Johannes Lõhmus is the main programmer and founder of Valga Hot Shorts film festival in Valga, Estonia. He has been working in various cinemas for most of his adult life after being brought up in a household with an excessive VHS-collection. At the moment his day job is being the main programmer in the oldest arthouse cinema of Estonia, Kino Sõprus while also trying to manage a bit of teaching and writing and filmmaking here and there whenever possible. Johannes believes in the magical power of surprising the audience and in that field the short films have an upper hand over feature length films.

Olga Sydorushkina (Ольга Сидорушкина) is a Ukrainian film curator and cultural manager with 15 years of experience in managing cultural projects in Ukraine, both local and international. She worked as a coordinator and selector at the Odesa International Film Festival and curated the film department at the Green Theatre (Odesa). Currently, Olga is working as a film programmer at the DocudaysUA film Festival and as a Program Curator at the Ukrainian Institute London. She is also the CEO and co-founder of the festival of contemporary culture PORUCH (Odesa).

Zane Oborenko is a Latvian animation director and artist specializing in the challenging and intricate technique of frame-by-frame sand animation. Zane holds an MA in Animation from the Estonian Academy of Arts and studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera) in Milan.

Matheus Mello is a Brazilian non-binary film producer and founder of Migranta Films, based between Brazil and Spain. Their films have screened and been awarded at major international festivals including IDFA, Rotterdam, Tallinn Black Nights, Raindance, and ZINEBI. Mello is an alumnus of the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Ji.hlava Emerging Producers. 

Mailo Mēness is a Latvian performance artist and occasional writer whose practice is grounded in artistic activism. Working at the intersection of queer visibility, embodied experience, and sociopolitical critique, he uses performance as a space to question dominant narratives of gender and belonging. In the field of Latvian contemporary art, Mailo occupies a unique and strategically important position: his practice demonstrates how an artist, working outside traditional institutional frameworks, can shape socially relevant discourse and generate new forms of representation for identity and political subjectivity. Alongside his artistic work, Mailo engages in public discourse on identity and language.