Tadashi Nakamura
Emmy-winning filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura was named one of CNN’s “Young People Who Rock” for being the youngest filmmaker at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and listed as one of the “Top Rising Asian American Directors” on IMDb. His last film Mele Murals, a documentary on the transformative power of modern graffiti art and ancient Hawaiian culture for a new generation of Native Hawaiians, was broadcasted on PBS and Al Jazeera, and was nominated for an Emmy in 2018. His previous film Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings was broadcasted nationally on PBS and went on to win the 2013 Gotham Independent Film Audience Award. Nakamura’s trilogy of documentary films on the Japanese American experience, Yellow Brotherhood (2003), Pilgrimage (2007) and A Song for Ourselves (2009) have garnered over 20 awards. Nakamura has a M.A. in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz, a B.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. Nakamura is the Director of the Watase Media Arts Center at the Japanese American National Museum.
Bhawin Suchak
Bhawin is an educator and filmmaker, the co-founder and co-executive director of Youth FX, an organization that focuses on empowering and building community with young people of color through filmmaking. He is also the co-director of NeXt Doc, a fellowship program of Youth FX that aims to amplify the voices of emerging non-fiction storytellers. Bhawin is the director, cinematographer and editor of Outta The Muck (2022), a feature length documentary supported by ITVS, Sundance, Just Films, Black Public Media and Southern Documentary Fund, and which aired on PBS’ Independent Lens series. He previously directed and edited The Throwaways (2014) and Free To Learn (2004). Bhawin is a 2019 JustFilms Rockwood Fellow, 2019 Sundance DFP Fellow, an advisor at the 2023 Sundance Edit & Story Lab, a member of A-Doc, and the Documentary Accountability Working Group.
Diane Quon
Academy Award-nominated producer Diane Quon worked as a marketing executive at NBC and Paramount Pictures in LA for 17 years before moving back to her hometown of Chicago. Diane has produced the feature documentaries: the Oscar and Emmy nominated and Peabody award-winning film, Minding the Gap (Sundance 2018, Hulu, POV); 2022 Oscar-shortlisted Bad Axe (IFCFilms); AKA Mr. Chow (Telluride 2023, HBO), Breaking the News (Tribeca 2023, Indie Lens); The Dilemma of Desire (Showtime); Emmy-nominated Finding Yingying (MTVDocs); For the Left Hand (PBS); Emmy-nominated Wuhan Wuhan (POV) and Surf Nation (Mountainfilm Telluride 2022). Upcoming projects include the documentary the Sam and Omar Project, as well as a fiction feature based on a NYTimes bestseller. Diane is an AMPAS member, a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow, a Cinereach Producer Awardee and the proud mother of four.