Director + Producer Taylor Hosking is a Brearley School and University of Pennsylvania alumn and journalist with seven years of experience. She got her start in The Atlantic’s political writing fellowship program just out of college. Then she wrote about Black and LGBTQ culture as a Culture Staff Writer at VICE, before going into producing podcasts. As a podcast producer she’s lead-produced, narrated and hosted multiple docu-style projects for clients like Netflix, HBO, NPR and The New Yorker. She sold and lead-produced an original podcast show idea to HBO about the Insecure soundtrack’s influence on music culture called “Insecure Interludes.” She was the lead story editor for a five episode narrative docuseries from NPR’s WHYY called March On about the fallout among Pride organizers. And she narrated her own audio doc on The New Yorker Radio Hour about a group of rappers in Tulsa, Oklahoma rebuilding Black Wall Street while taking over an antebellum-style mansion house that used to belong to a KKK member city founder. West Side Familia will be her directorial debut in video docs. She’s beyond humbled and honored that her first film will be about her neighborhood, made with friends and family.

Her hobbies include basketball, organizing creative photoshoots, vibing to Maxwell and Sade, and people watching from her terrace in the summer time.

Emir Lewis has decades of documentary editing experience for both film and TV stories often about Black and Latinx protest and cultural movements. He’s also an Associate Arts Professor at NYU. He’s presently editing on TV series Independent Lens and previously he’s been an editor for the reparations doc The Big Pay Back and the Netflix doc Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives. He’ll be giving notes, and editorial + strategy guidance.

Mohammed was the lead editor of the IBM feature docuseries The Uncharted and has edited many branded content videos for high profile clients like Showtime, Amazon, Verizon, and Morgan Stanley. He’ll be building out scenes, and jazzing up the pacing, transitions and visual design.  

Cristal Jefferson has been a full-time DP at VICE for five years now and counting, shooting for all of their digital verticals as well as for VICE News on HBO and VICE on Showtime. She’s also shot videos for Them., Teen Vogue and Glamour. Her work ranges from capturing scenes out in the field, even fast-moving surfing videos, to sit-down interviews with top artists for today’s youth culture.

Morgan Powell (fluid pronouns) is the first DP that jumped onto the project and helped it get off the ground before Hollywood called them away to LA. Morgan is a creative director and cinematographer who’s led projects at Mass Appeal and directed / shot a number of music videos like R&B singer Yaya Bey’s Fxck It Then. They have an M.A. in digital cinema production from The New School. And they’ve been a producer on a number of independent films including the queer coming of age short “Grace” which premiered at Sundance this year. Taylor and Morgan have also been buds whyling out in the city together since 2014.

Funmi is our amazingly talented stills photographer who has accompanied shoots that are now in the film! By day she’s a copywriter at Weiden and Kennedy, by night photographs events for her poppin Brooklyn friends and builds her own canon. She also did sound on our first day for three different scenes (a rockstar!).

Alexis Moore is a podcast producer at Pineapple Street Media where she’s lead-produced award-winning documentaries, including Hanif Abdurraquib’s docuseries Time Machine: The Score which combines a personal coming of age narrative with a journalistic look back at the cultural impact of The Fugees’ only album The Score. Alexis has helped out with audio and editorial notes.