Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker and media researcher who has produced nearly 400 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Berlinale, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, as well as websites such as The New York Times and Mubi. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). He co-leads the Swiss National Science Foundation research project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies.” His new feature film “Afterlives” screened at BFI London Film Festival and DocLisboa International Film Festival.

Andrea Gatopoulos is an Italian and Greek director, producer, and distributor. A member of EFA, Berlinale Talents, Locarno Spring Academy, and TFL, he studied in workshops with W. Herzog, Radu Jude, and A. Weerasethakul. He has produced more than 120 short films which played in more than 600 festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno and Rotterdam. His films deal with virtual realities, disturbing valleys, anti-capitalism, and critiques of progressivism. “Happy New Year, Jim” (2022) was the first machinima film at Cannes, at the 54th Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. In 2023, he presented “Eschaton Ad”, a film about the apocalyptic advent of AI, at Locarno. Later that year, he presented “A stranger quest” (2023), his first feature-length documentary about maps, at the Torino Film Festival. In 2024, his short film “The Eggregores’ Theory” opened the 39th Critics’ Week in Venice as the first AI film in Venice and was nominated for the EFA by ZINEBI and the 70th David di Donatello Awards, winning a special Nastro D’Argento for experimentation. His film in development, “The Hallucinations”, is being produced by Les Films du Worso, Fandango, Heretic and Il Varco, and won the CNC Prize at the 49. La Residence of Cannes, and the Prada Film Fund for development.

Mayte Gómez Molina is a writer, researcher, and new media artist using writing as the backbone of a plural body of work grounded in digitally produced images, including 3D, VR, and digital cinema. Through these tools, she explores the body as a political subject, perception as a social agreement, and visibility and invisibility as sites of survival and resistance. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and festivals such as the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Tabakalera Donosti, Documenta Madrid, Festival de Sevilla, FILE São Paulo, MMMAD Festival, and the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech. Her poetry book Los Trabajos sin Hércules (No Labours for Hercules) was awarded the National Prize for Young Poetry of Spain in 2023. Her second poetry book, Circuito Cerrado de Vigilancia (Closed Surveillance Circuit), examines the frictions between analog bodies and digital spaces, questioning the obsolete binaries of natural and artificial. Her first novel, La boca llena de trigo (A Mouthful of Wheat) was published by Anagrama in March of 2026. She holds an MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completed with a Fulbright scholarship. She is currently a PhD candidate in the MAKE/SENSE program at the FHNW in Basel (Switzerland), where she also teaches at the Academy of Art and Design, at the Institute of Art, Gender and Nature.

Linn Spitz is a Zurich-based interdisciplinary digital artist with a background in Computer Science. She is focused on animation and experimental technology. Her work blends visual cinematic storytelling with hand-painted and computational processes.

Rachel Maclean has spent over a decade showcasing her ground-breaking work in galleries, museums, film festivals and on television. Her multi-media work spans video, sculpture and print, blending the grotesque with the seductive and challenging audiences to confront uncomfortable social realities through a lens of absurdist satire.

She has exhibited her work widely, receiving critical acclaim in the spheres of film and visual art. Solo exhibitions include: Tate Britain and National Gallery, London; Arsenal Contemporary, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, and Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany; KWM Art Center, Beijing; and HOME, Manchester. Her films have screened at major festivals including IFFR, Fantasia, Fantastic Fest and the BFI London Film Festival. She has screened work on the BBC, Channel 4 and Arte, and was awarded the prestigious Margaret Tait Award in 2013 and honourary mention at Pris Ars Electronica 2024.