Focusing outside of yourself helps you thrive in this industry and helps you deal with so much and all the obstacles we face. ~Donna Benedicto

Donna Benedicto is a Filipina Canadian actress and singer born and raised in Vancouver, BC. Growing up as an ethnic minority, Donna decided to make a switch from full-time singing to pursue acting in 2013 because she saw a gap in Asian representation. Since then, she has gone on to become the first Filipina lead in multiple TV movies, including Incendo's Farmer Seeking Love, as well as guest starring on NBC's The Good Doctor, and booking recurring roles on CW's Supergirl and ABC's A Million Little Things. 

My work has always been about bringing people together, forging new transcultural and transnational artistic relationships, and combining research with theatre-making in order to explore and extend the limits of creativity.

Avra Sidiropoulou is a theatre director and academic. She is the Artistic Director of Persona Theatre Company. She has published extensively on directing theory and practice, contemporary performance and dramaturgy and is the author of Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method (Routledge 2018) In 2020 she was nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award by the League of Professional Theatre Women.

Telling stories that activate emotions helps audiences be open to new ideas. People can only change themselves. But until they experience the new they will remain stuck in the old--in other words, we are growing and changing or stagnating and dying. My work helps people find the best of themselves.

Theresa Chaze began her career in the mid-1980s at a small independent TV station in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Moving to Traverse City, she worked at the local ABC affiliate as a producer, writer, editor, and director. In the mid-1990s, she ghostwrote two features and two shorts. However, after working as a producer on two independent films, she walked away from the industry. In 2009, she started her journey back began through a series of coincidences. Her time away from film and television gave her the strength and courage to turn "impossible" into "I'm possible".

Getting my Masters at Harvard at age sixty-nine, I hope that I'm inspiring other women that there are no limits. There's absolutely no limits except for those you place on yourself. I never actually wrote a screenplay and now all these Film Festivals think I'm such a great writer.. . There's always a first time for everything. Why not me?

Pamela S. K. Glasner is a critically acclaimed published author of fiction and non-fiction, a filmmaker, a playwright, a social advocate. She is also a proud member of the Writer’s Guild of America, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, the Connecticut Historical Society and Grace Episcopal Church. Additionally, she is a Registered Reader at both the Royal Society of London and the British Library.

I truly believe we are in an apocalyptic culture shift ; truly, an historical, multi-century, multi-millennial shift and in the last gasp of the white-supremacist patriarchal society. We are living through that moment...So, what I focus on these days more than railing against what has been we had to tear the scales from people's eyes: 'Hey, wake up everybody! This is what's been happening and you need to look!' But the moment has shifted now and now we have to build on what's going to happen next. And what is already happening. And that is what I spend my days doing.

​Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning storyteller and thought leader for bringing gender parity to cinema. A long-time advocate for bringing parity to film, both on and off screen, she has spoken at film festivals and conferences around the world and written extensively on this subject.

We are a film production company on a mission to inspire, empower and light a fire! Not just for women.

We can acknowledge that we're all damaged, we're all broken. That doesn't mean that we're destroyed because beautiful things can grow out of damage. ~ Gina Dobson

I'm exploring a me that I would have never known before. Women wear so many hats. How about wearing the hat that I want to wear! ~ Carla Kelly Turner

I started to get the idea that it's possible to do what you really want to do -- no matter what age you are. [My mother] led by an example for me. It's not IF this is possible -- it's more WHEN am I going to do this. ~Jennifer Pyle

Human rights and civil rights will be realized only when we fully hear the voices, ideas and creative concepts of womxn over 40, whose perspectives have long been marginalized and stifled. ~ Cindy Cooper 

Cynthia L. Cooper (Cindy to most people) is an award-winning playwright, journalist, author and activist. She became a playwright to use the power of the stage to address topics and issues that were flattened and ignored by popular media. Her plays are united by a passion for socially relevant topics, stylized staging and a dramatic-comedic mix.

Patt Addiss, Theater Producer, I didn’t start out wanting to be a theatrical producer. She was busy running the promotion company she founded, but after 30 years, she handed the reins over to her daughter. Then in 2005, after ‘learning the tools of the trade,’ Pat went on to produce more than 18 Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including: “Spring Awakening,” “Vanya, Sonia, Masha and Spike” and “Desperate Measures.” And…she’s never looked back!

I don't know all the answers. I mean I'm not some Great Guru. I just know what I know. I just know what has transpired in my life. You have to take chances. . . I will expire before I retire.

I [want] people to think a little bit more about where we might be headed from the standpoint of communications and how it's manipulated and massaged by people with all sorts of different interests [and money].

"The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet." ~William Gibson

"We can heal. I think it's really important to be in control of what we're taking in so that we don't feel that we have to worry...that we can feel like we can live in our power, we can do things, as artists, that will hopefully push the needle and change the culture and make people think more deeply about what THEY can do if they're not artists."

Playwright, Dramaturg, and Teacher Emma Goldman-Sherman (she/they) is an autistic, gender-dysphoric, queer, Jewish, feminist playwright living in New York City. Emma Goldman-Sherman is a playwright who likes to challenge audiences in terms of what we think a play can be.