DeeDee Halleck is a media activist, founder of Paper Tiger Television and co-founder of the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. Her first film, Children Make Movies (1961), documented a project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. Her film, Mural on Our Street (1964) was nominated for an Academy Award in 1965. She founded film workshops at Henry Street Settlement (1963-66) and Otisville State School for Boys in 1968. As President of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF) in the nineteen seventies, Halleck led a media reform campaign in Washington, organizing union and civil rights organizations to support efforts to make “public television public” and to include required funding for independent diverse producers. She testified twice before the House Sub-Committee on Telecommunications for increased support and channel space for independent video and film. This work led to “sunshine legislation” which meant that public television entities have to have open books, open meetings and local community advisory boards. The campaign ultimately developed ITVS, POV and other independent outlets. She has served as a trustee of the American Film Institute, Women Make Movies and the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation. She was Chair of the WBAI-FM Local Station Board (2019-2023). Her book, Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media (2002), is published by Fordham Press. She co-authored Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (2003) and has written essays for a number of collections about independent media. Halleck is an official representative of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) of ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) which is the only official regulatory body of the internet. Halleck has received four awards for life-time achievement: an Indy from AIVF, The George Stoney Award from the Alliance for Community Media; The Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), and the Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communication, 2008. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego.

Miko Revereza (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker raised in California and currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship to moving images. He has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile: DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93 – 96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021), and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, and was listed in BFI’s Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, is a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is a recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaker. He holds an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films are distributed by LUX, and he is the co-founder of Cinema Antena in San Agustín Etla.