Vida Zamora, originally from Puebla, is an artist formed at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Film/Video and Liberal Arts. Their passion for the documentary arts is an imminent result of their roots in the Global South, devotion to social organizing, and a forager’s approach to academia. Their most recent affair was moving to New York for a residency at UnionDocs. Vida’s practice, per se, weaves through the complex tapestry of intersectionality, dialect, and historicity with an unyielding lens of resistance and dissent. Their ethos embodies stark materialism, dissecting dominant discourses on race, gender, and class in the Americas. Vida challenges entrenched roles through direct action, democratizing mediums for marginalized voices through their processes. Advocating for "Kuxlejal" life-affirming processes, their voice spans disciplines, drawing from decolonial and socialist theories.
Guess is a filmmaker specializing in narrative, documentary, and experimental cinema. She holds a dual degree in Global BFA in Film Art from Emerson College and Paris College of Art. Through her engagement with filmmaking trends across East Asia, the United States, and Europe, Guess has cultivated a distinctive voice that harmonizes diverse cultural influences. Her work is characterized by her commitment to capturing authentic truths through delicate expression, allowing reality to articulate itself. Guess’s films consistently strive to convey genuine emotions with sincerity and depth. Outside of film, Guess likes solving puzzles.
Pete Crispell is busy. He wants to do all the things in the short time he has.
Pyrate, Artist, builder, student, teacher, storyteller, and civil engineer.
He likes to build sandcastles then furiously work to protect them from the tide as it inevitably overtakes them.
His work is concerned with community, housing, borders and boundaries, and claims of authority.
Pete is fascinated and wants to understand.
Allison ‘Sunny’ Dean is a documentary media artist and amateur craftsman from Tucson, Arizona. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media program, they relocated to San Francisco to be more centralized for their work in prison abolition and wrongful conviction media advocacy. Allison’s work focuses on the narratives of community spaces and landscapes, and the portraits of the people within them. At Duke, they hope to explore the poetry of collaboration woven within documentary media’s framework, and the new age question of howwe choose to document the world around us.
Afang Fan is a Chinese documentary filmmaker with 8 years of experience. Her works are full of humanistic care and focus on social issues. She hopes that minorities can be heard and seen through documentaries. She is very good at telling stories of herself and people around her in a warm and light style, reflecting the relevance between individuals and community culture and life. In the past two years, she has been farming in her hometown Xinjiang while filming the whole process into a short documentary series, which has been very popular online.
Victoria Guillem (she/they) is a filmmaker, educator, and musician born and raised in New York City with deep roots in Portoviejo, Ecuador. Victoria has been making experimental, narrative, and documentary films for over a decade. Victoria has a BFA in Film and Television from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is a 2023 Karen Schmeer Editing Fellow. They have worked as a media arts educator, programmer, editor, and assistant editor. Victoria currently works as a youth media educator at the Educational Video Center and is also developing a documentary about the revolutionary salsa band, Las Mariquitas. Their directorial work has been included in the Anthology Film Archives New Filmmakers series, the Universe Multicultural Film Festival, and the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, among others. Her latest film “Todo” won the Best Experimental Film award at the 2023 Oregon Documentary Film Festival. Victoria uses her work to question Latinx identity, memory, and linear time. Using experimental filmmaking techniques, Victoria explores her family’s history to have larger conversations about acculturation gaps in the immigrant experience.
Claire Rosemary Lewis, or simply Claire Rosemary, is an animator, performer, and writer whose work explores how computers and the internet impact the incredibly human experiences of gender, sexuality, disability, body, religion, and self-perception, particularly in relation to girlhood in the digital age. In her animation and video art, she often uses an autobiographical character named Lola to engage with her own experiences with these topics. Lately, her work has focused on online teenage girlhood, female evangelical social media content creators, and the relationship between the online persona and the physical body. Her comics, short stories, essays, and poetry have been published in Bluestem, The Bookends Review, Women at Warp, Helix, and elsewhere. Claire grew up in the southern exurbs of Kansas City and has spent most of her adult life in Chicago, where she earned her BFA in animation from DePaul University and taught herself how to play chess. Website/Portfolio: clairerosemary.com
Lala Luo (b. 2000, Shanghai) is a writer, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores notions of interiority, subtlety, and memory through a decolonial lens. Her works focus on individuals, families, and communities navigating social changes, exploring and interpreting their realities of diaspora, exile, grievance, and other the often unspoken sentiments and connections within East Asian culture. She feels, retrospects, cries, gets lost, heals, and embraces all in the tender filmmaking spaces she strives to create. She holds a BA in Design|Media Arts and Sociology from UCLA.
