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Alystyre Julian, Director

Alystyre Julian is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer, She is the director of Outrider. In 2024, Julian co-curated Language and Light: The Films of Ed Bowes at Anthology Film Archives. She has been the stills photographer on award-winning feature films Diane (2018), Monsters and Men (2018), Goldie (2019), and others, and has directed and worked on numerous short films, videos, and documentary projects. She holds an MFA from Bard College, and previously taught creative writing at Long Island University, Montclair State University, and screenwriting at New York University. Her poems have been featured in publications such as Poetry Project Newsletter, Chain, Talisman, and Pharos. She lives and works in New York City, where she is at work on a new film project related to Black Mountain College. 

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Anne Waldman, Poet

Anne Waldman is an internationally acclaimed poet and the author of more than sixty books, including Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays (1996), The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011), and Bard, Kinetic (2023). She is a founder and former director of the The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and along with contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Diane DiPrima, founded the ‘Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics’ at Naropa University. Her poetry belongs to the lineages of the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain Movements of New American Poetry. As a feminist, social activist, and powerful performer, she has read in the streets and literary institutions worldwide and continues to teach poetics all over the world.

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Sarah Riggs, Producer

Sarah Riggs is a poet, filmmaker, and producer of Outrider. Past films include: Six Lives: A Cinepoem (2016) and The Tangier 8 (2009), which screened at the Cinémathèque de Tanger (Morocco), the Berlinale, and the Tate Modern. She is the author of seven books of poetry in English, most recently The Nerve Epistle (Roof Books, 2021). She has translated and co-translated seven books of contemporary French poetry into English, including Etel Adnan's TIME (Nightboat, 2019), recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the 2020 Best Translated Book Award.

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Melissa Huffsmith-Roth, Editor

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Melissa Huffsmith-Roth is a film and video editor and multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City. Her critically acclaimed film collaborations have screened at international festivals and museums. Her recent collaborators include Julie Dash, Alison Klayman, and Alystyre Julian.

Sarah Enid Hagey, Editor

Sarah Enid Hagey is an artist, writer, and film editor living in Brooklyn, NY. She is most known for full-length films: You Were My First Boyfriend (2023), The Faithful (2021) and Aleph (2021). She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2011, and has been editing film and video for over 20 years.

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Ruy García, Sound Designer

Award winning sound designer, composer, and music producer based in New York, Ruy García has provided sound design and re-recording mixing for feature films like Y Tu Mamá También, First Reformed, Midsommar, Marcel The Shell with Shoes On, and for scripted television like Boardwalk Empire, The Night Of, The Get Down, and The Staircase. He has been nominated for six Prime Time Emmy Awards, winning twice. He has also received a Golden Reel and three Ariel Award Nominations from the Mexican Film Academy. 

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Sean Gullette, Consulting Producer

Sean Gullette is a filmmaker, actor, and consulting producer of Outrider. His debut as a writer-director, Traitors (2013) premiered at the Venice Film Festival. He recently developed and executive produced the documentary series Black Gold (2022) and is now in development on Upland, a near-future thriller adapted from the novel by Nobel prizewinner Kenzaburo Oe, and Strong Girls, about Ukrainian teen rock band The Sixsters. 

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Frédéric Tcheng, Advisor

Frédéric Tcheng is a French-born film director and advisor for Outrider based in Brooklyn. His films have premiered in Venice, Toronto, Sundance, Telluride, CPH:DOX, and Tribeca. His most recent film Invisible Beauty (2023), co-directed with trailblazer activist Bethann Hardison, was released by Magnolia Pictures and won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary. In 2019, he directed the documentary Halston, (2018), a CNN Films Production and Amazon Original. His award-winning directorial debut, Dior and I was released in 2015 by The Orchard. Previously, Tcheng had co-directed the 2011 acclaimed documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, which the NYT called “dizzily enjoyable.” He also co-produced and co-edited Valentino: The Last Emperor, the 2009 hit documentary short-listed for the Best Documentary Oscar. Tcheng has served as a filmmaking mentor for Queer Art. He holds an engineering degree from France and an MFA in filmmaking from Columbia University. 

Malvika Jolly, Web Designer

Malvika Jolly is a poet, translator, and web designer for Outrider. She is the author of the poetry collection Visiting Hours of the World, winner of the 2025 Alice James Award, forthcoming in May 2027. She is a graduate student in poetry at NYU, where she teaches in the undergraduate writing program. She supports programs for Tamaas and runs The New Third World, a poetry series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement. 

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Safaa Fathy, Advisor

Safaa Fathy is an Egyptian poet, essay writer, filmmaker, and advisor for Outrider, she is best known for her feature films D’ailleurs Derrida [Derrida's Elsewhere] (1999) and Mohammad Saved from the Waters (2012). Fathy is the author of Where Not to Be Born (Litmus Press, 2024) Al Haschische (Pamenar Press, 2023), and Revolution Goes Through the Walls (Split Level Texts, 2018). Her plays Terror and Ordeal (Lansman, 2004) were prefaced by Jacques Derrida. She continues to experiment with the visual texture of poems in filmic forms.