Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr., Bruce W. Smith

Matthew A. Cherry is an American film director, writer, producer, and former American football player. He wrote and directed two independent films, The Last Fall(2012), and 9 Rides(2016). He is best known for the 2019 Academy Award-winning animated short film, Hair Love. The Kickstarter campaign for Hair Love raised nearly $300,000 and broke the record for the highest amount raised for any short film on the platform.

Everett Downing is an Oscar winning director, story artist and animator. Hebegan his career as a story artist at Big Idea Productions before making his break into feature film, animating at Blue Sky Studios on the original Ice Age. He later took a position as an animator at Pixar, animating on several Academy award winning feature films. Since then he's worked on films at Dreamworks, Paramount, & Sony Pictures Animation. Everett co-directed the animated short Hair Lovewhich won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2019. He's recently joined Netflix Animation where he is co-producing and co-showrunning an original animated series My Dadthe Bounty Hunter.

Bruce W. Smith studied animation in the Character Animation program at the California Institute of the Artsand joined the Walt Disney Studios as an animator on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Smith also served as co-director on the Warner Bros. live action/animated film Space Jambefore returning to Disney as supervising animatoron such films as Tarzanand The Emperor's New Groove. He co-founded Jambalaya Studios, with Hyperion Pictures for the production of the series and crafted over 50 episodes of the series along with The Proud Family Movie.Smith then rejoined the Walt Disney Studios and Duncan Studio Production to supervise animation on The
Princess and the Frog, the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie, and as the lead animator on the short Tangled Ever After. Smith's joined the visual development of projectssuch as Wreck-It Ralphand Frozen, and was one of the directors of the award-winning short animation, Hair Love.