Grace Hughes-Hallett is a director from London, highly acclaimed for producing and originating Three Identical Strangers, which won the Sundance Special Jury Award for Storytelling, a Grierson, and was BAFTA and Emmy-nominated. She has directed documentaries that examine a wide range of powerful stories: from the lives of ultra-orthodox women in Israel, to the relationship between the British royal family and the press, to the world of high fashion. In 2023, Hughes-Hallett ventured into podcasting, creating, writing and presenting the hit series Dangerous Memories for Tortoise Media. The Secret of Me is her feature documentary directorial debut.

Najiba NOORI was born in 1995 in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. She began working for media organizations as a volunteer when she was just 15. She has reported for various organizations and agencies, including the AFP, Huffington Post, MSF, FMIC, NRC and UN Women in Afghanistan. She participated in the Close-Up program 2020-2021 and at the IDFA Academy in 2022. She joined AFP as a video journalist in 2019. In 2021, she was obliged to leave her country when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, and now lives in France. Writing Hawa is her first documentary.

KAREN CHAPMAN (Writer/Director/Producer) At the service of every story, award-winning filmmaker Karen Chapman strives to center work that is grounded in storytelling and impact. Chapman holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and is an alumnus of the Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre’s – Director’s Lab, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Women in the Director’s Chair, and the CaribbeanTales Incubator Pitch Winner, HotDocs Accelerator, The TIFF Talent Lab, TIFF Accelerator and Every Story Accelerator. She is also a recipient of the 2023 Micki Moore Fellowship. 

Her Canadian Film Centre’s thesis film, Measure, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 and won the International Hollywood Foreign Press and Residency Award at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards as well as the CineFilm’s Best Overall Film, and Best Directing in 2020 at the Women in Film and Television – Toronto Showcase. Chapman’s Quiet Minds Silent Streets premiered at the 2022, Toronto International Film Festival and received the award for best Documentary at the Canadian Film Festival along with winning Best Mental Health, Non-Fiction Film at the Yorkton Film Festival and a Silver Medal at the 2024 Anthem Awards.

Registered Social Worker, Psychotherapist, Mediator, and Workplace Mental Health & Sexual Violence Consultant

Nada Johnson is a highly respected Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist (MSW, RSW), Family and Workplace Mediator, EMDR-trained Therapist, Certified Racial Trauma Clinician, and Workplace Mental Health and Sexual Violence Consultant at Nada Johnson Consulting & Counselling Services.

With nearly a decade of experience, Nada has established herself as a leader renowned for her deep expertise and compassionate approach across private practice, corporate, and community sectors. She provides virtual clinical counselling across Canada to women coping with the impacts of childhood trauma, racism and discrimination, and low self-esteem. She also provides group facilitation and organizational consulting locally and globally, helping individuals and institutions address trauma, gender inequality, and inequities, racial equity, and mental well-being with insight and integrity.

A passionate advocate for trauma-informed and culturally responsive care, on an individual and group facilitation level, Nada works collaboratively with clients to uncover their strengths and navigate life’s challenges. Her holistic approach recognizes the interconnectedness of race, culture, faith, identity, and lived experience in shaping mental health and resilience.

Nada earned a Master’s in Social Work from York University, an Honours Bachelor of Arts (with Distinction) in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, and a Family Mediation Certificate from Herzing College. She has also earned advanced certificates in Diversity & Inclusion from Seneca Polytechnic and Minnesota State University.

She is proud to serve as a panelist for The Village Keepers panel discussion, contributing her professional insight on Black mental health, trauma, income inequality, and resilience—topics that reflect both her expertise and her unwavering commitment to community healing.

Keisha Greene is a Registered Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently an adjunct professor and sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto in the Applied Psychology and Human Development Program in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education department.  Keisha has been a practicing clinician for over 10 years with BIPOC+ populations and has experience working with clients in community mental health, outpatient mental health and private practice.  Keisha’s research interests are in understanding how racialized individuals can be best served in the therapeutic process so that they achieve their desired outcomes.

Victor Stiff is a Toronto-based entertainment journalist and member of the Toronto Film Critics Association. He is the News Editor and Senior Critic at ThatShelf.com and host of UFO Movie Club on YouTube. Victor has contributed to the Canadian Academy, POV Magazine, Global News, The Playlist, Screen Rant, We Got This Covered, In the Seats, and Sordid Cinema. Victor received the TFCA’s 2019 Emerging Critic award and served as a jury member at the 49th Festival du nouveau cinéma. He’s currently a programmer for the Rendezvous With Madness Festival.

