Third Coast Festival artistic director Julie Shapiro has been with the Festival since its inaugural year (2000). Before moving to Chicago, Shapiro spent years behind record stores counters in multiple cities before landing in North Carolina to work at the the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. These days, she teaches radio documentary in Chicago and beyond, keeps a blog about sound, and can occasionally be heard on the public radio airwaves. 

Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto (otherwise known as the Books) started working together in 2000 while living as neighbors in Inwood, a small neighborhood at the very northern tip of Manhattan, regularly referred to as 'Upstate Manhattan' by New Yorkers. Over the next few years they moved around a lot but always kept the music going through the mail, and occasional recording sessions. Since 2002 they've settled their working studio in the Berkshire Mountains of North Adams, Massachusetts. They do all of their own sample collecting, composing, writing, recording, mixing, and mastering in their home studios using PCs running cheap software and the ragtag equipment that they've pieced together over the years. What you hear on their records is exactly how it left their hands, with no producer, engineers, or sweetening in between.

Niall Farrell studied Sound Arts and Design at the University of the Arts in London before dropping out to pursue overly ambitious projects further afield. With a failed radio documentary in Cambodia firmly under his belt, he is currently making a film in the Middle East where his philosophy is "if you can get a permit, great - if you can't, do it on the sly." He lives in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Matt Purdy is an independent radio producer who picked up a portable recorder and a microphone a few years ago and has been slowly but steadily making radio ever since. He recently returned to the States after a two year stint in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria.

Andrea Silenzi produces Central Standard on KCUR in Kansas City and Seven Second Delay for WFMU in New Jersey, on which she once set the world record for most guests interviewed during an hour-long radio show. She has produced for WNYC, PRI's Studio 360, Third Coast's Filmless Festival, Transom, and WFMU's Too Much Information. She is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Wesleyan University.

Frances Willick is a newspaper reporter currently living in Windsor, Ontario. She previously worked as a bookseller in one of the last remaining independent bookstores in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as an organic vegetable farmer and as a radio producer for community and public radio stations in Nova Scotia.