Olivier Catherin is an ethnologist by training. He was a board member and employee of the French Animation Film Association (AFCA), where he was responsible for the Resource Centre and created the International Animation Film Day. In 2008 he created the production company “Les Trois Ours”. He produced, among others, Kiki of Montparnasse which won a César for best short animation film. From 2015 to 2018 he was in charge of the animation sector for the Hauts-de-France region (Nord) at Pictanovo. He is one of the co-founders and administrators of the European Animation Awards (Emile Awards). Today he is a freelance producer on international co-production projects and teaching animation production and History of Cinema (INA sup, Sciences Po).
Olga Bobrowska is a doctor of Humanities in Arts Studies. Currently she lectures on the subject of animated film history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw. Bobrowska’s main fields of interest embrace studies in animation, propaganda, visual discourses of ideological doctrines, problems of politicized representation, theories of narrative, adaptation, feminism and Chinese Studies. She is a festival director and co-founder of the StopTrik International Film Festival (Maribor, Slovenia/Lodz, Poland).
Mats Grorud is a film director and animator from Norway. He has directed short films and has worked as an animator on several feature films, documentaries and music videos. During his childhood, his mother worked as a nurse in refugee camps in Lebanon. In the 1990s, Mats studied at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon while working as an English and Animation teacher in the Burj el Barjaneh refugee camp. Based on the testimonies of the refugees and his experience, he wrote the script for his first feature film, The Tower (2018).