 Alan Zweig is a Toronto documentary filmmaker known for using film to explore his own life. His first film was the cult classic Vinyl, which was listed by Pitchfork as one of the best music documentaries ever made. Other films include Hurt, I, Curmudgeon, There Is a House Here and Fifteen Reasons to Live. His films have won the Platform and Best Canadian Feature Awards at TIFF, a Genie and a Canadian Screen Award.

Alex is a survivor of suicide loss. After the suicide of his sister he started volunteering in the suicide loss program at the Distress Centres of Greater Toronto. After a period of volunteering in the that program (Survivor Support Program) he transitioned to the role of Program Manager. In that role he has developed innovative programming and training materials focussing on suicide loss. 

One of our team of Rendezvous with Madness film programmers, Emma Badame, is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved entertainment journalist, the current Managing Editor at That Shelf, and an award-nominated digital marketing strategist for film, television, and not-for-profit arts organizations. Her coverage has appeared in POV, Billboard and Cineplex Magazines, on The Mary Sue, eTalk, Breakfast Television, PopLife, MuchMusic and more. This is her fourth year with the festival.

Niitsitapi, amateur physicist, frybread-eating machine, Damien Eagle Bear is a multifaceted filmmaker from the Kainai First Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy. His career began with the short experimental documentary Napi, which asks the question of what will happen when the Blackfoot trickster gets behind the camera. Damien has gone on to produce, direct and write short films, web series and documentaries that have played at film festivals across both Canada and the United States.  Damien continues to expand his horizons with work that explores the themes of belonging and Indigenous resiliency.

Lindsay Monture is Mohawk, turtle clan from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. A graduate of York University’s Film and Media Studies program, Lindsay has worked in the media arts sector for over 15 years. Throughout her career she has followed her passion for the arts, culture, language and education. Her desire to work with Indigenous communities has been enriched through opportunities to work with non-profit organizations such as; Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, Native Earth Performing Arts, Maoriland Film Festival, Revolutions Per Minute, Woodland Cultural Centre and Indigenous Climate Action. Lindsay is currently the Artistic Director for the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

Since she was 10 years old child, she was writing poetry in her mother language Arabic. What inspired Ghadeer to write is nature, her father, love, longing, nostalgia, diaspora, her homeland Palestine, difficult emotions, hard feelings, trauma, feminism, freedom, liberation, human rights and justice.

Ghadeer is the founder of Toronto Poetry Club. She has organized inclusive and diverse multicultural multilingual open mic poetry nights in Toronto for 8 years. She has published her Arabic and English poetry in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, including the anthology “Poetry ReRooted: Decolonizing Our Tongues” and in the anthology “To Hear The Birds” 

Ghadeer’s poem “Alhuwiyya (The Identity)” had been published in English in an anthology of “Muslim American Writers at Home” in San Francisco by Freedom Voices Publisher. It was about her 3 different identities contained within her while being in diaspora, relocating in different countries and her nostalgia to her homeland Palestine. She received a grant from The Toronto Arts Council to start a Multilingual Poetry Collective. 

Ghadeer is an Ontario Ambassador, Outreach to Arab speaking community of National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse (NAASCA). She completed her BSc. in Computer Science and MBA at the American University of Sharjah in UAE. Her dream is to have her own house and host her poetry nights, under the name Qahwa Art Café, in its back or front yard in the Summer and in the basement in the Winter. “Qahwa” means coffee in Arabic.

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back is a writer and creative writing workshop facilitator. Her fiction, poetry, and journalism has appeared recently in publications like The Briarpatch, The Deadlands, and This Magazine, as well as anthologies such as Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (ChiZine, 2012) . Their debut collection of poems, The Hammer of Witches (Caitlin Press/Dagger Editions, 2020), recently placed as a finalist in the upcoming Bisexual Book Awards.

Helen Kong is a second generation Chinese Canadian living and working in Tkaronto (Toronto). She studied her first ritualized tea while living in Japan. Chado (the Way of Tea) is a meditative life journey through tea and hospitality. It is the gateway into art, culture, and philosophy. After returning to Canada, she studied ceramics as a way to better understand tea vessels. She established Secret Teatime, a clay studio where people play with clay and sip tea. She has expanded from making tea wares for Japanese teas to also studying and making wares for her own heritage of Chinese tea.