Sarah S. Kim

Sarah S. Kim‘s producing credits include August at Akiko’s (director Christopher Makoto Yogi), which premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam and was hailed as one of the “Best Movies of 2019” in the New Yorker. Her next feature film I Was a Simple Man premiered in competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, is distributed by Strand Releasing, and is currently on the Criterion Channel. Other credits include the latest documentary by Emmy Award winning filmmaker Deanne Borshay Liem, Crossings. Sarah has a background in film festival programming and co-founded the distribution initiative Sentient Art Film. She is a fellow of the Film Independent Producers Lab, Cannes Producers Network, and Sundance Producers Summit and a recent recipient of the Dear Producer Award.

Kris Montello

By day, native New Yorker Kris Montello works in customer experience for Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming apps, like Max. By night, they serve as the programming manager for Asian CineVision and their annual Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF), which in 2024 celebrated its 47th year. Additionally, Kris volunteers as a programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival in Los Angeles and sometimes makes their own films (but it’s been a while!).

Jason Ooi

Jason Ooi is a distributor, programmer, and writer based in NYC by way of Southern California. He is the founder of the distribution company Crescendo House and the Long Distance Film Festival, among other initiatives. Currently, he manages the Film-ADE Audience Innovation Fund. Jason is dedicated to contributing to the success and accessibility of international, independent, and experimental cinema by cultivating new audiences and developing innovative release strategies. One day, he hopes to truly let loose with his niche movie recommendations and sick references, and discuss obscure film topics like “landscape cinema” or Shaw Brothers films as casually as he talks about sports.

Margaret Rhee

Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar, and new media artist. Her poetry book Love, Robot was awarded the Best Book Prize in Poetry by the Association of Asian American Studies. Forthcoming books include Machine Dreams: Race, Robots and the Asian American Body and The Watermelon Woman. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Media Studies and chair of Arts Writing in the Creative Writing MFA Program at The New School.

Whitney Horn

Whitney Horn has been making films with Lev Kalman since 2003. Their distinctive style blends lo-fi 16mm photography, dreamy electronic music, philosophical musings, and steady bursts of absurdist humor. Their films Blondes in the Jungle, L for Leisure, and Two Plains & a Fancy have played at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London, and BAMCinemaFest. L for Leisure was praised as the “movie of the century so far” by The L Magazine, and appeared on multiple top-10s lists. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called Two Plains & a Fancy, “The most imaginative and visionary recent addition to the [Western] genre.”

John Torres

John Torres is an independent filmmaker, musician, and writer. He has made more than a dozen short films and five features. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations, and memory in relation to current events, hearsays, myth, and folklore. He teaches part-time at the University of the Philippines Film Institute and conducts filmmaking workshops and co-organizes artist talks and screenings in Los Otros, a Manila-based space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product. A special focus of his works has been shown in Oberhausen and Viennale.

Morris Yang

Morris Yang is a student and film critic from Singapore. He has written for Film Inquiry and Slant Magazine, and currently serves as Associate Editor for In Review Online. He also does film programming from time to time, having worked with the Singapore Film Society, Fantasia International Film Festival, Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, and the International Cinephile Society, of which he is a voting member.