Born and raised in New York, Anne Thompson has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Wired. She was a film columnist at Variety and deputy editor of Variety.com, where her daily blog, Thompson on Hollywood, launched in March 2007; she moved it to Indiewire in 2009 where she is now Editor at Large. Anne was the Deputy Film Editor at The Hollywood Reporter, where she wrote the Risky Business column and started the trade's first blog, "Risky Business" in 2005. She also served as the West Coast Editor of Premiere, Film Comment, and Empire as well as Senior Writer at Entertainment Weekly. She wrote the film industry column "Risky Business" for L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times syndicate, and later revived it for Filmmaker Magazine. A graduate of the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, she has taught film criticism at USC Critical Studies, and hosts the fall semester of Sneak Previews for UCLA Extension.  

Emily founded Seed&Spark to make a contribution to the truly independent community in which she would like to make moving pictures. In 2011, she had the great fortune of producing her first feature with a remarkable group of women. The spirit, the community and the challenges of that project, Like the Water, inspired Seed&Spark. Before producing Like the Water, Emily produced theater, worked as a vision and values strategy consultant for Best Partners, ran restaurants, studied jazz singing at the Taller de Musics, tour guided and cooked in Barcelona, and before that, was a student of Cultural Anthropology and American Studies at Haverford College. Emily was named one of the 2013 Indiewire Influencers, 2014 New York Women of Influence, 2015 Upstart 100, 2016 Techstars. Emily is touring film and tech festivals around the world as a part of the #StayIndieTour to educate filmmakers and learn their best practices in connecting with their audiences to build a sustainable career. She has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in crowdfunding for film, and contributed to over 300 campaigns to date.

Marc Hofstatter leads film and creative for global crowd funding platform, Indiegogo. Originally from New York, he began his career at Bingham Ray's former indie film label, October Films. Hofstatter later transitioned to Los Angeles, moving to the William Morris Agency. He went on to serve as a production executive on both the Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox lots. He has worked on over a dozen feature films, including helping oversee production on such projects as Peter Sollett's Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.