Cole Smith is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy and served as a nuclear missile officer in the Air Force. He holds an MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia University. Smith received a 2021 Columbia Sloan Screenplay award for his feature script Silo. He is the writer of Sunday Money and Mutually Assured Destruction, two TV pilots chosen as Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF) Faculty Selects. His editorial writing on nuclear weapons regularly appears in The Guardian. He has been interviewed by BBC Live, NPR, Newsweek, and TIME on his experience working with nuclear missiles.

Alyssa Loh is a filmmaker and writer based in New York. She was a 2021 Sundance Lab Fellow and Sundance | Alfred P. Sloan Development Fellow. She holds a joint MBA/MFA from NYU, where she was a winner of the 2022 Purple List, and the recipient of the Roger King Finishing Award, Riese Production Award, Faculty Commendation in Filmmaking, and Screenwriting Craft Award. She has a BA from Princeton in English and creative writing, where she won the Ward Mathis Prize for best short story. Her essays on technology, surveillance, and visual culture have appeared in Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The American Reader, and she sits on the Editorial Board of the history journal Lapham’s Quarterly. In 2021, she co-created the experimental film series Twelve Theses on Attention for the Glasgow Biennial. The book version (text & film stills) was published by Princeton University Press in 2022.

James Brown has worked in acquisitions at various independent UK, US, and Australia/NZ distribution companies. In 2011 he produced his first feature, Age of Heroes, starring Sean Bean. Still Alice, his second feature as a producer, was adapted from the bestselling novel by Lisa Genova and acquired by Sony Pictures Classics at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. Still Alice won its star Julianne Moore the SAG Award, Indie Spirit, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Oscar in 2015. His latest feature as producer, Before You Know It, starring Judith Light, Mandy Patinkin, and Alec Baldwin, premiered in Competition at Sundance 2019 and was released in the US by 1091 (previously The Orchard). In 2017, Brown produced and directed family film You Can Tutu which was acquired by Netflix for all English-language territories. His short Failure to Thrive premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2018, and he was selected for the TIFF Director’s Lab the same year. Author A is Brown’s debut feature as writer-director.

Jasmin Tenucci is a writer and director based in São Paulo, Brazil. Her directing work includes short film August Sky, which won the Special Mention of the Jury at the Cannes 2021 Official Selection, as well as four episodes of the Brazilian television series Shop Tudo (Glaze Entretenimento/Fall 2023). Tenucci’s screenwriting work includes co-developing and writing on Globo’s acclaimed series As FiveE (2020), and a soon-to-be-announced Netflix series that will premiere in June 2022. She is also adapting the novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet for Oscar-nominated director Bing Liu, and the Brazilian novel The Pediatrician for Anonymous Content Brazil. Tenucci also served as editor on Joyland, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes in 2022 and Best International Film at the Spirit Awards in 2023. Tenucci holds a BA in Film from São Paulo University and an MFA in Writing and Directing from Columbia University Film School, where she also taught directing. She is currently in development on two feature films that she will direct: Purple Cotton and The Smallest Whale in the World, which won the 2017 Columbia Alfred P. Sloan Development Grant.

Maggie Briggs is a filmmaker based between her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, and New York City, where she received her MFA at Columbia University. Her short film, To Sonny, premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2020. Her next short, Louis I: King of the Sheep, a stop-motion animation she wrote and produced, had its World Premiere at the 72nd Berlinale in its Generation Program. Her features in development, Prone to Wander and Sweet as Figs, have been supported by Tribeca Film Institute, Cine Qua Non, and the TIFF Writers’ Studio, where she was awarded with the CHANEL Women Writers’ Network Grant, and, most recently, the Bergman Estate Residency. She co-wrote Saim Sadiq’s feature, Joyland, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard, where it won the Jury Prize and the Queer Palme and later went on to win Best International Film at the 2023 Indie Spirit Awards.