Clio Barnard has a feature length drama, Sleepwalking , in development with FilmFour, and her feature script Rooftop was developed by BBC Films and the Film Council's New Cinema Fund. Previous short films have screened at international film festivals from Edinburgh to Berlin and Rotterdam, at the Tate Britain and on Channel Four and FilmFour. Her post-graduate piece Dirt and Science toured internationally as part of the ICA Biennial of Independent Film & Video, Between Imagination and Reality, curated by Tilda Swinton. She recently completed The Advanced Programme at the National Film and Television School.

Laurie Simmons has had solo exhibitions at museums and galleries across America and arts festivals worldwide. In her earlier works, Simmons photographed her dolls with dramatic lighting so that they resemble images of people, a practice that allied her with photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. In the 1980s, Simmons expanded on her dolls project with series featuring toy ballerinas, cowboys, and "walking objects". This led to her work on the Music of Regret series, in which she commissioned a female dummy with her own face and used it for simulated self-portraits. Simmons received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984. She lives and works in New York.

Gillian Wearing, photographer and video artist, has described her method as 'editing life'. Her work looks at the disparities between public and private life, between individual and collective experience. Wearing has cited the influence of fly-on-the-wall documentaries; in an early piece she approached people on London streets and asked them to write something on a card, photographing them as they displayed it. With the introduction of video and more in-depth interviews to her work, Wearing began to use devices such as adult actors lip-synching the recorded confessions of children, and subjects, solicited from advertisements placed in newpapers, making confessions while wearing masks. She won the Turner Prize in 1997. 

Carol Morley has been making films for over 10 years. Her most successful work has been Alcohol Years (2000), which recounts five self-destructive years of her life in early 1980s Manchester.

Miranda Pennell studied contemporary-dance in New York and Amsterdam , after which she started to explore choreographic ideas through filmmaking. Pennell's work often looks at the choreography that can be found in the ‘real' world, using a diverse range of subjects that has included soldiers, teenage ice-skaters, stage-fighting, amateur dancers and Rock-drummers. Her films and videos have won various prizes including from the Biennale of Moving Images (Geneva 2005), the Ann Arbour Film Festival (USA 2004), Cork International Film Festival (Ireland 2003), the Grand Prix Video Danse (France 1997), and have been exhibited across a range of contexts.

This event is chaired by Gary Thomas:

Gary Thomas is an arts consultant and Co-Director of the animate! project. He co-edited The animate! Book (2006). As Head of Moving Image (2001-6) at Arts Council England, he devised Necessary Journeys, a series of arts projects in association with BFI Black World, and, in collaboration with UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund, he initiated the Single-Shot project, to commission short work for exhibition across a range of platforms and sites in five cities, and to produce two feature length films by artists. From 1991 to 1999, he managed the Arts Council's Artists' Film and Video Production Fund, supporting hundreds of artists' films. He also makes films, in collaboration with artist Tim Shore, including Cabinet, nominated for this year's transmediale Award, and they're about to start work on a commission for Capture, the dance and moving image agency.