Varsha Panikar (She/Her) is an up and coming filmmaker, poet, and artist who likes to tell stories by blending poetry, performance, art, moving images, and sound. Driven by an unyielding desire to constantly create, she likes to do a bit of everything: from commercials and independent audio-visual endeavours to delving into the sphere of art, poetry, and performance.

Director’s Guild of America (DGA) student award winner Saad Nawab’s film “Frankenstein’s Light,” a kids fantasy, has played and won awards in over twenty-five film festivals across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. He loves to utilize visual media to explore innocence, loss, and religion against the backdrop of worlds brimmed with science fiction and fantasy.

Presented in partnership with Pink & White Productions.

Priya “Pree” Rehal (they/them) is an artist-educator currently based in Tkaronto. They’re a child of immigrant settlers from Punjab. Pree’s work is an ode to their extended youth as a trans and non-binary person, while also painting love letters to their inner child, and affirming their queer, disabled, fat self. Their main medium is watercolour, but Pree also embroiders, creates short films, writes, and performs drag. They have an interdisciplinary arts practice under the name: Sticky Mangos and co-founded the Non-Binary Colour Collective. Pree’s work has been featured in CBC, Xtra magazine, BlogTo and Salty.

Augusto Bitter is a performer, writer, producer, and facilitator based in Toronto, born in Venezuela. They’ve been a resident artist at Canadian Stage, Aluna Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, and hub14. They express their creativity through dance, spoken word, pottery, and cooking. Augusto has made two short video-poems, cannibal, and golden girl, with the support of the Toronto Queer Film Festival and Glad Day Lit’s Naked Heart Festival. They are an artist-educator with Soulpepper Theatre, and they facilitate creative-writing workshops with children and youth in under-resourced schools and communities with Story Planet.

Kitty Rodé is a queer, agender, monster-femme creating multidisciplinary art in Tkaronto. Their work explores body horror, chronic illness, trauma, BDSM and healing. Special thanks to Devochka, founder of TENSION: School of Self-Suspension Art, and filmmakers Thirza Cuthand and Fallon Simard for facilitating this journey.

Mari “Dev” Ramsawakh is a disabled, non-binary and multidisciplinary artist and storyteller. Their work focuses on their many intersecting identities and social justice. They have written news articles, essays, and opinion pieces for CBC, HuffPost Canada, Insider, Bitch Media, and other publications. They have produced the podcasts Sick Sad World and Cripresentation, and have acted as editor for Possibilities Podcast and Leaders in Colour Podcast. They have published short fiction in the 2014 Hart House Review and the Toronto 2033 anthology published by Spacing Magazine. They also facilitate workshops on ableism and anti-oppression, write poetry and occasionally model.

Maria Lorente has a degree in History of Art and a Master’s Degree in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary Making from the University of Barcelona. She is currently studying for another Master’s Degree in TV and Cinema Script Writing at the Blanquerna University. Her production company, Intensidades Films, produces short erotic and pornographic films. She collaborates with directors, Mariona Vázquez, Yaiza de Lamo, and Juno Álvarez.

A collector of souvenir state spoons, Jordan Wong is a Chinese American experimental animator and nonfiction filmmaker driven by emotional honesty and hands-on processes. His films have screened internationally, including DOK Leipzig, NewFest, Animafest Zagreb, Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where he was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker for the film “Mom’s Clothes”.

Ena Lind has been creating different kinds of work around sexuality, art, and education for the last two decades. They have been interested in the dynamics between humans for as long as they can think. Submerge is their film directing debut. Currently, Ena is working on a second film while studying to become a sex and couples therapist. They live in Berlin with their two kids.

Benedito Ferreira lives and works between Goiânia and Rio de Janeiro. Ph.D. student in Arts at the State University of Rio de Janeiro with research focusing on his artistic processes, montages and narratives. Works with film, objects, installation and photography, without establishing a hierarchy between media. He is currently developing the Despertáculo project, whose boundary between document and fiction is blurred by using as a premise letters he writes for the poet Pio Vargas and photographer Samuel Costa, Brazilian artists who had an early death.

Beeta is an artist based in Toronto where she lovingly tends to her houseplants. She received an award at Scarborough Arts’ annual juried exhibition in 2019 for her experimental film “Making an Other of That Which is also Life”, and produced her second film “Lonely in Quarantine” in 2020. Beeta occasionally writes for Kajal magazine. She performs burlesque as her alter ego Kareena Pussy Couture, co-founding Silk Burlesque with Ola Minou to produce queer and Middle Eastern-centered burlesque shows. Beeta is currently working on a comedic screenplay. She frequently fantasizes about a better world.