Union

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker based in Toronto whose films have screened at festivals internationally, including SXSW, True/False, Sheffield Doc Fest, and CPH-DOX.  Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. The film was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens in April of 2017. Brett holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Her award-winning 2019 documentary The Hottest August, has played over fifty festivals and continues to be programmed around the world. In 2019 she was named one of Variety’s 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch.

Stephen Maing is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker based in New York City. His feature documentary CRIME + PUNISHMENT, which he directed, filmed and edited, won a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His previous films, HIGH TECH, LOW LIFE and THE SURRENDER, both of which he directed, filmed and edited, have screened internationally and were released on POV and Field of Vision, respectively. Maing is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, Sundance Institute Fellow, NBC Original Voices Fellow, John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Reporting Fellow and recipient of the IDA's Courage Under Fire Award. He is a member of the Academy, a frequent visiting artist and lives in Ridgewood, Queens with his partner and young daughter.

Samantha Curley is an award-winning film producer and creative entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. In 2013, she Co-Founded Level Ground Collective, a 501(c)3 artist collective and production incubator creating experiments in empathy. In 2021, she Founded Level Ground Productions which she runs with her creative partner Chase Joynt. Her first feature, FRAMING AGNES (dir. Chase Joynt) won both the NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Samantha is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Kellogg School of Management. She is a 2022 NBC Original Voices Fellow and a PGA Create Fellow. 

Mars Verrone is a filmmaker and educator from Los Angeles, CA, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. They graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with honors in Modern Culture and Media (Production) and Phi Beta Kappa membership. Mars works as a development coordinator at Maxine Productions, part of Sony Pictures Television's nonfiction group. Mars is a 2022 NBC Original Voices fellow, Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist fellow, and PGA Create fellow.