Habiba Boumlik, the founder and co-curator of NYFAF, is professor at CUNY LaGuardia Community College and a scholar of Amazigh cinema. Her original aim was to bring visibility to the Amazigh communities and cultures in North Africa and the diaspora through films. NYFAF has now grown from bridging encounters between LaGuardia students, filmmakers, scholars, artists and the large New York City audiences, to creating a space for transnational Amazigh voices to connect through film.  
Professor Boumlik has presented her research at national and international conferences. Her presentations have explored themes of diasporic Amazigh film, transnational identities, and the role of film festivals in preserving cultural heritage.
Her recent publications on Amazigh cinema include: "Global Trajectories, Localized Stories: Amazigh Filmmaking through the Eyes of Selected Filmmakers" in Amazigh Cinema: An Introduction to North African Indigenous Film (2025); "Journeys of Discovery: The Case of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film" in African Film Festivals and Transnational Flows of Living Cultural Heritage (2025); and "Indigeneity and Identity Transmission: Amazigh Cultural Expression through Film" in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture (2023). 
Through her scholarship and curatorial role, Professor Boumlik continues to advocate for Amazigh cinematic production and the recognition of Amazigh cinema, a vital form of cultural preservation. 

Luce McNair is a translator and Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, where she teaches academic and creative writing and champions multilingual pedagogies. Her research focuses on North African Francophone and Amazigh literature and film, exploring themes of traumatic memory, Indigeneity, and Amazighity.
In 2015, she became a core member and co-curator of The New York Forum of Amazigh Film, an annual festival of Indigenous North African cinema that brings college students together with North African filmmakers, musicians, artists, and scholars to discover contemporary Amazigh life and discuss shared challenges and themes. This work resulted in the first English-language scholarly collection on this emergent cinema, Amazigh Cinema: An Introduction to North African Indigenous Film (University of Regina Press/NYU Press, 2025), which she co-edited with Yahya Laayouni. 
Her literary translations from French include Mouloud Feraoun's Algerian classic The Poor Man's Son and contributions to SOUFFLES-ANFAS: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco during the Years of Lead (1966-1988). Her articles have appeared in Jadaliyya, Language, Culture and Curriculum, and Journal of North African Studies. Her article "Journeys of Discovery: The Case of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film” has recently appeared in African Film Festivals and Transnational Flows of Living Cultural Heritage, ed. Sheila Petty (Palgrave, 2025).

Dr. Wafa Bahri teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at San Francisco State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics (Sociolinguistics) from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Dr. Bahri's primary research focuses on documenting and describing Tunisian Tamazight, with particular emphasis on the discursive construction of the Tamazight language and identity in digital spaces. Her broader scholarly interests span the sociolinguistics of endangered languages, language and gender, and, more recently, language in Amazigh cinema. Beyond her academic pursuits, Dr. Bahri has been a member of the organizing committee of the New York Forum for Amazigh Film (NYFAF) since 2016. In this role, she coordinates the forum's Facebook outreach and oversees its pedagogical programming.

Dr. Yahya Laayouni is an Amazigh scholar and Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in French and an MA in Gender Studies. He has extensive experience teaching language as well as cultural and film courses. His research and publications focus on Amazigh cinema, gender and migration in film, and identity formation in Maghrebi-French film. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes such as the Journal of Religion & Film, Journal of African Cinemas, Tamazgha Studies Journal, and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture. With Lucy McNair, he co-edited Amazigh Cinema: An Introduction to North African Indigenous Film. He is also a co-organizer of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film.

Miranda Schrade is a former research assistant on the NEH Cultural and Community Resilience Grant Transmission Regained: Recalling Traditional Lifeways through Intergenerational Oral History in the 'World's Borough’ Queens and MoMA LaGuardia Scholar at CUNY LaGuardia Community College. She joined the team in 2025 to expand digital awareness of the Forum.
Miranda has contributed to programming by sourcing landmark works like the Tuareg feature Zerzura. She created community engagements like #RADIONYFAF and NYFAF's partnership with Barzakh Café. Miranda is passionate about presenting Amazigh film beautifully to audiences new and old. Herself a filmmaker, her directorial work was screened at Tribeca in 2016.