Sheila Petty is Professor of media studies and SaskPower Research Chair in Cultural Heritage at the University of Regina. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema, and co-editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Africa. Her research program focuses on manifestations of cultural heritage in sub-Saharan African, North African and Amazigh cinemas. Her latest project, funded through New Frontiers in Research Fund, investigates methodologies for decolonizing film festival research in a post-pandemic world. She is currently completing a book on Algerian feminist filmmaker, Habiba Djahnine.

Estrella Sendra works as Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Education (Festivals and Events) at King’s College London. She is a researcher and educator, with work experience in filmmaking and film festival organisation. Estrella is interested in bridging scholarship and practice and engaging in collaborations between Higher Education and the creative industries, particularly film festivals. Her main research interests are festivals, film, screen media and creative industries in Africa and artistic research, namely, video essays. Since 2011, when she directed Témoignages de l’autre côté, an awarded documentary about migration, she has been developing a regional expertise in Senegal. Since March 2022, she is the Co-Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Decolonizing Film Festival Research in a Post-Pandemic World’, funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund, Government of Canada [NFRFR-2021-00161]. She is Associate Editor in _Screenworks_, an Editorial Board Member in the _Journal of African Media Studies_, an Advisory Board member of the ERC-funded research project ‘Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies’, led by Prof Lindiwe Dovey at SOAS, University of London; and Advisory Board member of Film Africa in London. Since 2014 to 2016 she was the director of the Cambridge African Film Festival.

Ben Akoh is the founder and president of the African Movie Festival in Manitoba (AM-FM), a festival dedicated to African cinema and cross-cultural cohabitation in Canada. The festival screens films from all over Africa and from African directors in the Diaspora. Dr. Akoh was awarded an interdisciplinary doctoral degree in the intersection of culture, technology and education from the University of Manitoba. His research work on identifying the determinants of learning with technology in an Indigenous context in Northern Manitoba has led to various published articles and conference presentations internationally and in Canada. Dr. Akoh has developed and implemented many programs with the United Nations and the World Bank in culture, telecommunications, internet technologies and education to empower the marginalized especially women and children in Africa and in remote Canadian indigenous communities.

Gabriela Almeida is a Full Professor at the Graduate Program in Communication and Consumer Practices at ESPM-SP (Brazil). PhD in Communication and Information (UFRGS, Brazil), with a visiting scholar scholarship at the Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB, Spain). Leader of the research group Sense – Communication, consumption, image and experience (CNPq/ESPM). Member of the board of SOCINE – Brazilian Society of Film and Audiovisual Studies (2019-2021), and also of SOCINE’s Deliberative Council (2015-2017 and 2011-2013). Former editor of REBECA – Brazilian Journal for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies, also from SOCINE. Producer and curator of the Thinking Image seminar, held annually at Cine Esquema Novo festival in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Author of books and papers on film, aesthetics, and politics, such as “O ensaio fílmico ou o cinema à deriva” (“Film essay or the drifting cinema”, book published in 2018), and editor of the collections “Comunicação, estética e política: epistemologias, problemas e pesquisas” (“Communication, aesthetics and politics: epistemologies, problems and research, 2020) and “Políticas do sensível: corpos e marcadores de diferença na Comunicação” (Sensible politics: bodies and markers of difference in Communication, 2020).

