Julia Meltzer (Director/Producer of Dalya's Other Country) is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder and director of Clockshop, an arts organization. She previously directed The Light in Her Eyes, a feature film about a Qur'an school for girls in Damascus, Syria. The Light in Her Eyes was broadcast on POV in 2012 and toured with the Sundance Film Forward program. Meltzer's work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, IDFA, the Toronto International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is a recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and was a senior Fulbright fellow in Damascus, Syria from 2005 to 2006. She returned to Syria every year thereafter until 2010 to work and film and produced two short films and one feature from that footage.
Colleen Cassingham (Director of From Damascus to Chicago) graduated from Northwestern University in 2016 with a bachelor's degree in Middle East and North African studies and a minor in film. She has filmed in various places, including in Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Palestine. She is currently based in Brooklyn, N.Y. where she works for Multitude Films and is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow.
Alex Lederman (Director of From Damascus to Chicago) Alex Lederman is a multimedia journalist whose work has been published by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, ABC News, and Al Jazeera English, among other publications. He graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism with a degree in journalism and political science and a minor in Middle East and North African studies. He has worked for Al Jazeera English, ABC News, CNN, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Sirius XM.
Daphne Matziaraki (Director of 4.1 Miles) is a documentary filmmaker based in the San Francisco area. She was born and raised in Athens, Greece and has lived and worked as a filmmaker and journalist in Europe, Africa and the U.S. She holds a master's in documentary filmmaking from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a master's in international relations from the University of Bristol.
Obaidah Zytoon (Director/Writer of The War Show) was born in Zabadani, Syria in 1976. She studied English literature at the University of Damascus before becoming a radio host and producer, working both in Syria and internationally. In 2008, Zytoon produced her first documentary film, Through Women's Eyes. Following the 2011 Syrian uprising, Zytoon co-founded the Syrian artist-activist collective Waw Al Wasel, which produces multimedia art and short films related to the Syrian conflict. She has also coached and trained young Syrians entering media and radio production. The War Show is Zytoon's first film as a director.
Andreas Dalsgaard (Director/Writer of The War Show) has directed documentaries for over a decade. Educated in anthropology at Aarhus University and Paris Diderot University and film directing at the National Film School of Denmark, he has made award-winning films that have been shown at festivals worldwide and include Afghan Muscles (2007, American Film Institute Best Documentary), Copenhagen (2009, winner of the CILECT Prize 2010, awarded by the world association of film schools), Bogota Change (2009), The Human Scale (2012, Al Jazeera Documentary Film Festival Audience Award), Life Is Sacred (2015) and numerous shorts. Dalsgaard is co-founder of the production company Elk Film, writes and directs fiction for both film and theater and has given conferences and taught master classes worldwide.
Feras Fayyad (Director of The War Show) is an award-winning filmmaker who has worked as a film editor and cinematographer on several documentary and narrative films. He has participated in international film festivals and received recognition for his work with contemporary Syrian issues and political transformation in the Arab world.