Sonita Alleyne OBE
Sonita founded the multimedia production company Somethin’ Else in 1991 and was CEO until 2007. She was a member of The BBC Trust for five years and Chair of the BBFC. She has been a non-executive at public and private sector companies such as the Local Radio Company, Archant, the London Legacy Development Corporation and the DCMS. Sonita is Director of The Cultural Capital Fund and Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2002 she received an OBE for services to broadcasting.
Damian Paul Daniel
Damian is a cinematographer who shoots documentary films, series dramas, broadcast television and commercials. He was selected as a BAFTA Brit To Watch in 2011. His TV credits include Later With Jools Holland, Idris Elba’s In The Long Run, Call The Midwife and Reinventing The Orchestra with Charles Hazlewood. He shot the acclaimed Black Hollywood: They’ve Gotta Have Us for the BBC and the documentary feature, Against The Tides, which is on Sky Docs. Damian was DoP on the 2022, BAFTA winning short - The Black Cop. He is currently working on the feature documentaries: The First And Only about footballer Geoff Hurst and For The Money, a film about international art fraud.
Noella Mingo
Born in London of Guyanese and British parents, Noella has worked in the creative industry for twenty years. The lack of films by and about people from the diaspora inspired her to begin writing and directing the films she wanted to see. Noella is passionate about telling stories overlooked by mainstream media. She has written and directed five short films, winning Best Director and Best Short Film awards for Forgotten. Her short film, elephant was accepted into sixteen festivals including two BAFTA and three Academy Award qualifiers. Noella's feature debut, Fearless is currently on the festival circuit and has been selected for nine so far, winning Best International Documentary Film at IBDFF 2024.
James McCarthy
James is a Carl Foreman Scholarship screenwriter who has worked with Working Title, Element Pictures, MRC, Celador, Warner Bros and multi-award winning producer James Gay-Rees among numerous other companies. He co-wrote THE DESCENT: PART 2 and was recently in both the conceptual and series writers rooms for Disney’s CULPRITS, writing the penultimate episode. His latest feature spec tells the story of a British theatre designer who tries to stop the slaughter in the trenches (and shorten the First World War) by becoming one of the creators of organised camouflage. He’s a member of BAFTA and the Writers Guild of America.