Additional Collaborators

KALIANA PIERGA

  • Kalina Pierga is a filmmaker, journalist, and photographer. Kalina earned her B.S. from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where she explored her interests in culture and social justice through documentary journalism. She is currently a J.D. Candidate at Georgetown Law.  Her work includes documentation of the experiences of Northwestern Prison Education Program participants and their loved ones for Northwestern University’s Epistemic Reparations Global Working Group. Kalina is also a video producer for the Here To Stay Community Land Trust, which works to provide affordable land ownership in Chicago’s rapidly-gentrifying neighborhoods. Kalina has recently provided production support and data management services for Sung Kang’s The Ride Life, as well as production assistance for Comcast NBCUniversal’s editorial content team in Philadelphia. In 2023, Kalina was selected for Netflix’s inaugural cohort of the Documentary Archival Research Training Program, through which she earned a certification in Documentary Archival Research and Production. She specializes in data management, archival production, camera operation and editing. 

LIZ SCHAD

  • Liz Schad is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA who has worked in both film and theatre as a producer, writer, actor, stage manager, coordinator, and assistant director. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Liz pursued a BFA in Theatre from Columbus State University before graduating from Chapman University, summa cum laude, with an MFA in Television Writing and Producing. Her goal is to create impactful and innovative content that entertains, educates, and inspires.

MINGLA SHERPA

  • Mingla Sherpa of Nepal is a current freshman at Northwestern University. Mingla’s educational journey has taken her from primary school in Nepal to secondary school at the Tibetan Children’s Village School (TCV) in India. She completed her high school through United World College of Atlantic in the UK before traveling to Northwestern for college. Mingla was a part of the Lighthouse Project in the UK, where they pitched and won funding used for building a dining hall and kitchen space for a local school in Punakha Dzong, Bhutan under partnership with the Bhutan Youth Development Fund. Additionally, she has also dedicated her vacation time over three years to volunteer at a school in the northeastern Himalayas of Nepal, her hometown, where she taught Tibetan cultural dance and helped set up the school's library which was established to offer children access to quality education and help preserve Buddhist culture and the Tibetan and Sanskrit languages. 

MIA MYLVAGANAM

  • Mia Mylvaganam is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and media artist, who is currently in her final year of undergraduate studies in Film and Computer Science at Northwestern University. Being of Chinese and Sri Lankan descent, her work has always existed in the middle ground: in between art and technology, in between analog and digital mediums, and in between past and present temporalities. Having spent her childhood in a small Michigan town, usually hoping for another time, another place, she has always wished to exist in the art that she connects with most and hopes to create work that can evoke that feeling in others. She has worked as the Director of Photography for numerous student films and focuses her work on that sense of yearning. She will be shooting her thesis film called Dreamlogic this spring, a series of long takes shot on color film that centers on themes of nighttime, power, queerness, and dreams. She also creates artwork in a digital space, primarily through computer programming. This past summer, she began developing an interactive mystery game called ORANGES GONE MISSING in an internship with Eyebeam. This game will serve as her capstone project for Northwestern's Media Arts and Game Design module. You can find her work at mia.wiki.

ALI WILT

  • Ali Wilt is a queer journalist, photographer and filmmaker from the small town of Martinsville, Indiana. She is a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where she created her first film with three other students entitled Let us Breathe, an educational and inspirational documentary short telling a story of environmental injustice on Chicago’s southeast side, which was honored with a Chicago College Emmy Award and a Social Impact Award from CineYouth Film Festival, and premiered at four film festivals

KYRA CUADRADO

  • Kyra has more than a decade of experience working in the nonprofit/philanthropy sector. Currently, she serves as a Manager at the Help at Home Community Foundation, which provides comprehensive support to home caregivers across the US. Previously, Kyra worked at the Centerbridge Foundation, where she fostered connections between Centerbridge employees and community-based nonprofits. She received a B.A., cum laude, from Colby College and an M.S. in Nonprofit Management from Columbia University.

AMELIA PANE SCHAFFNER

  • Amelia Pane Schaffner is a Partner at Lexicon Strategies, focusing her practice on strategy consulting, ecosystem building, innovation agendas, and culture change efforts, for clients across the globe.

    Before joining Lexicon, Amelia cofounded and secured multimillion-dollar funding for the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Goizueta Business School – Emory University, ranked 22 among the 4,000+ American universities. During her time there, she fostered a novel climate of entrepreneurship and innovation, successfully ran 15+ entrepreneurship initiatives, built 14+ strategic partnerships in the southeast ecosystem and beyond, facilitated the funding of 25+ startups, coached 100+ startups, and advised a $1M minority-focused fund.

    Amelia is also an accomplished educator, with a summa- cum laude Master of Science in Business, Finance, and Economics from LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy. She has designed and taught various trainings around entrepreneurship & innovation topics, designed corporate curricula and capability development programs, created playbooks and best practices forums. Amelia has also moderator and panelist experience, including having led multiple stakeholder sessions, and collaborated with the World Economic Forum.

    Amelia has served on several boards and advisories, including Startup Atlanta, the RAISE Forum, Innov8GA, CNBC Disruptor 50 Advisory Council, and Emory’s Advancing Healthcare Innovation in Africa. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Emory-Goizueta 2022 Excellence Award for Influence, the Accenture A3 “Addo Agnitio” award for connect/contribute/champion behavior, and a Deloitte-Bersin Learning leaders award for a Strategy Podcast she designed while at Accenture. She has served as a startup mentor in accelerators and incubators like Techstars, ATV, and Goodie Nation.