Director, teacher, Concordia University
Shira Avni is an award-winning artist-filmmaker and Associate Professor of Film Animation at Concordia University in Montreal. Her collaborative, community-based films weave documentary, animation, and personal memoir to address questions of neurodiversity, identity, social justice, parenting, and interdependence through luminous clay-on-glass animation, back-lit to create the shimmering effect of stained glass in?motion. Her forthcoming animated documentary film, Two-One-Two (Love Letter for a Two-Headed Monster), will be released in summer 2022.

Director, media arts artist
Pixie Cram is a filmmaker and animator who lives in Ottawa-Gatineau. In her films she explores themes of nature, technology and war. Her stop-motion short, Emergency Broadcast, screened at over a dozen festivals worldwide, including Interfilm Berlin, Animafest Cyprus, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. On top of her own art practice, she works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor.

Director, teacher, École Émile Cohl (France)
Born in 1984 in Villeurbanne, Jean-Charles Mbotti Malolo attended the Emile Cohl school in the auteur film section. His graduation film Le Coeur est un métronome received the Best First Film Award at the Hiroshima Film Festival in 2008. Drawing is his first passion, but dance has always been part of his mode of expression. In June 2012, Jean-Charles trained in sign language to write and direct Le Sens du Toucher, under the friendly eye of Emmanuelle Laborit. This short film received more than twenty international awards, among more than sixty official selections in festivals. His latest film, Make it Soul, is based on the graphic design of Simon Roussin. Its ambition is to pay tribute to the essence of black American music. It has been nominated for the César for best animated short film in 2020.

actor, director
Olivier Morin is an actor, author, animator and director. He has done a lot of theater as an actor (about forty plays since 2002), a dozen productions (La Grosse Noirceur, The King Stinks, Le Clone est triste, Les Secrets de la Vérité, Épopée Nord, Peer Gynt, Queue Cerise, etc.), television (Web Thérapie,Série Noire), radio (Plus on est de fous, plus on lit), and many other related shows (PaparaGilles, Infoman, l'Heure est grave). He is co-director, with Guillaume Tremblay and Navet Confit, of Théâtre du Futur (La Grosse Noirceur (2022), La Colère des Doux, Le Clone est triste (2019), Les Secrets de la Vérité (2018), La vague parfaite (2016), Épopée Nord (2015), l'Assassinat du Président (2013), Clotaire Rapaille, l'Opéra Rock (2011)), a divinatory theater company whose mandate is to save Quebec, minimum. He has also been a painter (www.oliviermorin.com) for the past twenty years.

Author, Director
Every year in August, a gigantic full moon appears and makes the pistachio trees in the orchards of Aleppo vibrate. The shells of the pistachios open in their husks and they are ready to be picked. It was in Aleppo, and on one of these very nights that Marya Zarif was born. Writer, designer, director and illustrator, she is the creator, writer and co-director of the animated series Dounia, winner of two Gémeaux Awards. Now completely dedicated to her art, she is preparing season 2 of Dounia, the feature film Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo which will be released internationally at the end of 2022, and other films of which she holds the secret.

Director, teacher, École NAD-UQAC
Ileana Dana Darie is a professor of 3D animation and traditional animation at NAD School since 2007. She started her 3D animation career in 1999 in charge of rigging.
In August of 2008 she debuted her film Abstract Trilogy at the World Film Festival in Montreal. Her second short animation The cage that is my beauty received two international awards in 2010 and 2011, and played in numerous festivals around the world.

Teacher, UQAT Campus Montréal
Erwan Davisseau is a former video game artist, lead artist and art production manager who worked 13 years in the game industry on international renowned franchises like Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia or Far Cry, a Ph. D candidate in UQAM (University of Québec in Montréal) and a professor in UQAT (University of Québec in Abitibi-Témiscamingue) in Montréal. His field of research is about video game semiotics and how 3D environments communicate the player how to play without the need of overlaid information like HUD. Opposed to the classic way of having two different universes of signs (symbolic vs iconic) to communicate with the player, he is arguing that a specific genre is developing an effective iconic visual language called ludonarrative resonance by sharing the same universe of signs as the environment (despite its strong complexification and densification over the last decade) to clearly suggest actions to perform.

Teacher, Collège de Bois-de-Boulogne
Renowned animation filmmaker, Michel Murray was a director at the National Film Board of Canada from 1992 to 2003. Since 1984, he has directed a dozen short and medium-length animated films. Several of his works have won awards in various festivals. Michel Murray has also worked as a line producer, consultant and director for various agencies. From 2004 to 2007, he was the head of the Institute for Artistic Creation and Research in Computer Graphics (ICARI) and later developed and established the 3D Animation and Image Synthesis program at Bois-de-Boulogne College in Montreal. He is still the coordinator.

Production Executive
Production Executive for the past 10 years, Hugues Dufour dreamed of working in the field of cartoons since he was a little boy. His wish came true when he joined Teletoon. Since then, he has worked on numerous productions, including Rocket Monkeys, Johnny Test, The Strange Stories of Professor Zarbi, Total Drama Rama, Total Drama Island, Les Grandes Gueules s'anime! *, *Bravest Warriors, ToonMarty, Super Noobs, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Atomic Puppet, Chop-Chop Ninja, Grojband, The Day My Butt Went Psycho, George of the Jungle, Detentionaire, Matt Hatter, Skatoony, Side Show Halloween, In the Land of the Slapheads, Total Drama: The Ridonculous Race, Snow Snaps and The Apocalypse Brothers.

president and founder, h264
Driven by his passion for promoting cinema, Jean-Christophe J. Lamontagne founds h264 in 2015. His goal: to expand the reach of cinematographic works by forging strong relationships between audiences and creators. The same impulse brings him to cofound and pilot Plein(s) Écran(s), the world’s first film festival to take place on Facebook. h264 is diversifying its activities and, in 2019, it launched a new aggregation service offer in a will to improve the accessibility and the distribution on digital platforms.

producer, Kaïbou Production
Producer in the animation sector for over 20 years, Anne Pagès has more than 25 series to her credit as well as several feature films, all in international co-production. Keen on 2D techniques, she set up in 2010 for Roger Frappier (Max Films) a traditional animation studio (paper) ad hoc for the production of the film The Day of the Crows (2012); In 2013, she became associate producer within Kaibou Production Inc. with the film April and the Extraordinary World, a feature film inspired by Tardi's graphic universe in international co-production (France, Canada, Belgium) which won the Cristal of the feature film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2015; Her latest film : Pachamama (2019).