Madison Egan
Madison Egan is a Short Film Programmer for Tribeca Festival, born and raised in New York. Film festivals are the perfect industry for an extroverted film-lover like her, having programmed and worked with many festivals across the US.
She previously worked as an artist liaison for Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Festival and New York Film Festival and as a Programming Fellow for Athena Film Festival out of Barnard College. Madison studied Cinema History at Purchase College, State University of New York and continued a degree in Film Theory at the University of Galway, Ireland. She lived in Ireland from 2017 to 2020, where she began her foray into film festivals.
As well as programming for festivals, Madison has been a script reader and screen, so she has a wealth of experience from script to screen.
Katja Gauriloff
Katja Gauriloff is an award-winning film director and screenwriter, who is known as the director of feature-length documentaries and fiction films.
Her debut feature Canned Dreams premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2012 and was nominated for a Jussi Award for the best documentary feature film. Her latest documentary Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest won the Jussi Award for best documentary feature in 2016 and has also been awarded at several international festivals.
Her first fictional feature film, Baby Jane, which is based on Sofi Oksanen’s book by the same name, premiered in the spring of 2019. Directed by Gauriloff and co-written by Niillas Holmberg, Je´vida had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2023 and is now touring festivals.
Leena Virtanen
Leena Virtanen is a journalist, critic, and non-fiction writer. She has followed the film industry since the 1980s, and when she studied in Tampere, she was a loyal follower of the film festival programme every spring. She got to know short films and documentaries well.
Virtanen has written for Helsingin Sanomat since 1991, and she worked in-house until 2010, when she switched into freelancing. She still assists the paper as a film and TV critic.
Together with Jaana Semeri, Virtanen has written Neitoperhot ja Pahanhautojat, a non-fiction book about the women in the Finnish film industry from different perspectives. The book was published in 2023.
