Robert Borgatti (producer, America’s Stairway) is a media professional and former professor/coordinator of the Digital Media, Communication Studies, and Animation programs at SUNY Niagara. His background includes both production and teaching experience in digital filmmaking, photography, web design, graphic design, and social media. In addition to America's Stairway, he has collaborated with Paul Lamont on several award-winning projects including the PBS documentary films in/word/out and Fading in the Mist. He is a graduate of the Television & Film program at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School and has a B.A. in History from Niagara University.

Sam Fleischner (director, Jetty) is an American director based in New York. His directing career began with micro-budget feature film, Wah Do Dem, shot on location on a cruise ship and in Jamaica. The film premiered at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize for best feature film. Amy Taubin of Film Comment called it "one of the best debuts of the 21st century."

Fleischner's second dramatic feature, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival where it won a special Jury Prize for best film. Stephen Holden of the New York Times called it a "small miracle of a film" and listed in his top 10 from 2014. In 2018, Fleischner co-founded Rockaway Film Festival, a nonprofit film organization that presents a wide variety of cinema and other arts and which is planning to open the first year-round cinema in Rockaway in over 30 years.

Sarah Gross (director, Grains of Sand) is a politically engaged filmmaker, writer, and mother of three young adults. Her prior works have been shown in festivals around the world and broadcast on PBS/World Channel nationally and other public and private broadcasters internationally. Having grown up in a multiracial family in the US, Gross has a deep personal connection to stories of racism, identity, and belonging. She has citizenship in the US, UK, and in Germany.

Peter Hutchison (producer, Calico Rebellion) is an award-winning filmmaker, New York Times bestselling author, educator, and activist. This is his fifth appearance at Film Days, where he has presented films including Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky and the Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power, Healing From Hate: Battle for the Soul of a Nation, Devil Put the Coal in the Ground (a Film Days Audience Choice Winner), and The Cure for Hate. His numerous documentary features include What Would Jesus Buy? (Sundance Channel Feature), SPLIT: A Divided America (IFC Choice Indie), its follow-up SPLIT: A Deeper Divide (The Documentary Channel), and Awake Zion (Film Buff).

Fred Isseks (film subject, Middletown) was radicalized during his sophomore year of college, notably during the anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon in 1967.  As a teacher, “Hippie Fred” brought left-wing ideals to Middletown High School. Interested in the history of Middletown, he applied for a grant to buy Instamatic cameras for the students and guide them toward creating a visual history of their town. Their ensuing investigation into the mafia-sponsored illegal dumping in local landfills earned Fred a reputation as a “crusader,” leading students into potentially dangerous situations as part of his own quixotic quest.

Since retiring Fred has remained dedicated to the cause – monitoring the landfill sites and the Wallkill River and also digitizing his records and archival footage of the investigation. Fred currently lives in Middletown with his wife Denise with his daughter Sadie nearby in New York City.

Victoria Kupchinetsky (director,Calico Rebellion) is an award-winning TV journalist and filmmaker. Her documentary, The Lakota Daughters, about women and girls on the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation in South Dakota, won the national 2021 Gracie Award for Outstanding Original Online Programming/Documentary. The Lakota Daughters has also won the Jury Prize at the 2021 Loyola Feminist Film Festival and the Audience Choice Best Documentary Short Award at the 2021 Kansas City International Film Festival. Victoria’s other directing and producing credits include documentaries about the first US climate refugees in Louisiana, Guantanamo prison, and Mormon feminists in Utah’s polygamist communities. Victoria’s career as a storyteller spans from working on several international co-productions at Sesame Workshop to collecting and recording testimonies of Holocaust survivors at Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. She is a first-generation immigrant from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Paul Lamont (director, America’s Stairway) is a veteran filmmaker whose career spans over 35 years. He has produced, directed, and written numerous documentary films that have been broadcast on public television stations nationwide. His films tackle a wide range of subjects and events and cover diverse topics including history, race, science, and the arts. In addition to PBS broadcasts, Lamont’s films have been screened at festivals, universities, museums, and institutions around the world and have been recognized with several Emmy nominations as well as multiple other national and international awards.

Peter Rutkoff (Speaker and moderator, Rutkoff Brunch Discussion) is Chair Emeritus of the Department of American Studies at Kenyon College in Ohio. He is the author of recent non-fiction works that examine African-American art and culture, as well as two novels, most recently Irish Eyes. He is a regular summer visitor to Cooperstown, which is also the setting of his book of short stories, Cooperstown Chronicles. Peter is a member of the Film Days Steering Committee.

Jane Steuerwald (Selections from the Thomas Edison Film Festival) is the executive director of the Thomas Edison Media Arts Consortium-Thomas Edison Film Festival. She curates and presents film programs for colleges, universities, museums, cinemas, and arts venues across the country and abroad. Her films have been screened at MoMA; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Anthology Film Archives; and festivals across the US. Steuerwald was a professor and chair of the Media Arts Department, NJ City University, for many years, where she taught media production, history, and aesthetics. She has worked with film and video as an art medium since 1980, creating installations, documentaries, found footage works, experimental films, and single edition art books. In 2012, she was a Women's History Month Honoree in New Jersey for empowering women through education.

Ilana Trachtman (director, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round) has made Emmy award-winning nonfiction programs for over 30 years. For PBS, HBO Family, ABC-TV, Showtime, Lifetime, Discovery, A&E, and the Sundance Channel, she has explored worlds such as the legacy of slavery in Latin America, activism among Gulf Coast shrimpers, glassblowing with at-risk youth, and transgender parents. Prime-time directing credits for PBS include the independent feature Mariachi High (Imagen Award Nomination), Black in Latin America hosted by Henry Louis Gates, and Texas Ranch House. Ilana was a supervising producer on PBS’ History Detectives and the Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet. Ilana began her career in the documentary unit of PBS’s Reading Rainbow. Ilana’s independent feature documentary Praying with Lior played theatrically in over 60 cities in the US and abroad, garnered multiple awards and critical acclaim. Ilana produced and directed The Pursuit: 50 Years in the Fight for LGBT Rights for WHYY, which won the Mid-Atlantic Emmy for Best Documentary. Most recently, she co-produced Stand Up and Shout: Songs from a Philly High School (HBO).

Ellen Casey Wagner (producer, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light) is the president of American Focus, Inc., a nonprofit organization committed to creating films about America and its people. She has produced several films, beginning in 1995 with Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America. Other productions include Black in Blue, about the football players who broke the color line in Southern sports, and The Tunnel, about the Blue Ridge Railroad Tunnel in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ellen was the executive producer of Windhorse, the first digitally produced feature, which screened at the Toronto Film Festival, played theatrically at 100 theaters in North America, and was distributed by New Yorker Films. Prior to the founding of American Focus, Ellen served as an associate producer at WETA, a public television station in Washington, DC.

Paul Wagner (director, Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light) is an Academy Award- and Emmy Award-winning independent filmmaker whose documentaries have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Telluride, and Rotterdam film festivals and have been broadcast widely on PBS. He has produced over 40 films during a 40-year career. His films include: The Stone Carvers, Miles of Smiles/Years of Struggle, Signature: George C. Wolfe, Black and Blue, and Out of Ireland. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky and earned a BA in English and an MA in Communications at the University of Kentucky. He currently resided in Charlottesville, Virgina with his wife Ellen Casey Wagner. Paul and Ellen are the principal officers in American Focus, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of independent films about subjects in American Culture. In addition to his filmmaking, Paul teaches courses in screenwriting and film directing at the University of Virginia.