Brave Miss World

Cecilia Peck is a notable documentary filmmaker, producer and actress. She directed and produced Shut Up and Sing (2006) about the backlash against the Dixie Chicks for opposing the Iraq War. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Chicago Film Festival and won Best Documentary at the Sydney, Aspen, and Woodstock Film Festivals. Peck produced A Conversation with Gregory Peck (1999) which premiered as a Special Selection in the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and aired on TCM and PBS American Masters. She was an associate producer on Defending Our Daughters (1998), a non-fiction film about women’s human rights for Lifetime Television, which was awarded the Voices of Courage Award by the Women’s Refugee Committee. As an actress, she performed in films such as Torn Apart (1990) and TV shows such as The Portrait (1993), the latter of which resulted in a Golden Globe nomination. Peck’s company, “Rocket Girl Productions,” produces independent feature films and documentaries.

Jill Dunlap is the Director of the Campus Advocacy, Resources & Education (CARE) Program and Women’s Center at UCSB. Jill joined the CARE program in January 2012, after serving in similar capacities at Northern Illinois University and University of Missouri–Kansas City. She has more than 1,500 hours of advocacy and crisis intervention training and has worked closely with college student survivors of interpersonal violence in a professional capacity for more than 12 years. Jill served on the Violence Against Women Act Campus SaVE federal negotiated rule making committee with the Department of Education in 2014. In her role as the representative for four year, public institutions, her work with the committee assisted in creating guidelines for campuses to follow when complying with new federal regulations on sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking prevention and response. Jill has served on the University of California Presidential Task Force on Sexual Assault and Sexual Violence, as well as the UC Sexual Assault Policy Working group.

Dr. Cassie Pasquariello served as a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she interned at Counseling & Psychological Services. She holds a B.S. in Behavioral Science from Pacific Union College, an Ed.M. in Counseling & Sport Psychology from Boston University, an M.S. in Counseling Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a Ph.D in Counseling Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently serves as the Counseling and Sport Psychologist for University of Washington Athletics.

Elisa Bonora is an Italian-born film editor. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue her editing career and began working in advertising at Red Car with editor/director Larry Bridges.  Shortly after, she started working exclusively for DGA winning commercial director, Joe Pytka and edited campaigns for Pepsi, Lee Jeans, Nike, Gap, Sony, Levis and others. Bonora’s first breakthrough in long format editing occurred when Oliver Stone asked her to edit Comandante (2003), a feature-length documentary about Fidel Castro.  Following the success of Comandante, she collaborated with Oscar winner Pietro Scalia to edit the film Ashes and Snow (2005). She also edited and co-produced the feature length documentary No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos (2008), which premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy Award.

Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Founding Director and Co-Director Emeritus of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies and editor or co-editor of the influential collections Feminism and Film Theory, Male Trouble, Technoculture, The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender, and The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (with Tristan Taormino, Mireille Miller-Young, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu). Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography. She is co-producer of Porn 101 with Katie Morgan for HBO Documentaries. Her collaborative art projects are “MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee” and “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera,” on which she was co-librettist. Penley is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award and the Kenneth Burke Society Prize in Rhetorical Criticism.