Laura Poitras is an Academy Award®, Pulitzer Prize, and Golden Lion winning filmmaker and journalist. Her 2025 film, Cover-Up, was nominated for BAFTA, DGA, and Emmy awards. Her previous film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award®. Her film CITIZENFOUR won an Academy Award® for Best Documentary. Her reporting on the National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2006, the government placed her on a terrorist watchlist for documenting the U.S. war in Iraq. Her first solo museum exhibition, Astro Noise, was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 2016. Curated by Jay Sanders, the show included a series of immersive installations exploring surveillance and post-9/11 America.
Rachel Lauren Mueller is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Minneapolis. Combining investigative reporting with an anthropological approach, she creates immersive films that interrogate systems of power. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, PBS, and Al Jazeera.
Baher Azmy is the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he directs all litigation related to the promotion of civil and human rights. He has personally litigated cases related to discriminatory policing practices (stop and frisk), government surveillance, the rights of Guantánamo detainees, and accountability for victims of torture. To join the Center, he took leave from Seton Hall University School of Law, where he taught Constitutional Law and directed the Civil Rights and Constitutional Litigation Clinic. As a Clinical Law Professor, he successfully represented Murat Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish descent imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, until his release in August 2006. He also litigated cases challenging police misconduct and violations of the rights of immigrants, prisoners, and the press. He has authored numerous legal briefs in the federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court on human rights and constitutional law, testified before Congress, and produced substantial scholarship on access to justice. Baher is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and NYU School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden-Snow Public Interest Scholar. Since 2012, Lawdragon Magazine has named him one of the top 500 lawyers in America. He has been published by and appeared on major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, 60 Minutes, PBS NewsHour, and MSNBC.
Hae-Lin Choi is co-founder and co-executive director of HandsOffNYC, a citywide coalition launched in October 2025 that organizes New Yorkers around nonviolent resistance and neighborhood solidarity in response to federal enforcement actions and the threat of military deployment in the city. Born in Germany to Korean guestworker parents, she began organizing in 2001 with ver.di, the German service-sector union, and has worked in the labor movement since. For the last eight years, she served as Legislative and Political Director for the Communications Workers of America, District 1, where she led legislative, electoral, and organizing campaigns and developed leadership programs. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
Morgan Bassichis is a writer and performer whose off-Broadway show Can I Be Frank? explored the life and legacy of the queer comedian Frank Maya. Morgan co-edited, with Rachel Valinsky and Jay Saper, the anti-zionist anthology Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah (Wendy’s Subway, 2023). Morgan’s book To Do ASAP: I Feel Like Now Is the Time will be out in April 2027 from Haymarket. Their show In Concert with Amy Winehouse will premiere at Joe’s Pub on January 13–17 and April 10–18, 2027. Morgan has been a member of Jewish Voice for Peace-NYC since 2014.
