Mahtab Rezayi is an Iranian filmmaker, writer, and photographer born in May 1995. She graduated with a BA in Film Directing from Art University in Tehran, Iran. She has made several fiction and documentary films. Additionally, In her professional career as a filmmaker, she has participated as a screenwriter in several movies and won an award for the best commercial script in 2017. Mahtab Rezayi was a member of the screenwriting selection committee of the 16th Nahal International Film Festival and a jury member of the 5th National Technology and Industrial Film and Photography Festival. She was also the art manager and supervisor of the artistic and cinematic content production department at Puzzle Academy Art Institute.

Areas of focus: Documentary, Directing, Photography, Writing, Gender discrimination, Social taboos

Laura holds a BA in History from DePaul University and an MA in Media Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Their master’s thesis explored hauntings depicted in American haunted house horror films and questioned how these tales obfuscated or shed light on systems of violence, death, and memory in the real world. Their research interests include the exploration of the messy separation between the real world and fictional media, representation and reception, applications of necropolitical theory to horror films, and anything and everything related to horror & ghosts. Other research interests include fan studies and the creation of fan identities.

In their free time, Laura is an avid fan of music, TikTok cat videos, and medical history books.

Dennis (Yifei) Sun is a Ph.D. student in Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests revolve around new media theory, new media authorship, film philosophy, handmade motion pictures, and the intriguing copyright issue surrounding AI-generated art. Titled "Rethinking Bergson and Deleuze's Theories of Movement - The Material Ontology of Analog and Digital Moving Images, and The Disciplines of Creation in Digital Artworks", his previous article appears in Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology (vol. 8, no. 1, 2023). In light of the historical legal precedents in handmade motion pictures, he is currently engaged in a project that delves into the complex copyright and authorship issues surrounding AI-generated images. With this endeavor, he also seeks to build an archive related to the recent advancements in AI technologies, explore the resurgence of the romantic authorship in a digital context, and investigate the purpose of copyright from the perspective of chance-oriented art.