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Steve James is the award-winning director, producer, and co-editor of Hoop Dreams, which won every major critics award as well as a Peabody and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1995. The film earned James the Directors Guild of America Award and the MTV Movie Award’s “Best New Filmmaker.” James’ next documentary, Stevie, won major festival awards at Sundance, Amsterdam, Yamagata and Philadelphia, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. The acclaimed feature was released theatrically and landed on a dozen “Top Ten Films of the Year” lists for 2003. He will be presenting the Winnipeg Premiere of his new film At the Death House Door (2008) at the conference.

John Paskievich is an award-winning documentary film maker whose subjects are often individuals and communities whose cultural values are at odds with our received notions of progress and modernity. The Genie-Award-winning Ted Baryluk's Grocery (1983), was shot entirely in still pictures. Other films include The Old Believers (1989), Sedna: The Making of a Myth (1992) and his most recent film, Unspeakable (2006), in which he turns the camera on himself and others, who like him, stutter. Paskievich is also an accomplished still photographer who has published several books, including A Voiceless Song and The North End.

Joe MacDonald - Based in the NFB’s Prairie Centre, Joe MacDonald is an award-winning producer with over 100 documentary ,dramatic and new media productions to his credit. Born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia he studied at St. Francis Xavier University and Carleton University. His recent credits include A Place Between: The Story of an Adoption which is nominated for the Donald Brittain Award for best social/political documentary at the 2008 Gemini Awards. He also recently worked with the United Nations conducting a workshop in Nairobi for emerging documentary filmmakers living in the slums of that city.