Lucía Florez is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who earned recognition with her film, “Shirampari: Legacies of the River”. The film premiered at Sundance 2023 and was screened at major festivals including DOC NYC and DOK Leipzig. It was also selected for the PBS series POV! and was part of the competitive POV Shorts program.

Produced with a National Geographic Explorer grant, the film captures a boy’s rite of passage in the Ashéninka community of the Peruvian Amazon. Her earlier work, Paperthin (2019), about a young Russian trans woman seeking asylum in New York, won Best Documentary at the Sioux City International Film Festival.

She has collaborated with leading global organizations such as the UN, WWF, and Conservation International. Her latest project Ever and the Sharks, follows a Peruvian boy and a marine researcher as they tag whale sharks off Peru’s northern coast.

Sasha-Gay Lewis is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. Lewis’s acclaimed documentary The Incursion earned awards at the Caribbean Tales Film Festival, Los Angeles Film and Script Festival, and DOC LA. She was a co-producer on HBO’s Reopening Night, which followed the Public Theater’s return to the stage after the COVID-19 shutdown.

As a screenwriter and producer on Glad You Asked (Season 2), Lewis helped the YouTube Originals series earn an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Educational or Informational Series. Her short Surviving Suicide is used as an awareness tool in high schools, and her architectural short The People’s Vision was featured by the AIA’s I Look Up Film Challenge.

She is the founder of Phoenix, a female-led production company offering creative producing services, and she has served on the board of the Documentary Producers Alliance.