LEYA HALE is from the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Diné Nations. She makes her home in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her companion and three children. Leya works as a Producer for Twin Cities PBS. She is best known for her first feature documentary, “The People’s Protectors,” a Vision Maker Media grant production and winner of the 2019 Upper Midwest Emmy Award for Best Cultural Documentary. Recently, Leya was selected as the 2020 Sundance Institute Merata Mita Fellowship for Indigenous Artists and attended the 2020 Berlinale European Film Market as a Native Fellow. Leya is currently producing her second feature length documentary about missing and murdered Indigenous women, titled “Bring Her Home.” KARYN PUGLIESE aka Pabàmàdiz, is an assistant professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario. Karyn may be best known for her work as a Parliament Hill reporter and as the Executive Director of News and Current Affairs at APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network), where she ran the news department for seven years. She has completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. Karyn has worked in both daily news and on long-form investigations at a variety of outlets including ichannel, VisionTV, CBC and CTV. Karyn is past president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and she is a board member of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. She is a Journalists for Human Rights Ambassador and worked as an expert trainer for the program in South Sudan in 2018. Her journalism has been recognized by the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Canadian Screen Awards, the Native American Journalists Association and the Public Policy Forum. She holds degrees in Journalism and History. Karyn is a citizen of the Pikwàkanagàn First Nation in Ontario, and is of mixed Algonquin and Italian descent. When she is not engaged in acts of journalism, you'll find her paddling a canoe, shooting photos and eating frybread.

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