Maria Collette Sundeen is a writer, producer and director with more than 15 years of experience in television, documentary, short, and corporate productions. After starting a career with CNN’s San Francisco bureau, she was hired as one of the founding producers for C|NET-TV. Since then she’s worked on a spectrum of award-winning short films and documentaries.. She has written more than a dozen scripts for film and television, many of which have won awards or placed in national festival competitions.
Luis is an actor and stunt performer from International Stunt School currently residing in Tacoma Washington. He developed an interest in acting and costumed performance after watching Nick Castle in Halloween when he was 7 years old. Luis plays the lifeless corpse in Rion Smith's "Too Dry."
Maxwell I. Gold is a Jewish American multiple award nominated author who writes prose poetry and short stories in weird and cosmic fiction. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines including Weirdbook Magazine, Space and Time Magazine, Startling Stories, Strange Horizons, Tales from OmniPark Anthology, Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas and more. He’s the author of Oblivion in Flux: A Collection of Cyber Prose from Crystal Lake Publishing.
Valentina Battorti was born in Belluno, Italy, in 1983. Her dad watched made her watch all types of movies from Gremlins to Pretty Woman. When her love for films was complete, and she discovered her favorite genre, she longed to be part of it!! Valentina loves to draw, read, sing, write, listen to music, watch Tv series, theatre, films of all kinds and has always wanted to find a way to reunite all of these media to tell stories, so.. films!!
Emily Flummox uses 18 names (including An-Sisa, Gandalfina Face-and-Heart, & Tristissima) competed on two National Poetry Slam teams over a decade-long slam career. E also designs & streams TTRPG content, writes fiction, and edits anthologies. Much of eir poetry, notably “Sacred Purification Ritual Using Your Own Urine Instead of Water”, focuses on identifying with the divinity of the disgusting. Skunkheart performed that poem during the San Francisco Leather Cultural District’s Erotic Storytelling Hour; it was published in Scry of Lust.
Gretchen has volunteered at Portland Horror Film Festival and the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival since 2016, and helps judge films for both. As a lifelong fan of horror movies, she loves found footage films and exorcism movies. She is a co-host for Gwen & Gretchen Watch Movies, Check The Gate podcast, co-hosted the Kaijucast podcast, and was a frequent guest on Horror Brew podcast.
Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito (she/her) is a Chinese American writer in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Nailed Magazine, Buckman Journal, Flame Tree Press's Asian Ghost Stories, Strangehouse's Chromophobia, Startling Stories, Not a Pipe's Stories Within, Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, Death’s Garden Revisited, and Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Frances also co-chairs the Young Willamette Writers program that provides free writing classes for high school and middle school students.
Mark graduated from UCSC with his bachelor’s in Film and Television. He worked for Roger Corman’s New Horizon script department and later for the producer of Piranha 3D directed by Alexandre Aja. He has made dozens of award-winning films and documentaries, including Manumission, Starved, and Cassandra, which was nominated for a student Academy Award, and An Inaugural Ride to Freedom, which won an Emmy.
Heather Humpleman is the director of “Whisper in the Static”, and the Co-Founder of Midnight Hour Studios, a Los Angeles-based production company. She graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and has been fortunate to serve and support their alumni as both the President of the Women of Cinematic Arts and the Director of Membership for the Trojan Entertainment Network. Heather is also a member of LA’s Asian Business Association, a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, and a US-UK dual-citizen.
Kasie Heister is a Southern California native, and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California and her Masters of Business Administration, specializing in Entertainment Management, from the University of California, Los Angeles. "Whisper in the Static" is her inaugural film, and she is currently in development on the feature version.