Director Alex Gibney called “the most important documentarian of our time” by Esquire Magazine has a signature cinematic style that lends itself to penetrating, gripping, and deeply insightful documentaries. His work has been the recipient of an Academy Award, multiple Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, several Peabody Awards, the DuPont-Columbia Award, The Independent Spirit Award and The Writers Guild Awards. In 2013, Alex was honored with the International Documentary Association’s (IDA) Career Achievement Award, in 2015 the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Prize, and the Robert J. Flaherty Award in 2019.

Some of Gibney’s notable films include the triple Emmy and Peabody award-winning Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, the most-watched non-music HBO documentary; the Academy Award winning Taxi to The Dark Side, the Oscar nominated Enron The Smartest Guys in the Room, the multiple Emmy Award-winning Mea Maxima Culpa; The Armstrong Lie, We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks, the Peabody award-winning Zero Days, No Stone Unturned which premiered at the New York Film Festival in September of 2017 and was nominated for the WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary; for HBO, Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, a two-part special on legendary entertainer Frank Sinatra, and Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge (2017), co-directed by Blair Foster. He executive produced, and directed the first episode of The Looming Tower, a popular Hulu drama series based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name. His film The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Documentary and won the WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay. Gibney’s most recent film Citizen K world premiered at 76th Venice International Film Festival in 2019 and was released theatrically this year.

Roger Ross Williams is an award-winning director, producer, writer and the first African-American director to win an Academy Award ® with his short film Music By Prudence.

Williams’ award winning work pushes the boundaries of culture and film. His documentaries include Academy Award ® nominated and Emmy Award winning Life, Animated as well as God Loves Uganda, American Jail, The Apollo, and VR experience Traveling While Black. His production company One Story Up produced the first three episodes of the critically acclaimed Netflix limited series The Innocence Files, as well as another limited series for Netflix that will premiere in the fall.

Currently Williams is directing a documentary feature and working on his first narrative feature for Amazon studios.

Liz Garbus is a two-time Oscar-nominee, two-time Emmy winner, Peabody winner, Grammy nominee, DGA nominee, and BAFTA nominee and the Co-Founder of Story Syndicate. Garbus’ most recent release is The Innocence Files (Netflix, 2020), which details the personal stories of eight cases of wrongful conviction that the Innocence Project has worked to highlight and overturn. Lost Girls (Netflix, 2020), which made its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, was Garbus’ narrative feature debut, starring Amy Ryan, Gabriel Byrne and Thomasin McKenzie. Garbus’ miniseries, Who Killed Garrett Phillips? (HBO, 2019), examines the 2011 murder of 12 year-old Garrett Phillips and the subsequent trial of Oral “Nick” Hillary, a black man in a small rural mostly white community. The Fourth Estate (Showtime, 2018) was nominated for a 2018 Emmy for “Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series,” BAFTA TV Award, a Cinema Eye Honor for “Outstanding Achievement in a Nonfiction Series” and a Humanitas Prize. What Happened Miss Simone? (Netflix, 2016) was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for “Best Documentary Feature,” and received a Peabody Award and six Emmy nominations including “Best Directing.”

Her past works include A Dangerous Son (HBO), which won a 2018 Peabody Award; Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper (HBO), which made its world premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival; and Love, Marilyn (StudioCanal and HBO), a Gala Premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Bobby Fischer Against The World won the 2011 UK Grierson Award for “Best Cinema Documentary” and earned an Emmy nomination for Best Documentary Special. Upcoming 2020 releases include: HBO’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, based on the bestselling book by Michelle McNamara, which debuts June 28, 2020.

Cynthia Littleton is Business Editor of Variety, based in New York. She has covered the television beat for more than 20 years. She began her career at United Press International, followed by stints at Broadcasting & Cable magazine, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, where she rose to Editor before rejoining Variety in 2007. Littleton co-hosts with Andrew Wallenstein Variety’s weekly podcast Strictly Business, featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of entertainment. Littleton is the author of TV on Strike: Why Hollywood Went to War Over the Internet (Syracuse University Press, 2013), the definitive account of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike and the impact of the disruptive digital advancements that fueled the labor strife. She is also the co-author with Susanne Daniels of Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB Network and UPN (HarperCollins, 2007). Littleton edited the essay collection What I Told My Daughter: Lessons From Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women with Nina Tassler (Simon & Schuster, 2016).

Peter Neufeld co-founded and is Special Counsel at the Innocence Project, a national non-profit organization which uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. The Project also assists legislatures and executive branches as well as police, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to bring about reform in criminal justice. In its twenty-eight years of existence, 375 individuals have been exonerated in the United States through post- conviction DNA testing. The Project has been instrumental in the passage of federal legislation and more than a hundred state statutes to improve the quality of justice. You can read about each of these cases at www.innocenceproject.org.

Peter Neufeld is a founding partner in the New York civil rights law firm of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, LLP. Mr. Neufeld’s focus is constitutional law and civil rights. He has lectured and taught students, lawyers, judges, legislators and scientists on subjects at the intersection of science and criminal justice. Before co-founding the Innocence Project, Mr. Neufeld taught trial advocacy at Fordham University Law School.

From 2014-2017, Mr. Neufeld served as a Commission member of the National Commission on Forensic Science, established by US Department of Justice and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. From 1995 to his resignation in 2016, Mr. Neufeld served on the New York State Commission on Forensic Science which regulates the two dozen crime laboratories in the state. He is a member Emeritus of the boards of the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Peter Neufeld received his law degree from New York University School of Law.

Vincent M. Southerland joined the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law as its inaugural Executive Director in 2017. He has dedicated his career to advancing racial justice and civil rights. Vincent came to NYU Law after serving as an Assistant Federal Public Defender with the Federal Defenders for the Southern District of New York, where he represented indigent individuals accused of federal crimes from initial appearance through the final disposition of the criminal case.

Prior to his time at the Federal Defenders, Vincent spent seven years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), where he was a Senior Counsel. While at LDF, he engaged in litigation and advocacy at the intersection of race and criminal justice, including the successful representation of death-sentenced prisoners across the American South and juveniles sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. He also led LDF’s advocacy efforts around race and policing, and was lead counsel in school desegregation and employment discrimination matters. Vincent previously served as a staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders, and an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. He began his career as a law clerk to the Honorable Theodore McKee, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and the Honorable Louis H. Pollak, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Former jailhouse lawyer Derrick Hamilton won his freedom in 2015 after being wrongly convicted of murder in 1991. His case and subsequent legal advocacy helped to expose the widespread corruption of Brooklyn detective Louis Scarcella. Today, Hamilton works as a paralegal and continues to advocate for the wrongly convicted.

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author whose work has been published in the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, Essence, among numerous others. She is co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race, Culture and Creed, and contributed to Emmy-Award winning artist James Gayles’ anthology, Reflections.

In addition to her print work, Janice has adopted a new storytelling platform – filmmaking. In 2016, she traveled to Sierre, Switzerland to workshop her script, Those People: A Love Story, which was a finalist in the DreamAgo Plume y Pellicule international writing atelier. She has been twice recognized by Black Women in Jazz and the Arts Awards for her documentary/multimedia project, “…but can she play?”: Blowing the Roof Off Women Horn Players and Jazz, raising awareness on the stories of Jazzwomen instrumentalists.

Janice earned her Master’s degree from USC, and her B.A. in Communications from Loyola Marymount University where she also taught journalism as an adjunct professor. Before her appointment as Associate Director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC, Janice headed Special Projects for the Los Angeles Review of Books while serving as Senior Editor of Women, Culture and Media.