Lindiwe Dovey is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at SOAS University of London. She is a researcher, teacher, filmmaker, and film curator, and is deeply invested in the relationship between scholarship, practice, and pedagogy. From 2019 to 2025, she is Principal Investigator of the project ”African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies”, funded by a European Research Council grant. From 2023-2025 she is director of research and knowledge exchange in the College of Humanities at SOAS, and the chair of the SOAS Research Culture Committee. Lindiwe’s filmmaking practice is driven by a decolonial feminist ethos and an interest in questions of gender. She is the director of the feature-length documentary films, Out of the Box: The Screen Worlds of Judy Kibinge (2023) and From One Woman to Another: The Screen Worlds of Bongiwe Selane (2023), which were nominated for Best Educational Film at the 2023 Learning on Screen Awards. She is the author of the books Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and African Film and Literature (Columbia UP, 2009), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Laura Feal is a journalist, independent researcher, project manager and expert in international cooperation, holds a degree in Anthropology of art. For two decades, she has worked in several countries around Africa with different NGOs and agencies on gender, migration and rural development issues. Currently based in Senegal since 2012, where she coordinates the activities of the local association Hahatay, with a strong cultural component from a community approach. She has been a contributor to the Spanish newspaper EL PAIS and other media since 2018 and is engaged in different cultural initiatives as an independent researcher. She is a member of the Artistic Committee of the Saint Louis African Documentary Film Festival, STLouis’Docs and she is a PhD candidate at Gaston Berger University of Saint Louis (Senegal) looking at memories of cinema-going in the twentieth century in Saint-Louis under the supervision of Dr Delphe Kifouani.

Rachel Johnson lectures in Film Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. She researches film festivals in their transnational, networked aspect, from “A-list” festivals’ consolidation of Eurocentric canons to emerging networks of solidarity across migration festivals. She has written on topics such as film festivals and ideology, the documentary biopic of Geneviéve Makaping (Maka), and tropes of ‘flow’ in contemporary film and theory. Her book, Film Festivals, Ideology and Art Cinema is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press. Rachel’s other recent endeavours include leading the research project New Voices in Cinephilia (2022-23), and consulting on film programming for the Leeds International Film Festival and Hyde Park Picture House (Leeds, UK).

Robin Steedman is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Creative and Cultural Industries in Africa at Copenhagen Business School and has a PhD from SOAS, University of London. She is interested in global creative and cultural industries with a special focus on Kenya and Ghana, and in questions of diversity and inequality in media production, distribution, and viewership. Her first book, Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi, is forthcoming from The MIT Press in February 2023. She has also been a long time Submissions Advisor for the festival Film Africa.

Ana Camila Esteves is a journalist, cultural producer, researcher, and film curator. She holds a master’s degree in film studies and a PhD on contemporary African cinemas at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil), with a thesis on Netflix’s foray into Nollywood, in Nigeria. She is the co-founder, director, and curator of Mostra de Cinemas Africanos / Brazil African Film Festival and of Cine África Film Club, a contributing curator of Africa in Motion Film Festival (Scotland), and part of the selection committee of Vues d’Afrique film festival (Canada). She co-edited the e-book “Cinemas Africanos Contemporâneos: perspectivas críticas” (Contemporary African Cinemas: critical approaches – 2020), and she is the founder and editor of Revista Crítica de Cinemas Africanos / Critical Magazine of African Cinemas. She collaborates as curator, programmer, teacher, panellist and translator with several institutions and festivals in Brazil and abroad. She is currently a Research Associate at King’s College London, as part of the research project ‘Decolonizing Film Festival Research in a Post-Pandemic World’, funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund, Government of Canada [NFRF-2021-00161], led by Professor Sheila Petty (University of Regina/Canada) and Dr Estrella Sendra (King’s College London/UK).

Born in Salamanca, Mexico, mainly from a Basque and Catalán background. He has been doing photography and invested in the world of film since high school, where he created the first film club in his school’s history. He then graduated with a bachelor’s in communications from the Universidad Iberoamericana León in 2018. He has worked in many fields since then, including journalism, cultural events coverage for the Mexican government and marketing. He has lived, studied and worked in many different places such as Guanajuato, León, Vancouver, New York and now Regina, which has helped him shape his view of the world. Since University he has focused in doing documentary filmmaking, some of his work includes Piernas vs Cabezas (roughly translated to Legs vs heads) which centers on the corruption that permeates the landscape of Mexican professional soccer, as well as LOCAL STRANGERS, produced during an international exchange in the University of Regina on 2018. He is currently a student in the MFA Film Production program at the University of Regina and is working on his latest project, Assembling the Shards, a participatory autoethnographic documentary work which centers on the topic of migration and of which he now will share more with us.