Mystery Sender

Tanuj Chopra is writer/director/producer and television showrunner from Northern California with 5 feature films to his name. His first feature film Punching at the Sun about South Asian teenagers coming of age in post 9/11 Queens premiered at the 2006 Sundance and Tribeca film festivals + won the grand jury prize at the San Francisco International Asian American Film festival. Variety called the fiery debut “a display of talent that's distinctive, original and iconoclastic.” Punching at the Sun was the first South Asian American feature to ever be selected to Sundance. 

Tanuj's most recent award winning feature Staycation won the grand jury prize at the 2018 LA film festival in the Muse section. His other award winning titles Grass and Chee and T were both acquired in 2017 by genre leader Comedy Dynamics and available to watch on Netflix. Chee and T premiered at 2016 Los Angeles Film Festival where it won a jury prize for comedy. 

Chopra holds a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University and an MFA in film direction from Columbia University where he was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship. He was recently selected to the 2018 Sundance Episodic Lab, the Fox Global Filmmaker Initiative and the Sony TV directors lab. He's a member of Temple University's faculty and teaches ‘Directing the Actor’ in the university’s Los Angeles Film program. He’s currently showrunning and executive producing season 2 of Delhi Crime for Netflix.

ManSee is a filmmaker and cultural worker born and raised in NYC. She is a co-founder of cultural collective Chinatown Art Brigade, and a co-founding member of Gòngmíng Collective for Language Justice. She has camera-assisted for Spike Lee, was a video fellow for Democracy Now!, and is currently working on her first feature documentary. Her film projects have received support from the Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Puffin Foundation, and Asian Women Giving Circle. Her cultural organizing work has received support from A Blade of Grass, Rubin Foundation, Asian Women Giving Circle, Fourth Arts Block, Culture Push, and Laundromat Project. ManSee is a graduate of Third World Newsreel’s Production Workshop, and received an MFA in Film (Directing/Writing) from NYU. 

Marta Effinger-Crichlow is an interdisciplinary artist whose body of work reflects her mission to fuse social issues, culture, and history. She has worked as a freelance dramaturg in cities like Chicago, Louisville, Pittsburgh, and New York. She received a Pittsburgh Multicultural Arts Initiative grant for her multi-media collage The Kitchen is Closed Startin' Sunday and collaborated with noted jazz saxophonist Billy Harper for her play Whispers Want to Holler. She is the author of Staging Migrations toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones published by University Press of Colorado. Marta is on the faculty at New York City College of Technology-CUNY. She was a 2017 IFP JustFilms Fellow at the Made in NY Media Center and a 2018 recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts-Individual Artist Grant. She is in Women Make Movies’ Production Assistance Program for her documentary project Little Sallie Walker.

Independent filmmaker Ann Kaneko is known for her personal films that weave her intimate aesthetic with the complex intricacies of political reality. Often involving subjects in other parts of the world, Kaneko poetically probes the intersection where power impacts the personal. She has screened internationally and been commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Getty Center. Her films include A Flicker in Eternity; Against the Grain: An Artist's Survival Guide to Peru, Overstay and 100% Human Hair. Currently, she is producing Manzanar, Diverted, which examines environmental justice in Payahunaadü/the Owens Valley. She has been funded by PBS, the Japan Foundation, Hoso Bunka Foundation and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Kaneko has been a Fulbright and Japan Foundation Artist fellow and has an MFA in film directing from UCLA. She is the artist mentor for Visual Communications’ Armed With a Camera fellowship and teaches Media Studies at Pitzer College. 

Bebe Nodjomi currently works as an Admissions Administrative Aide at NYU’s Tisch Special Programs. She manages all incoming applications, interviews, auditions, and inquiries for a variety of programs including study abroad, summer high school, online programming, and more. Before joining NYU Tisch, Bebe was the Documentary Lab Coordinator at Firelight Media, a Lab that specifically supports people of color working on their first or second documentary features. At Firelight she spearheaded and managed the company's open call process. Bebe has also worked the New York festival circuit, rotating live event work between IFP Film Week, Tribeca Film Festival, and DOC NYC. She holds a Bachelor's from Hunter College and a Master's from Columbia University, both in Film and Media Studies. Bebe has published academic pieces on Iranian Cinema and has discussed her work on panels and conferences.

Myles Connell has worked as a screenwriter, director, script doctor, and musician. His first film In Uncle Robert's Footsteps – a 24 minute short - premiered at New Directors New Films at the Museum of Modern Art and subsequently played at Sundance. He wrote and directed The Opportunists – an independent feature starring Christopher Walken, Vera Farmiga, and Cyndi Lauper - which premiered at Sundance and was theatrically released in the USA, France, and Italy. He has worked as both a screenwriter and director for the BBC and Independent Television in the UK, and for NBC in the USA. He has taught screenwriting and directing, and is a Screenwriting and Directing Fellow of The Sundance Institute and a member of the Director’s Guild of America.