Tony Dowmunt is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-supervises Practice Research PhDs, mostly in the field of radical and ‘alternative’ documentary practices. He also co-directs the London Community Video Archive which is preserving community-made videos from the 1970s and 80s, to enable them to be used as a resource for contemporary debates and activism. As well as teaching, he has worked as a television Producer/Director, and as a community media activist.

Carry Gorney is an artist, writer and filmmaker who for more than 50 years has used creative arts to strengthen communities. She founded Interplay, Leeds, and has had a long association with Inter-Action, the London based community arts trust, developing their Milton Keynes outpost in 1975. In Milton Keynes, she initiated video projects for local groups to tell their own stories, collaborating with the cable television station Channel 40. She has also worked as a family psychotherapist for the NHS, and her project ‘Seeing is Believing’ uses video to capture ‘magic’ moments between parent and baby/toddler. Her memoir Send Me a Parcel with a Hundred Lovely Things was published in 2017.

Peter Lewis is Professor of Media and Culture at London Metropolitan University. He has published widely on radio and community media and was a founding member of the Radio Studies Network. Before his academic career, he worked in educational broadcasting for ten years. After Bristol Channel closed down in 1975, he took an active part in the campaign for community radio.

Martin Parry grew up in Herefordshire. He went to Canada in the early 1970s, where he worked in television and for the National Film Board. He returned to the UK in 1980 to initiate a public media centre – Media Arts – and took on management of Swindon Viewpoint. An award-winning filmmaker, he has maintained a commitment to enabling broader access to the media, and to training young people. He has maintained Viewpoint for 43 years, and in 2019 was in the New Years Honours list for services to the nation in film, media and music.

Maggie Pinhorn began her career working in the art departments of feature films at Pinewood and Shepperton Studios. In the early 70s she founded Alternative Arts, an independent multidisciplinary arts organisation in Covent Garden, and the Basement Film Project in Stepney where she worked with a group of young people making Tunde’s Film. The BBC’s Community Programme Unit invited them to make one of the first Open Door programmes and they chose to create their own spoof TV channel ‘East End Channel One’. Maggie continued to work in the East End creating Community Festivals, and in Covent Garden where she started the famous Street Theatre. From the mid 90s Alternative Arts work has been focused in East London, producing among other things ‘Photomonth’ – the International Photography Festival – and exhibitions and events for Women’s History Month and Black History Month.

Ed Webb-Ingall is a filmmaker and researcher working with archival materials and methodologies drawn from community video. He collaborates with groups to explore under-represented historical moments and their relationship to contemporary life, developing modes of self-representation specific to the subject or the experiences of the participants. He is senior lecturer on the BA Film and Screen Studies course at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and is currently writing a book for Bloomsbury/BFI with the title BFI Screen Stories: The Story of Video Activism.