Film Forum

The Vera Institute of Justice is a national organization working to build criminal legal and immigration systems that deliver safety and justice for all. Vera works to end mass incarceration, protect immigrants’ rights, ensure dignity for people behind bars, and build safe, thriving communities.

Founder and Director of Aubin Pictures, Catherine Gund is an Emmy-nominated and Academy-shortlisted producer, director, writer and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and racial, reproductive and environmental justice. Her films have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums and schools; on PBS, HBO, Paramount+, the Discovery Channel, Sundance Channel, Free Speech TV, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. In 2023, Gund won the Gracie Award for Documentary Producer. Her films include MEANWHILE, ANGOLA DO YOU HEAR US? VOICES FROM A PLANTATION PRISON (Academy shortlist), PRIMERA (HBO), AGGIE (Strand Releasing) and BORN TO FLY (Emmy nominated). She has served on several arts, media and justice nonprofit boards and has been a creative advisor on numerous documentary films. Gund is an alumnus of Brown University and the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has four children and lives in New York City.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, writer, pedagogue, and cultural worker based in Philadelphia, PA. As a visionary thought leader creating socially conscious music, film, performance, and visual art, her practice embodies resilience, care, and community-centeredness while working at the intersections of reproductive justice, black feminist thought, and transformative change. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including MoMA PS1, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, Frieze LA, Eastern State Penitentiary, and the Brooklyn Museum, among many others. Baxter has received numerous prestigious awards, including being an inaugural Right of Return fellow, Mural Arts Philadelphia Reimagining Reentry fellow, Leeway Foundation Transformation awardee, and a Soros Justice fellow. On February 2, 2024, Baxter received a Governors' Pardon from Josh Shapiro and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, honoring her transformative work in the arts and culture sector and her 17-year commitment to communal healing, advocacy, and repair.

Nicole Fleetwood is an art historian and curator exploring how the art of incarcerated people is essential to our understandings of contemporary art, the carceral state, and the humanity it contains. Fleetwood’s earlier work focused on representations of Blackness in art, performance, and popular culture, particularly how assumptions within American culture about Blackness are disrupted or reinforced by Black artists and public figures.

Vincent N. Schiraldi (born January 3, 1959) is an American juvenile justice policy reformer and activist who has served as the Maryland Secretary of Juvenile Services since 2023. He was previously a senior research scientist at the Columbia University School of Social Work from October 2017 to January 2023. He was DoC Commissioner of NY from June 1st, 2021 to December 31st, 2021.


Anna Deavere Smith — actress, playwright, teacher —  is credited with having created a new form of theater. Her work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal (2013). Other awards include Obie Awards, two Tony nominations, runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, George Polk Award in Journalism, and The Dean’s Medal from Stanford University Medical School. She was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2021. Her play This Ghost of Slavery was recently featured in the Atlantic Magazine, making it one of only two plays published during the magazine’s 166-year history. Other plays include Notes from the Field about the school to prison pipeline, Let Me Down Easy (health care), House Arrest (the U.S. presidency and the press), and Twilight: Los Angeles (uprising in LA 1992), Fires in the Mirror ( uprising in Brooklyn 1991). HBO and PBS have produced and broadcast her plays. She has several honorary degrees including Oxford, Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Spelman, Dartmouth, Prairie View University, and Juilliard. As an actress — Television: Inventing Anna, For the People, Black-ish, Nurse Jackie, The West Wing. Films: THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, PHILADELPHIA, GHOSTED, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. She serves on Biden’s President’s Committee for the Arts and the Humanities. In 2023, she was Eastman Professor at Oxford University – Balliol College. She is a University Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is 73rd A.W. Mellon Lecturer in Fine Arts at the National Gallery, Washington D.C.

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