Lana Link, the Moving Picture Institute's vice president of talent development, recruits filmmakers into their grant programs and classes. She produces films and masterclasses. She also writes original screenplays as a member of MPI's creative team. Lana is a graduate of the University of Chicago and a former Fulbright grant recipient in Vienna, Austria. She earned her JD from Pepperdine University School of Law and her certificate in independent producing from UCLA Extension.

R. J. Daniel Hanna is a Toronto-born, Arkansas-raised writer, director, and editor. He has directed commercials for Coca-Cola, Subway, Cole Haan, and numerous other brands, but his true passion is independent cinema that can ignite social change while delivering a powerful human story.

His feature screenplays have received dozens of awards and accolades, with his script Shelter Animal making the Top 50 Scripts (out of 8,000) in the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Nicholl Fellowship. His short film SHELTER, starring Clea DuVall (ARGO, ZODIAC) and April Grace (WHIPLASH, MAGNOLIA), played at the SAG Short Film Showcase and won the Audience Award from the NewFilmmakers LA festival, among other accolades. His most recent award-winning film, EVERYTHING, is based on a true story of a mother searching for a bone marrow donor for her daughter. It was featured in the Wall Street Journal and is spurring reform in the marrow donation industry.

Working both in narrative and documentary form, Hanna also brings an editor’s eye to his sets. Films he has edited have won awards from the Emmy Foundation, the Director’s Guild of America, BAFTA, the USC Editing Faculty, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and dozens of film festivals. Hanna is repped by the Gersh Agency and Luber-Roklin Entertainment.