LEO CHIANG is a filmmaker based in San Francisco and Taipei. His most recent film, Island in Between, received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Film in 2024. His previous film, Our Time Machine, played at over 50 film festivals worldwide, winning 10 awards, and was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award and a Gotham Award. In 2020, he directed two episodes of the landmark 5-part PBS series, Asian Americans. His previous films include the Emmy Award-nominated A Village Called Versailles, Out Run, Mr. Cao Goes to Washington, and To You Sweetheart, Aloha. Leo’s work has received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Tribeca Film Institute, and ITVS. He has been a Sundance-Time Warner Fellow, a Rockwood JustFilms Fellow, and a Co-Chair of New Day Films. He has served as a mentor/trainer for the Hot Docs CrossCurrent Fellowship, the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum, and the CAAM Fellowship. He is the co-founder of A-Doc, the Asian American Documentary Network, and a documentary branch member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.

MERCEDES COATS has directed and produced the award-winning documentaries Little Stars, about the unpredictable and challenging world of child actors, and Seoul II Soul, about a Korean/African-American family in post-riot Los Angeles (National PBS premiere presented by NAATA, Feb 2002). Her work has been seen on PBS, in educational video series for the California Science Center and others, and in family films and television seen on Showtime and distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures. She is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Alfred P. Sloan Award, an Entertainment Weekly film scholarship, and the Women in Film/Paramount Pictures Crystal Award scholarship. Mercedes recently collaborated with her USC film school classmate, S. Leo Chiang, to make To You Sweetheart, Aloha which won the Audience Award at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in 2005. She earned her MFA in Film Production from USC’s School of Cinema-Television in 1999, and holds a BA in Theatre from Occidental College.