Maria Bonsanti has been at the service of creative documentary film for over twenty years. She joined the Festival dei Popoli in Florence as a programmer in 2000, was appointed its co-director in 2012 and is still associated with this long-established institution as a member of the board of directors. She has repeatedly worked for the Locarno Film Festival, including as a coordinator of the Play Forward section in 2006 and 2007. Bonsanti served as artistic director of the Cinéma du réel festival in Paris until 2017 and as deputy director of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome from 2022 to 2024. Since 2017, she has been the head of programme of Eurodoc, a leading international network for documentary film producers.

French documentary filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre is from Guadeloupe and her works are regularly shown at the most important documentary film festivals in the world. A graduate of the Paris École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, she made her directing debut in 1998 with “The Isle” after having worked as a film editor for years. She attended DOK Leipzig in 2021 with “Words of Negroes”, which was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize for its politically astute montage dialogue between past and present. Since the early days of her professional career, she has shared her filmmaking skills in the training initiatives of the Parisian Ateliers Varan. In 2010, she adapted their non-academic training concept for Guadeloupe by founding Varan Caraïbe.

Originally from New York and based in Paris since 1995, Mark Edwards is a producer and broadcaster who served for four years as Director of the Steven Spielberg-founded USC Shoah Foundation in France before working across Europe as an independent producer. In 2012, he joined ARTE France as Head of International Co-productions. In 2021, he was appointed Director of Documentaries in Europe for Netflix. Since his departure from Netflix in February 2024, he has returned to working as a producer and media consultant. He has extensive experience teaching documentary production and writing and has tutored at prestigious French educational institutions. He has also been a member of several film commissions.

As Senior Curator of Film at the New York Museum of the Moving Image, Eric Hynes is responsible for the conception of film programmes and panels as well as the programming of the Museum’s annual “First Look” festival format. His passion for the moving image, especially the documentary, is also reflected in his writing. As a film critic and journalist, he has worked for the arts pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post for many years and writes for Film Comment, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Slate, New York Magazine and Sight & Sound. Eric Hynes has also been a staff writer for Reverse Shot film magazine since 2003, where he publishes a column on the art of nonfiction under the title “Make It Real”.

Avi Mograbi is considered one of Israel’s most distinguished auteur filmmakers. Born in Tel Aviv in 1956 and based in Lisbon today, his internationally acclaimed work stands for an innovative approach to documentary and fiction formats, but also for political commitment. He actively supports the organisation Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies by Israeli military personnel about their deployment in the occupied Palestinian territories. Mograbi poetically brings these testimonies to the public’s attention – in films, video works, at major international festivals. In 2009, the Berlin Academy of Arts awarded him the prestigious Konrad Wolf Prize, in 2015, the Parisian Jeu de Paume dedicated a retrospective to him, in 2021, DOK Leipzig honoured him with an Hommage.

Animation film director, animator and visual designer Merlin Flügel graduated with a diploma in Art from the University of Art and Design in Offenbach am Main in 2017. His first short films already attracted attention at festivals. “Echo” (2012), for example, was screened at the Berlinale and DOK Leipzig, and “Rules of Play”, which premiered in Leipzig in 2018, won the Jury Award in the Films de Fin d’études section at the Festival d’Animation Annecy in 2019. Merlin Flügel teaches, holds workshops and gives lectures. With Jonatan Schwenk and Marc Rühl, he is part of the animation collective Gogo Tanda, which founded the Sweat & Tears Animation Filmfest in Frankfurt am Main in 2018. Merlin Flügel currently lives in Berlin.

Isabel Herguera, born in San Sebastián in 1961, studied with Nam June Paik at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and devoted herself to animation at the California Institute of the Arts. After years of working as an animator for commercials and music clips in the USA, she returned to Europe in 2003. She was director of the Animac Festival in Lleida until 2011 and curator of the LIM Laboratorio de Imagen en Movimiento at the Arteleku art centre in San Sebastián. Workshops and teaching assignments have taken her to India and China. She has been a Professor of Animation at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne since 2017. In Isabel Herguera’s internationally acclaimed animated films, travels and encounters have left traces which DOK Leipzig 2024 explores in an Hommage.

Nosipho van den Bragt combines her passion for storytelling with legal expertise and entrepreneurial spirit. She studied law in Johannesburg and completed her Master of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2014. In the same year she co-founded Chocolate Tribe, an animation and visual effects studio based in Johannesburg and Cape Town which, as CEO, she has developed into a professional creative partner for international feature film, series and advertising film productions. She uses her commercial success to promote young, especially female talents in all animation film crafts – as a globally active workshop tutor and organiser of the annual AVIJOZI newcomers and network meeting.

Director and indie film enthusiast Tilman König was born in Erfurt in 1979. He studied Japanese Studies and Sociology in Leipzig and joined the university film circle as a scholarship holder at Waseda University in Tokyo. Back in Leipzig, he founded the film group Cinemabstruso,  curated the experimental film festival “The Night of Radical Film” and has worked as a video scenographer for various local theatres since 2009. After several anti-racist independent productions, often co-directed with his brother Karl-Friedrich, Tilman König won the hearts of a wider audience with his documentary “Pastor Lothar Stops” (2022), which was awarded the Film Prize Leipziger Ring and the ver.di Prize at DOK Leipzig.

Katrin Mundt has been Artistic Director of the EMAF European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück since 2018. Before that, she developed exhibition, film and performance series for the Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart and the Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund and worked for international festivals like the Duisburger Filmwoche, the Videonale in Bonn, goEast in Wiesbaden and the 25 FPS Festival in Zagreb. She regularly gives seminars, workshops and lectures at universities like the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam, Goldsmiths in London and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. As a writer, her focus is on documentary and performative practices in film and media arts.

Berlin-based actor Susanne Sachsse’s career began on the theatre stage but soon led her to other creative activities. In addition to performative and musical solo projects, she has presented collaborative performances, installations and staged events in theatre and alternative cultural spaces in Europe and New York as a founding member of the CHEAP art collective since 2001. In her cinematic work, too, she goes her own way. She has starred in several productions of Canadian queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce and has appeared in works by Yael Bartana, Zach Blas, Vaginal Davis, Ligia Lewis and Natascha Sadr Haghighian. In 2017, she received the Premio Maguey Queer Icon Award at the Guadalajara International Film Festival.