Lauren Neefe practices at the intersection of poetry, sound, place, and the built environment, often in collaboration with performance artists, including actors, musicians, and dancers. In site-specific docu-poems such as "Eunoisha" and "Citizen Greeting | Rite of Return" and in the design podcast Inhabit, her work explores a proposition of justice: if sound is movement, movement describes space, and space is where we negotiate relations, then justice will make a sound we can listen for. She holds an M.A. in Poetry and a Ph.D. in English literature and has taught courses on sound theory, aural architecture, Romanticism, and poetry at distinguished universities and in Georgia state prisons.
Originally from Pensacola, Florida, Mort O'Sullivan is a North Carolina-based photographer and printer with degrees in Literature, Religion, and Chemistry. After founding and running a banking technology company for 24 years, Mort dedicated himself to visual storytelling, a passion nurtured throughout his extensive travels and time living in New York City, Edinburgh, and northern Italy. In 2022, he was selected for the VII Masterclass in Arles, France, honing his skills in long-term documentary projects under the mentorship of respected documentary photographers and photojournalists. Mort's practice explores historical printing processes like photogravure and platinum-palladium, examining how these techniques shape narrative. His work investigates social issues and family narratives, often incorporating archives. At Duke, he aims to refine his creative voice and deepen his engagement with documentary arts.
Caleb Rivera is a multidisciplinary artist born in Louisiana and raised in Florida. After finishing high school, he attended the University of South Florida and earned his Master of Architecture in 2023. While earning his degree, Caleb worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant helping to facilitate both Design Theory and Design Studio courses. His current work explores speculative ideas of space and placemaking, as well as the intersecting relationship of the built environment and cultural imaginary.
Born in 1999, Sarah Soucek grew up on the coast of rural Maine. Following her graduation from high school, she moved to New York to pursue a BA in Film & Electronic Arts from Bard College. Her work explores how the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee informs the way stories are told. Soucek experiments with integrating video, audio, text, and still images into one fluid and dynamic storytelling form.
Emma Wheeler Volz is a documentary filmmaker from Mesa, Arizona. Following her time living in Cusco, Peru as a service volunteer, Emma entered Brigham Young University’s Media Arts program where she studied non-fiction storytelling and film history. Emma’s current project utilizes ethnographic and experimental techniques to explore the spiritual leadership of women Hmong shamans in northern Thailand. During her time at Duke, Emma seeks to further examine where portraits of female resilience intersect with individual efforts to cultivate traditions, languages, and religions.
Yuling Xiao was born in Beijing, China, and recently graduated with her BS degree in Business from New York University. Growing up with a background in marketing and public relations, Yuling embarked on a multicultural educational journey since high school while amassing extensive experiences in the multifaceted impacts of media and imagery on social culture. The exposure fostered her profound interest in the social expressions and impacts constructed through visual media, specifically documentary. In the summer of 2023, Yuling produced her first short documentary in the Gansu province of China, exploring the reconstruction of cultural and artistic communication under the context of ethnic minorities at a Tibetan art institution founded by a Canadian artist. During her time at Duke, Yuling aims to delve deeper into the subjects of cross-cultural confrontations, integrations, and harmonious coexistence, particularly from a female perspective.
Xiaomeng Yan received her bachelor's degree in Global Culture Studies from Duke Kunshan Unviersity in 2023. Her research interests lie in contemporary China, from the Mao Era to modernity after economic reform. She focuses on migrant workers, subaltern studies in postcolonial global orders, and East Asian popular cultures.
Yang Zou is a short film director from China. Her work ranges from narrative short films to conceptual photographic installations. Yang Zou started her career as a film and television photographer and producer, and holds a Bachelor's Degree from the Communication University of China, Nanjing. After winning numerous film awards during her undergraduate studies, including Best New Director at the London Independent Film Awards, and founding a startup company in Shanghai, Yang's current project focuses on developing independent feature films about family relationships and the plight of modern women in East Asia. During her time at Duke University's MAFEDA program, Yang hopes to further explore topics related to China's queer community and intimate relationships.
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