Ivana Kvesić is a versatile art and film curator, cultural project manager, and director of the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival in Baden, Switzerland. The animation festival, which has been running for almost 30 years, has grown over the years to become both the largest in Switzerland and one of the most important forums for animation in Europe. She is currently the President of the Executive Committee of Cinema Club Xenix in Zürich and a member of the Board of the Swiss film magazine "Filmbulletin", as well as representing SWAN (Swiss Women's Audiovisual Network). Kvesić has worked as a co-director of the Swiss Youth Film Day festival and part of the selection committee of the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and Rote Fabrik.

Romanna Lobach is a Ukrainian-born Greek actress, artist, and producer who founded and runs the production company Akran. She studied acting at the Athens Conservatoire and gained experience in the advertising industry, working as a creative copywriter for the advertising agency McCann. She first appeared on screen at the age of 11, taking on roles in more than 20 feature and short films that have been screened at the most prestigious festivals in Europe and North America. Among her best known roles are her work on Dimitris Nakos' March 4 (2015) and Ariane Labed's Olla (2019). In her practice, Lobach is intrigued by the possibilities offered by feminist and experimental filmmaking strategies, collaborative working environments, transmediality and indigenous cinema.

Vladan Petković is one of Europe's most visible film personalities. He is a Serbian film critic, journalist, curator and festival consultant with more than 20 years of experience. He studied cultural management, theatre, and radio at the University of the Arts in Belgrade. He has written for Screen International about the film industry in the Balkan region for two decades. Petković is published with enviable regularity in "Cineuropa" and numerous Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian publications. He has contributed as an adviser to festival programmes in the Netherlands (IDFA), Croatia (ZagrebDox and Rab Film Festival), Northern Macedonia (Skopje Film Festival) and elsewhere, and founded the "GoCritic!" training programme for young film journalists and critics in cooperation with "Cineuropa".

Léo Soesanto, the lead curator of RIGA IFF International and National Short Film Competitions, is a Paris-based film programmer and journalist who has written for publications such as Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, Vogue Paris, Premiere, and Grazia. He has extensive festival experience having been part of the feature film selection committee for the Critics’ Week sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival between 2009 and 2015. He also chaired the short film selection committee from 2017 to 2021. From 2016 to 2020, he was a film programmer at the Rotterdam Film Festival, which is a mecca for auteur cinema.

Chantal Lian has been working in the film industry for more than 12 years, as a programmer and curator at major French festivals such as the Les Arcs International Film Festival and the Champs-Élysées Film Festival for independent cinema where she also established the US in Progress Paris programme to promote cooperation between the European and North American film industries. Lian is an experienced film distributor with experience at respected companies such as Wild Bunch and Sophie Dulac Distribution, where she worked on commercially successful independent films such as Love & Friendship (2016) and Menashe (2017). She has also worked at Oxbelly, a training course for screenwriters and directors, and is currently studying art therapy.

It is the fourth year when Līga is a member of the pre-selection committee for the short film program at the Riga International Film Festival. She writes about short films for Talking Shorts. Occasionally she moderates Q&As and does various translation-related tasks for films and film festivals. Apart from that, she has also taken part in pre-selecting shorts for the Glasgow Short Film Festival.

Nanako Tsukidate is a film critic and a journalist for Nobody Magazine in Japan. She is also an independent programmer and consultant of Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori). She worked as a selector of short films for La Semaine de la Critique (2019-2021) and as programmer for the Hiroshima International Film Festival, in particular for the European films section (2015-2018). Nanako has been a part of the RIGA IFF Short film selection committee since 2022.

Chinese-born Qiu Yang studied directing at the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia. He has made both virtual and live-action short films, which have screened successfully at the Cannes Film Festival, Semaine de la Critique, the Venice Film Festival's virtual reality section and elsewhere. His graduation short film Under the Sun (2015) was selected for the Cinéfondation student film competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and his live-action short film A Gentle Night (2017) won the Palme d'Or in the short film section of the 70th Cannes Film Festival, making Yang the first Chinese filmmaker to receive this award. His most recent film, She Runs (2019), won the Leitz Cine Discovery Award at Cannes Critics' Week. Yang is currently working on his first feature-length film, has been selected for the Résidence du Festival residency programme, and been awarded the prestigious CNC Screenwriting Grant.