Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on multiple outlets, including Netflix, MSNBC, FX/Hulu, HBO, and PBS. Her most recent film The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and won a Peabody Award. It is currently streaming on Peacock. Other recent work includes the Emmy-nominated films American Reckoning (Frontline), How It Feels to Be Free (American Masters), The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show (Peacock), and Green Book: Guide to Freedom (Smithsonian Channel).

She directed an episode of the award-winning series Black and Missing for HBO and High on the Hog for Netflix. Her film, The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award and is streaming on HULU. Her previous films, The New Black and Promised Land won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens and P.O.V. Yoruba is a past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow and she won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access. She was a Sundance Producers Fellow and Women’s Fellow and is a recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker’s Award. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, and co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines. Her writing has appeared in publications including Make/Shift, Left Turn, The Abolitionist, Ms. Magazine, and more. She holds a PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University and is the co founder of Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study, and produce films with a Black feminist ethic. Alexis has won the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry and the Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction.

Kenja McCray is an Associate Professor of History at Clayton State University and is the author of Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (NYU Press 2025). Originally from Birmingham, AL, she is a graduate of Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned a Ph.D. in history at Georgia State University (GSU), has served as a Visiting Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and was an Associate Professor of History at Atlanta Metropolitan State College. She was a University System of Georgia Chancellor’s Learning Scholar and a nominee for the Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award. Dr. McCray received the GSU History Department’s John A. Alexander Memorial Award, a Georgia Regional Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society paper prize, and the Association of Black Women Historians‘ Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award.

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker who addresses important but often-neglected subjects with integrity, insight, and artistry. Massiah’s producing and directing credits include Trash (1985), The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), Cecil B. Moore (1987), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995), and Louise Alone Thompson Patterson: In Her Own Words (2002). He also produced two films for the PBS series, Eyes on the Prize II (1990). In addition to his film work, Massiah founded the Philadelphia-based Scribe Video Center, which provides access to media production facilities for underrepresented segments of society. This center trains emerging video makers and helps members of community organizations to address issues of social concern through the creative use of video. At the Scribe Video Center, he served as executive producer for “Precious Places” (2005), a citywide, community, video history project in the form of twenty-one short documentaries. He is a 1996 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.