Emily Coutts is a Canadian director and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She was selected as one of eight directors for the prestigious 2024 Women In The Director’s Chair program. She recently completed directing shadowing with three established directors on Star Trek: Discovery, where she also starred as Lt. Keyla Detmer for five seasons.

Her directing credits include the short film Rosebud (Dances With Films: NY) and They Choose You (Hollyshorts). She also wrote, produced, and starred in Dear Jesus (Portland Film Festival, Toronto Shorts International Film Festival, Dances With Films). A graduate of the Canadian Film Center’s Acting Conservatory, Coutts serves on the board of The Toronto Queer Film Festival and continues developing compelling projects between Los Angeles and Toronto.

Julietta Singh is an award-winning non-fiction writer and academic whose work engages the enduring effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance and systemic inequalities. She is the author of three books: No Archive Will Restore You (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (2018) and, most recently, The Breaks (2021), a long letter to her daughter about race and mothering at the end of the world. The Nest is her first documentary feature.

Chase Joynt is a multi-award-winning director and writer. His documentary feature Framing Agnes was named one of the best movies of the year by The New Yorker and won more than 10 awards, including the Next Innovator Award and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, which was presented at Cannes Docs as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and by Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” The film has won nine awards on the international festival circuit and was named to TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten.