Dina Iordanova is Professor of Film Studies and the founder of Centre of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She has served as Head of Department, as Director of Research for the performing School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies, and as Provost of the ancient St. Leonard’s College/Dean of Graduate Studies, with responsibility for doctoral students. She has written extensively on film festivals, Eastern European and Balkan cinema and the global creative industries, including The Film Festival Circuit (2009), Cinema of the Periphery (2010), Film Festival and East Asia (2011), Film Festival and Activism (2012), Sustainable Projections: Concepts in Film Festival Management (2012). She is Fellow of the institute of Directors and of the Royal Society of the Arts and serves on the Board of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She is a recipient of multiple awards from organisations such as the Rockefeller, Leverhulme and Carnegie Trusts. My work has been translated into twenty languages and has been adopted for teaching around the world.

Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies, at the School of Journalism and Digital Communication, University of Central Lancashire. She published nearly twenty monographs and edited collections. They include Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Representing Neighbours on Screen, with Eva Näripea and Lars Kristensen (I. B. Tauris, 2014), Work in Cinema: Labor and Human Condition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist (Berghahn Books, 2013) and European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Mazierska’s work was translated into over ten languages, including French, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Portugese, Estonian and Serbian. She is a principal editor of a Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin. She is the author, editor or co-editor of nine books the most recent of which are Old and New Media After Katrina (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity (with Su Holmes, Continuum, 2011); Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (with Yvonne Tasker, Duke U P, 2014) and Extreme Weather and Global Media (with Julia Leyda, forthcoming, Routledge, 2015). In 2015 she will take up co-editorship of Television and New Media.

Arash T. Riahi is film director, writer, producer, and dramatic advisor, born in Iran, currently living in Vienna. Studied Film and the Arts, has been working for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF, since 1995 on a freelance basis. Founded the film production company Golden Girls Filmproduktion  in 1997. Has written, directed and produced several award-winning documentaries, shorts, experimental films, music videos and commercials. The cinema documentary The Souvenirs of Mr. X  in cooperation with ARTE and ORF was his first cinema documentary and multi award winning Exile Family Movie  was the second one. His first feature film For a moment, freedom   has won 31 international awards and was the Austrian candidate for the Academy Awards 2010. The film had a cinematic release in Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Canada, South Korea, Czech Republic, Norway, Luxembourg, Netherlands, etc. Since 2010 Arash T. Riahi works as a script advisor for Sources 2. Teaching nonfictional storytelling and financing since 2011. More information here.