary film and media studies program at Lafayette College, PA.

Tiffany E. Barber is a scholar, curator, and critic of twentieth and twenty-first century visual art, new media, and performance. Her work, which spans abstraction, Afrofuturism, dance, fashion, feminism, and the ethics of representation and aesthetic criticism, focuses on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. She is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Barber will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute.

Na’Imah Sade Pope is a picture editor based in New York City. She has been working in post-production for nearly a decade while moonlighting as a teaching artist and restorationist. Among her episodic work, Na’Imah has also edited a number of short films, commercials,  music videos and more. She received her Masters in Post-Production at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. Her work has been featured in New York Film Festival, Boulder Internat’l Film Festival, New Orleans Film Society, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Moving Image, Queens World Film Festival, The Fader Magazine, Eberfest, and Baltimore Magazine just to name a few. Na’Imah is currently editing narrative, television, commercial, and documentary projects.

Haley Hnatuk is a 2020 Skidmore Storytellers’ Institute Visiting Fellow and a recent Muhlenberg College Media & Communications and Film Studies graduate. As an undergraduate, Hnatuk edited “Dos Hermanxs: The Blood of the California Fields,” a short documentary in which Luis Magaña, an immigrant rights organizer, recounts the tragic losses of two indigenous youth from México working in Central Valley vineyards. This film has been screened at festivals internationally. Additionally, while studying abroad at Dublin City University, she worked as a Production Assistant at Motherland, an award-winning Irish production company that produces commercials, films, and documentaries.

Graciela Santana is an independent documentary filmmaker and is currently working as a media specialist and educator at Lincoln Leadership Academy Charter School in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She has been making films since the age of twelve as a part of HYPE, a community-based program out of Muhlenberg College. Her documentary work is anchored in racial inequality, social justice movements, and education advocacy. Being from Allentown, and now an educator within it, she teaches her students the value of being able to use their voice through digital storytelling and story-making.