Board of Directors

Diliana Alexander

Diliana began her career in Canada as a producer, where she worked for CBC, HGTV, the Learning Channel and Showtime. Her films and TV shows can currently be found on HBO and Netflix. In 2012, she co-founded FilmGate Miami, a non profit organization that promotes innovation and creativity within Florida's evolving media ecosystem. In 2013, FilmGate Miami launched FilmGate Interactive, the only Festival in the region, focused on immersive media. In 2017, she co-founded the Downtown Media Center, a creative eclat of immersive and 2D creators. Diliana is currently developing a VR project on the iconic Stiltsville houses on Biscayne Bay and a feature film based on the young adult novel NARC, written by Florida book award winner Crissa Jean Chappell.

Nelly Gocheva

Nelly has 15+ years of experience developing media brands and creative strategies within start-ups and legacy brands across North America, Europe and Asia. Through the years, she's held senior positions at Soho House, The New York Times, Monocle Magazine and currently – Apple. Organizations and brands she's worked with on consultancy and brand-marketing partnerships include Nike, Airbnb, LVMH, L’Oréal, Rimowa, Burberry, Chanel, UBS, Credit Suisse, Samsung, BMW, Korean Air, Singapore Tourism Board, the City of Rio de Janeiro, Wunderman Thompson and Diet Coke.

James Powderly

James Powderly is an award-winning technology designer known for inventing tools to empower artists to augment the world. His vision and designs have made a broad cultural and engineering impact with acknowledged contributions in digital art, open source and augmented reality technology. His work can be found in the permanent collection of MoMA, in Snapchat's hardware products and on the surface of Mars. James is the most recent member to join the board at Filmgate Miami. His focus is on identifying and supporting a diverse cohort of creators innovating at the intersection of cryptoart and emerging tech like generative AI and augmented reality.

Billy Corben

Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Billy Corben made his feature documentary directorial debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001, making him one of the youngest directors in Sundance history. Following that success, he and his producing partners founded Rakontur, a Miami Beach-based content creation company.

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Lindsay Grace

Lindsay is an awarded game designer, developer, author and professor. He is the Knight Chair in Interactive Media and an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. He is Vice President for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance and the 2019 recipient of the Games for Change Vanguard award. Lindsay's book, Doing Things with Games, Social Impact through Design, is a well-received guide to game design. In 2020, he edited and authored Love and Electronic Affection: a Design Primer on designing love and affection in games.

Lori Wyman

Lori attended the University of Miami and she graduated with her Bachelor's Degree in Speech and Communications and her minor in Education. She received her Master's Degree from Nova Southeastern University (NSU) with a concentration in Drama Therapy. She pursued this degree in order to help actors with Audition Anxiety. Upon graduating with her undergraduate degree, she aggressively pursued a casting career and immediately started working for ACT I Talent Agency. At the time, ACT I was the biggest talent agency in the State of Florida.

Alex Cohen

Alex Cohen is the founder and CEO of Synkronized, a 23 years old US and Global Content Distributor and Production Company. With over 300 Films & Series produced and distributed in the US and worldwide. A library of more than 150 Festival nominations including the Cannes Film Festival, and 52 Awards and counting. Cohen's films have been released in partnership with companies like Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, and many more. Cohen notably produced Jenna Otega's "Saving Flora" in 2018, Naomie Watts and Octavia Spencer's "Luce", a 2019 Sundance finalist, "Stay Safe" in 2022, and "ODB: Wu-Tang Forever", an upcoming 2023 Series, among dozens of other Productions.

Jose Jacho

Jose Jacho is the co-founder of Filmgate Miami and the Downtown Media Center. He is an out-of-the box thinker and creator, who seeks to establish and maintain South Florida as legitimate location for advancing the arts with the aid of technology.

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Savannah Niles

Savannah Niles is a multi-disciplinary product and design leader with 7 years experience working in XR. Most recently, Savannah was the Director of Interaction Design and Product Experience at Magic Leap, a Florida-based augmented reality startup. For 5 years at Magic Leap, Savannah has designed, prototyped, and shipped a wide range of hardware and software products, with 20+ patent applications and grants. Savannah graduated from the MIT Media Lab with her Master's in 2015. She has designed interactive experiences for Walt Disney Imagineering and Twitter, and has served as a juror at SIGGRAPH for 3 years. 

Pedro Menocal

Pedro is a legal, business, and strategic advisor with 20 years’ experience representing clients, big and small, from all over the world. He represents both domestic and international clients in a number of industries, primarily private equity, software and technology, media and entertainment, and healthcare.

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Jimmy Cheng

Director of International Partnership at Sandman Studios / Sandbox Immersive Festival, and Head of
International Sales at Atlas V / Astrea. Jimmy is focusing on XR distribution, representing contents from
over 170 XR studios, and servicing different
platforms / offline locations to find suitable distribution opportunities. The distribution / licensing model of XR content was immature even until today, which is why Jimmy saw the opportunity to form a solid business model for supporting the creators / studios to distribute their projects and generate reasonable revenue. From November 2018 till today, over US$ 10M royalty fee has
been signed to support the XR ecosystem / licensing model growing more mature. 

Mauricio Ferrazza

Mauricio Ferrazza has been working with animation production for film and TV for over 25 years. With a B.A. in Advertising and Marketing, and a M.F.A. in Computer Animation, Ferrazza specialized in dynamics and particle simulation, creating motion and recreating natural phenomena through the application of the principles of physics. Storytelling has also been a focus for Ferrazza, researching the different ways storytelling engage audiences, character-driven stories for film production, and how it’s now infused in branding and sales.

Vivian Marthell

Director • Creative • Collaborator • Protogeek • Lizard Whisperer • XR Evangelist • Chile Lover • Medicine Maker • Flow Hacker • Wanderluster • Banned Book Reader • Venturer

*evil laughter*

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