Spirited creative innovator and entrepreneur, Pietro Gagliano, is a pioneer of new forms of media that allow humans to understand what it means to be machine, and machines what it means to be human. His commitment to the notion that art has the power to create a hopeful future in a post-singularity world has led to his founding of Toronto-based studio lab, Transitional Forms. “For creative people…” he so often reflects, “this is the most exciting time to be alive.”

Pietro’s work has been recognized through hundreds of awards and nominations including: 2 Emmy Awards, 11 Canadian Screen Awards, 31 FWAs, 2 Webby Awards, a Peabody-Facebook Award, and a Cannes Lion.

Previously, Pietro also co-founded digital agency+studio Secret Location, wearing many hats across his tenure, including: Chief Creative Officer, Head of Innovation, Executive Creative Director, and Head of Content. His production background has involved everything from large-scale corporate branding and social media marketing, to app and game development as well as interactive/immersive films. Pietro and his team made history in 2015 by winning the first ever Emmy Award for a Virtual Reality project. He has worked extensively across the broadcast and entertainment space with the likes of NBCUniversal, PBS Frontline and the New York Times.

David Oppenheim is a producer at the National Film Board of Canada’s Ontario Studio in Toronto, where his recent credits include Draw Me Close (Tribeca Storyscapes, Venice International Film Festival), the Webby Award-winning Universe Within (the final chapter of the NFB’s HIGHRISE project), and the interactive documentary The Space We Hold, which was awarded the Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award, Best Original Interactive Production at the Canadian Screen Awards, and the Columbia University Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling Award.

David is currently producing a number of creative non-fiction film, interactive, and immersive projects and leading the studio’s immersive lab. XR projects underway include the full production version of Draw Me Close, The Book of Distance, a room-scale, interactive pilgrimage across generations, Agence, an experimental simulation in virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and a new collaboration that combines immersive theatre, creative non-fiction storytelling and VR. He is a past resident at the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab.

Casey is a Queen’s Applied Economics Graduate, a degree that let him split his time between the commerce, computer science and economics departments, while minoring in film & media. After spending his early 20’s travelling to 40 countries, Casey worked at a couple of tech startups in strategy and operations before landing at Secret Location. He started in business affairs, and was quickly put into a leadership position by being moved to Project Manager of Vusr, Secret Location’s virtual reality distribution platform. He helped lead the launch of the platform, and worked with names such as The New York Times, Discovery, AMC, CBC & Frontline to launch their apps, which have been downloaded millions of times. After successes in product, Casey moved to the content team at Secret Location, where he led the prototype development and financing for many of Secret Location’s upcoming free-roam VR projects. Casey left Secret Location in November 2018 to join Pietro Gagliano in building Transitional Forms, and is currently running the operations and strategy of the company while acting as Producer on Agence.

Anita Lee is Executive Producer and Head of the Ontario Studio in Toronto for the National Film Board of Canada. She is a multi-award-winning producer with 20 years’ experience in the industry, and the founder of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. In co-production with the CFC Media Lab, Anita led the NFB’s first foray into interactive production as one of the creator-producers of North America’s first interactive feature film, Late Fragment (2006), which premiered at TIFF and SXSW.

More recent interactive work as producer/executive producer includes: The Deeper They Bury Me (2014), which premiered at NYFF and received one of Columbia University’s Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards; The Universe Within (2015), winner of the Webby Award for Best Use of Interactive Video and the Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Interactive Production; and The Space We Hold (2016), winner of the Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award for Interactive Documentary, a Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Storytelling Award, and Best Original Interactive Production at the Canadian Screen Awards.

Anita also helms the NFB’s Creative Non-Fiction Immersive Lab in Toronto, which collaborated with the CFC and the Ford Foundation on the Open Immersion VR residency lab and with the National Theatre (UK) on the Creative Doc VR lab, both in 2016. She is executive producer of the latter’s critically acclaimed VR project, Draw Me Close (2017), which premiered at Tribeca Storyscapes and at the Venice International Film Festival’s Venice Virtual Reality program.