Brian Gordon
Brian Gordon is the Nashville Film Festival’s artistic director and oversees the annual event’s film and workshop lineup, among other duties. Prior to arriving in Nashville in early 2001, he spent thirteen years as director of the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards Competition. Gordon has served on numerous film festival juries and grant committees and has appeared on panels at the IFP Market (New York), the Americana Music Seminar (Nashville), Film Arts Foundation (San Francisco), Chicago International Film Festival and elsewhere.

Gordon also wrote sidebars for the book Rough Guide to Country Music (edited by Kurt Wolff), and ran art cinemas in Cincinnati, Denver, Berkeley and San Francisco.

Cyndi Greening
Cyndi Greening is a filmmaker and digital media professor. She teaches animation, digital filmmaking, motion media and visual arts. Greening has been attending the Sundance Film Festival since 1996 and as a member of the press since 2004. She also attends numerous other festivals including Telluride, Tribeca and SXSW. Greening blogs on CinemaMinima and IndieWIRE and maintains a personal blog focusing on indie filmmaking, media arts and arts education.

In 2006, Greening produced two films that were shot in Zambia, Africa. Bad Timing was the first dramatic narrative feature film in the nation. Voice of an African Nation is a documentary about the cultural experience of the 18-member crew. This experience irrevocably altered her commitment and vision to independent global film. She and her writing partner recently completed Coyote and are in preproduction on another international independent film.

Leon
Leon is singular in more than just his name. His talents have graced film and television screens (Cool Runnings, Waiting to Exhale, Ali, The Five Heartbeats, Above the Rim, Little Richard, Temptations and many more), and theatrical and musical stages. Leon produced and starred in the feature film The Price of Kissing in addition to writing the songs he performs regularly as lead singer in Leon and The Peoples. Leon has two films set for distribution (Cover and Capers), is starring in the Je’Caryous Johnson’s touring play Shackin’ Up and performs regularly with Leon and The Peoples.

Billy Luther
Billy Luther studied film at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and worked on projects for the Smithsonian Institution’s New York City National Museum of the American Indian Film and Video Center. A past honoree of Los Angeles' Film Independent Project: Involve, Luther was recently selected for the 2006 Sundance Institute/Ford Foundation Fellowship, Corporation for Public Broadcasting/PBS Producers Academy at WGBH in Boston, and Tribeca Institute’s All Access Program with his feature documentary MISS NAVAJO, which world premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, had its national television premiere on Independent Lens on PBS and is the winner of Michael Moore's 2007 Special Founders Prize. He is in development on the documentaries Grab and The Untitled Indian Marching Band Project. Luther belongs to the Navajo, Hopi and Laguna Pueblo Tribes.

Kiyash Monsef
Kiyash Monsef is a producer and editor at the groundbreaking Current TV, a worldwide cable television network specializing in short-form documentaries and viewer-created programming.

Monsef is the producer and director of the documentary G4M3RS, the first film to examine the phenomenon of competitive computer gaming through the eyes of the players themselves. Received by the gaming community as an honest and accurate portrayal of the competitive gaming lifestyle, G4M3RS has been invited to screen at numerous film festivals and gaming events around the world.

Recently, Monsef wrote and directed a series of video segments for the ITVS-produced alternate reality game, WORLD WITHOUT OIL, documenting the candid responses of real people throughout the Bay Area to a (semi-) fictional global oil shortage.

Osnat Shurer
Osnat Shurer is an independent scriptwriter and producer. Until recently, she was the executive producer of the Shorts group at Pixar Animation Studios, where she oversaw all of Pixar's original short films (including three which were nominated for Academy Awards), DVD bonus materials, commercials and multi-media installations for museums.

Prior to joining Pixar in 2002, Shurer worked in many mediums: live action, animation, live television and various interactive museum installations. She produced and/or directed documentaries and docudramas throughout the world, in such places as India, China, Tibet, Japan, Africa and Europe.

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