Kill the documentary as we know it!

Toni Bell has worked in the documentary field for close to 10 years. She is the Impact Strategist for Looky Looky Pictures, where she has worked on films such as Building the American Dream and Councilwoman. She is the creator and host of the What’s Up with Docs Podcast. She has been a speaker, panelist, mentor, and juror at documentary film festivals and labs such as NALIP, Dok Leipzig, HotDocs, IFPWeek, Outfest, Docs by the Sea, and the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Toni is also part of the inaugural cohort of Art Equity’s BIPOC Leadership Circle is designed to center, support, and address experiences of BIPOC leaders of cultural institutions. She holds a MAT-TESOL and an M.A. in Visual Anthropology from USC, an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Naropa University, and a certificate in professional screenwriting from UCLA.

Tamara Dawit is a producer and director based between Canada and Ethiopia. She runs the production company Gobez Media which produces Ethiopian film, TV, digital and music content. After the short film, Grandma Knows Best (2014) she directed the feature documentary Finding Sally which had its North American premiere at the Hot Docs documentary festival in 2020. She is currently directing the feature documentary The Plot and producing the feature drama Last Tears of the Deceased, and the feature documentary Made in Ethiopia. Tamara has produced documentary and digital content for CBC News, MTV, Radio-Canada, Discovery, NHK, and others. She was a resident in Docs in Progress, the Logan Non-Fiction Residency and is an alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Durban Talents, Rotterdam Lab, Apost, and EAVE.

Dieu Hao Do (*1986 Stadthagen, Lower Saxony) is a Chinese-German writer and director. director. His films explore postcolonial perspectives on historical memory of the American War in Vietnam. His directing studies at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF led him to  thinking, speaking and acting critical of racism. With the goal of empowering new BIPOC voices for storytelling,  he leads film workshops and is involved as a mentor. He is an active member of the non-profit initiative BERLIN ASIAN FILM NETWORK (BAFNET), which has been working since 2012 to promote differentiated representations of Asian German realities in film and television. 

Jason Ryle is a producer, curator, story editor, and independent arts consultant based in Toronto, Canada. From July 2010 to June 2020, Jason was the Executive Director of imagineNATIVE, an Indigenous-run organization mandated to support international Indigenous filmmakers and media artists. In this capacity, Jason oversaw all operational and artistic activities of the annual imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the world’s largest showcase of Indigenous screen content. From 2013 until 2020, Jason was an Advisor for Indigenous films at the Berlinale and he has produced two award-winning short animations and is currently in development as a producer on two documentary features. He is a member of the National Film Board of Canada’s Indigenous Advisory. In February 2021, Jason received the Clyde Gilmour Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.