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Festival Jury Panel

Andy Smith

Andy Smithis a native Columbian and is the Executive Director of the Nickelodeon Theatre, a not-for-profit art house cinema in Columbia, SC. He is also the Founder and Co- Director of the Indie Grits Festival, which features the best in low-budget, independent film from the Southeast and was recently named one of the "20 Coolest Film Festivals" by Moviemaker Magazine. He received an M.A. in Film, Television and Digital Media from UCLA and a B.A. in Film Studies from Swarthmore College. In addition to his work at the Nickelodeon, he has served on the Board of Directors for the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) and the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center and teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.

Allison Inman

Allison Inmanis the education and engagement director for the Belcourt Theatre, Nashville's non-profit cinema. In addition to leading audience engagement events, she works with youth in schools and community centers to promote visual literacy and help foster a deeper appreciation for quality cinema. Before joining the Belcourt, she was a Nashville-based national engagement consultant for San Francisco-based ITVS, coordinating its popular public documentary screening series, Community Cinema, at Nashville Public Library. Prior to that, she was communications manager for Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver and a communications consultant in Denver, Nashville, and New Orleans.

Austin McCann

Austin McCannhas directed the Art Theater Co-op since 2012, when a community cooperative purchased the century-old single-screen cinema, based in Urbana-Campaign, Illinois. Under his leadership, the Art has become a vibrant community institution, and was named a member of the Sundance Institute's Art House Project in 2015. This Cleveland-to-Florida transplant learned about film by scouring the VHS collection of his local public library as a teenager. His programming reflects the diversity of that period of discovery, focusing on a mixture of first-run indie cinema and series focused on global black cinema, genre fare, children's programming, classics, new experimental cinema, and more. He has served on the City of Urbana's Arts Grant jury since 2013 and was a prison educator with the Education Justice Project, culminating in a well-received summer-long experimental cinema class in 2013. He performs original devised theater work with the Lisa Fay-Jeff Gassman Duo and drives to Chicago to see free jazz concerts. He has his B.A. in Anthropology & Performance from the New College of Florida.