Paul D. Brown  (Workshop Facilitator) is a member of the Management Information Systems faculty for the School of Business at Eastern Illinois University.  Paul completed both his undergraduate Computer Information Systems and MBA at Eastern.  Prior to Eastern, Paul served as the Emerging Technologies and Research Support Coordinator at Indiana State University.  Aside from the university, Paul enjoys investing in the lives of youth, wakeboarding, racquetball, and golf.

Robin Christian (Featured Speaker) is a Monticello, Illinois resident who has explored creative ideas in a variety of fields, including filmmaking, advertising, music and software design. In 2001 he began a sister company to his media firm called Dreamscape Cinema.  His first movie was a documentary about John Lennon and he has since written 21 screenplays and produced 4 feature films.  Actors he brought to Central Illinois include Oscar nominee Pat Morita, Emmy winner Adrienne Frantz, Eddie Jones, Ed Asner, and Judge Reinhold.  His movies have won 6 awards, including an Audience Award at the recent Breckenridge Film Fest.  Robin believes being located in central Illinois is a major factor to his success.

Dann Gire (Keynote Speaker) is a film critic for the Arlington Heights Daily Herald.  He serves as the president and founding director of the Chicago Film Critics Association and as an adjunct faculty member in William Rainey Harper College’s English and Journalism departments.  A graduate of EIU, Gire has won the prestigious Peter Lisagor Award for Arts Criticism six times.  He has participated in the EVFF since 2004.

Joyce Jackson (Children’s Workshop Facilitator) has worked in the children's area of Charleston Carnegie Public Library for 5 years and has worked in the Charleston Community School district as a library clerk for 10 years.  She is currently teaching art for grades kindergarten through fifth grade at the Arland D. Williams Elementary School in Mattoon for the past eleven years.  She received her MFA in studio art from SIU-Edwardsville and her BA with teaching certification from EIU.

Chuck Kleinhans (Plenary Speaker) is the co-editor, founder, and publisher of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media and an Associate Professor at Northwestern University.  His research interests include independent film and video; radical, feminist, and black independent work; subculture reception of mass culture; US culture in the third world; and sexual representation in experimental film and video.

Chuck Koplinski (Featured Speaker) has been participating in the EVFF since 2004, when he introduced Citizen Kane and Wuthering Heights to crowds of over 700 viewers at the Will Rogers Theater in Charleston.  A teacher in Urbana, Illinois, he also gives weekly movie reviews for WCIA-TV in Champaign and writes reviews for several newspapers, including the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette and Springfield’s Illinois Times. 

Julia Lesage (Plenary Speaker) is the co-editor, founder, and publisher of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media and Professor Emerita at the University of Oregon.  The senior editor of Making a Difference: University Students of Color Speak Out(2004), she is currently working on two book projects: Jump Cut Anthologyand Documentary Moments.

Murray Pomerance (Plenary Speaker) is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. Author of The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory (Rutgers 2008), Johnny Depp Starts Here (Rutgers 2005), An Eye for Hitchcock (Rutgers 2004), Savage Time (Oberon 2005), and Magia D'Amore (Sun and Moon, 1999), he has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (Wallflower 2008), City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (Rutgers 2007), Cinema and Modernity (Rutgers 2006), From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (Rodopi 2006), American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers 2005), Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (Wayne State 2005), BAD: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (State University of New York Press 2004), and Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film (New York University Press 2002). He is at work on a book about the color films of Michelangelo Antonioni. He is editor of the Horizons of Cinema series at State University of New York Press and, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, co-editor of both the Screen Decades and Star Decades series at Rutgers University Press.

Luke Ryan (Workshop Facilitator) is Vice President of Theatrical Productions at MGM Studios. Originally from Mattoon, Illinois, he graduated from Eastern Illinois University in 2000 with a major in Journalism.  His credits include the Harold & Kumar franchise and the film Martian Child starring John Cusack.  Luke also teaches film production and story design classes at UCLA Extension.

Andrew Rodgers (Featured Speaker) is the Executive Director of the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He oversees all aspects of the Festival including programming, strategy, budgeting, fundraising, marketing and publicity. Previously, Rodgers worked as publicist for the Sundance Film Festival and as the Publicity Director of the Chicago International Film Festival.  He graduated from Eastern Illinois University with a B.A. in Journalism in 1997 and started his career as a Staff Writer with the Chicago Tribune. He also helped launch the Tribune's entertainment news website Zap2it.com and served as their Los Angeles-based Staff Writer covering the film industry.

Craig Titley (Workshop Facilitator) is a Hollywood screenwriter whose film credits include 20th Century Fox’s Cheaper by the Dozen and Warner Brothers’ Scooby Doo. A native of Mattoon, Illinois, he is a graduate of EIU and also of the Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program, University of Southern California.  He is currently earning his Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute.