Since 2002, Susan Bettmann has been making documentary films, primarily about Vermont artists and the Vermont landscape. Her 2004 film, Beyond 88 Keys, the Music of Michael Arnowitt, won the Vermont Film Commission’s Goldstone Award. Prior to filmmaking, she was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s touring company, and a co-founder of Dragon Dance Theatre. She is the founder and director of White Rock Productions, Inc. She lives in Middlesex, Vermont.

Lizzie Borden is a writer, director and editor and script consultant. Her film, Born in Flames, has been called one of “The Hundred Most Significant Political Films Of All Time” by The New Republic, and is on the British Film Institute’s list of the 500 Best Films of All Time. In 2016, Born In Flames was restored by the Anthology Film Archives and screened around the world, where it received its belated acknowledgement as, in the words of New Yorker critic Richard Brody, “a feminist masterpiece.”

Alex Bortolot joined Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum’s staff as Deputy Director in January 2023. Bortolot graduated from Harvard University with a BA in the history of art and architecture and holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University. An impassioned champion of museums and the communities they serve, Bortolot invests deeply in understanding audiences and establishing cultures of transparency, collaboration, and experimentation. He is no stranger to the Dartmouth community, having worked as a visiting lecturer on African art in the Art History Department and as an assistant curator of special projects at the Hood Museum from 2008 to 2009.

Chris Danforth is a Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont, where he directs the Vermont Advanced Computing Center, and along with Peter Sheridan Dodds runs the Computational Story Lab research group at the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He is the co-inventor of hedonometer, a socio-technical instrument estimating daily happiness based on social media, and has also developed algorithms to identify predictors of depression from Instagram photos. Danforth has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications applying mathematical techniques to many fields including atmospheric science, linguistics, psychology, literature, finance, physics, engineering, and biochemistry. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website: http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort

Sandi DuBowski is the director/producer of Sabbath Queen, director/producer of Trembling Before G-D, producer of A Jihad For Love, and co-producer of Budrus. His award-winning work has screened at Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca, and Toronto, theatrically released in 150 cities, and broadcast on ZDF/Arte, BBC, Channel 4, and PBS. In 2020, he was invited to join the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. DuBowski spearheaded a groundbreaking impact campaign with the award-winning Trembling Before G-D, personally conducting 850 live events for over 250,000 people. He is a co-founder of The Creative Resistance, a collective of media-makers who create award-winning political ads and design. In the mid-1990s, he began his media and activism work at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, focused on the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement.

William Francis Lee III (born December 28, 1946), nicknamed “Spaceman,” was a Major League Baseball player who pitched for the Boston Red Sox (1969–1978) and Montreal Expos (1979–1982). In 2008, Lee was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame as the team’s record-holder for most games pitched by a left-hander (321) and the third-highest win total by a Red Sox southpaw (94). In addition to his statistical baseball accomplishments, Lee is known for his counterculture behavior, his antics both on and off the field, and his use of the Leephus pitch. Lee has co-written four books, and been the subject of a film (Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey), and a Warren Zevon song (“Bill Lee”).

Born in 1949 in New York City, Charles Light has been involved in the film and video industry since 1973, when he co-founded Green Mountain Post Films (GMP Films), a production and distribution company. Along with partner Dan Keller, Charlie produced and directed many award winning films on nuclear power, the environment, the Vietnam War, art and politics, cannabis, peace issues and other topics. GMP films have been featured at Lincoln Center, as part of the New York Film Festival, Madison Square Garden and the Pompidou Center in Paris. They have also been broadcast nationally and internationally and shown at theaters, town meetings, colleges, community gatherings, high schools, boardrooms, churches, museums, and Congressional and legislative hearing rooms.

Angelo Madsen (FKA Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen’s works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International, New York Film Festival, Tribeca, Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of documentary, LGBT, and experimental film festivals around the world. His film, “North By Current” (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.

Verandah Porche works as a poet-in-residence, performer, and writing partner. Based in rural Vermont on the notable commune Total Loss Farm since 1968, she has read her work on NPR stations, in the Vermont State House, and at the John Simon Guggenheim Museum. She initiated—and for almost 30 years taught the poetry program at Vermont’s Governor’s Institute on the Arts. The Vermont Arts Council presented her with its Award of Merit, and its first Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Award. Verandah serves as Vice Chair of the Select board, exploring the poetics of civic life, in Guilford, Vermont, a town of 2100 souls.

Richard H. Saunders is director of the Middlebury College Museum of Art and professor ofHistory of Art and Architecture. From 2003 until 2013 he was the Walter Cerf Distinguished College Professor, a position that was given to Middlebury in his honor. He came to Middlebury in 1985 and since his arrival the Museum has presented over 250 exhibits. He has published extensively on American art and portraiture over the past forty years. More recently he was co-editor of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Handbook of the Collection (2022).

Jacob Soboroff is an NBC News political and national correspondent. He is also the author of The New York Times best seller Separated: Inside an American Tragedy and an executive producer of Separated, a film by Errol Morris. For his reporting on the Trump administration’s child separation policy, Soboroff received the Walter Cronkite Award for Individual Achievement by a National Journalist and the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. He is also the recipient of a Ruben Salazar Journalism Award from the California Chicano News Media Association, and in 2022 was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award for his reporting from Haiti. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Nicole Cari and their two children.

Xinyan Yu is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC. Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Xinyan started her journalism career in 2012 in Beijing. Now working as an independent filmmaker, Xinyan has directed and produced for international broadcasters and programs. Made in Ethiopia, Xinyan’s feature documentary debut supported by IDA, Ford Foundation, Firelight Media and the Danish Film Institute, premiered at Tribeca Festival, Sheffield DocFest, DC/DOX and Encounters South Africa International Film Festival in 2024. Xinyan’s storytelling is deeply rooted in her upbringing within a community of steel factory workers, where she witnessed firsthand the sweeping socioeconomic changes in China. Her work bridges two distinct worlds: documenting the evolving geopolitical landscapes of the Global South, her place of origin, while elevating the voices of marginalized communities in the developed world, where she now lives and works.