DIRECTOR JULIA MARCHESI is a nonfiction producer, director, showrunner, and podcast host based in New York. She was the showrunner on an eight-part CNN documentary series on pop music and politics called SOUNDTRACKS and the latest installment of the CNN DECADES series on the 2010s. In 2017 she was nominated for a GRAMMY award in the ‘Best Music Film’ category for SOUNDBREAKING, a PBS series on the history of music recording. She was the showrunner on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS series RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR (2019), which won a DuPont-Columbia Award. She co-directed MAE WEST: DIRTY BLONDE (2020), which was the runner-up for the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. She directed the feature HBO documentary FREDERICK DOUGLASS: IN FIVE SPEECHES (2022) which was nominated for an EMMY and the Humanitas Prize. Together with Sharon Shattuck she co-created and co-hosted the podcast CONVICTION: AMERICAN PANIC for Gimlet/Spotify.

DIRECTOR SHARON SHATTUCK is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and podcast host. PICTURE A SCIENTIST (2020), about women scientists fighting sexual harassment, was nominated for a 2022 News & Documentary EMMY and was distributed on NOVA (PBS) and Netflix. FROM THIS DAY FORWARD (2015), an autobiography about growing up with a transgender parent, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was distributed on POV (PBS), Netflix, SundanceNow, Amazon, and iTunes. She’s the cohost of the podcast CONVICTION: AMERICAN PANIC, about a family caught up in the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1990s, from Spotify. In February 2023, the protagonist of the show, Melvin Quinney, was exonerated by the state of Texas due in part to their reporting. She was a producer on the EMMY-nominated Netflix Original Documentary series FOLLOW THIS and the co-creator of the EMMY-nominated New York Times Op Docs series ANIMATED LIFE. Sharon was one of DOC NYC and HBO Documentaries’ 40 UNDER 40 filmmakers for 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and toddler.