AX Mina (Director, Producer) is a filmmaker, artist and author. Mina has led exhibitions in spaces such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mozilla Festival Open Artist Studio (curated by the V&A Museum and Tate Modern), and the Museum of the Moving Image.

She is author of Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power, hailed as a “remarkable new book” by The Atlantic and “a visionary and sweeping history of the internet phenomenon” by DJ Spooky. Her second book, Hanmoji Handbook, co-authored with Jason Li and Jennifer 8. Lee, is a Kirkus Best Book of 2022 and and teaches the Chinese language through emoji. 

She is a current Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications, and she served as associate producer on the award-winning documentary Ascension, directed by Jessica Kingdon, and co-director of the Lijiang Creative City Guide, produced by China Residencies with support from the British Council China.

Kira Simon-Kennedy (Producer) is the co-founder & co-director of China Residencies/爻 yáo collaborative, a multifaceted arts nonprofit supporting hundreds of different international creative exchanges since its inception in 2013. Kira is also an Academy Award nominated documentary film producer, currently producing feature documentary projects by Yeelen Cohen (Lights of Passage), Jiayu Yang (The Entomologists), Shelley Cheung (Laying The Last Track), Morehshin Allahyari (The Remaining Signs of Future Centuries), and Mia Bendrimia (Magma). Through all of her work, she is committed to redistributing resources and mentoring the next generation of artists, cultural workers & organizers.

Flor de oro Tejada (Producer) is a multidisciplinary filmmaker and creative producer based in the Bronx, New York. Flor’s films explore Black, Indigenous, Latine and LGBTQIA+ communities through futurism and healing. She’s produced branded content and creative non-fiction shorts for clients including Condé Nast, AT&T, Amazon Web Services, Comcast, Time Inc., Tribeca Studios, P&G and many more. Flor graduated from the Kanbar Institute of Film & Television school at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and her films have appeared in AFI FEST, Allied Media Conference, Camden International Film Festival, Seattle Trans Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Martha's Vineyard African-American Film Festival, Afrikana Independent Film Festival, Odù Film Festival Brazil and more. Her latest film Bone Black: Midwives vs. the South won the Best Short Documentary award at Blackstar Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival in 2023. Flor is a Fellow to the 2023-2024 Sundance Documentary Producers Lab and Fellowship with her latest documentary feature, Wild Darlings Sing the Blues (And It’s a Song of Freedom.)

Leilah Babirye (Co-Writer) was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda. She studied art at Makerere University in Kampala (2007–2010) evolving a multidisciplinary practice that transforms everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights. Publicly outed in Uganda by a viruently anti-gay local newspaper, she fled to New York in 2015; participation in the Fire Island Artists Residency was her refuge. In spring 2018, with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project, Babirye was granted asylum, settling in Brooklyn where she lives and works today.

Leilah presented her first solo show at Gordon Robichaux, New York in 2018, her first solo show in the UK and Europe in 2021 hosted by the Stephen Friedman Gallery and has exhibited in group shows around the world from LA's Hammer Museum to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria. In May 2022 she created site-responsive work with the Public Art Fund in New York's Brooklyn Bridge Park and currently has a residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK) where she's creating new work towards major exhibitions opening in 2024, including the Venice Biennale. Yes, her Bushwick, Brooklyn studio is very busy.