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 firstborn son, Parris, she started to work towards a nonprofit for young adults that engages them with the resources they need for success. Buskirk 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 Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellow in 2022, a Visiting Fellow at MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute in 2020 and 2022, and 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 filmmaker, cinematographer, and educator based in Eastern Pennsylvania. Through a collaborative process and poetic approach, his filmmaking orbits around the everyday dreams, relationships, and forces that shape his home. Swedberg teaches an array of film classrooms from elementary to college, most recently as an Adjunct Professor in Lafayette College’s Film and Media Studies Department and LVAIC’s Documentary Storymaking Program. He leads the independent film curation for the Civic Theatre, Allentown’s local arthouse cinema. He was a Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellow in 2022, Visiting Fellow at Skidmore College’s MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute in 2020 and 2022, 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.

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis. Dr. Barber is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize.

Haley Hnatuk is a 2020 Skidmore Storytellers’ Institute Visiting Fellow and a 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 intern 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.