Julie Hébert is an award-winning writer/director of television, film, and theatre. Most recently she directed multiple episodes of the Fox hit drama ACCUSED, starring Whitney Cummings and Keith Carradine. She has written and served as Executive Producer and co-EP on series like MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, BOSS, THE GOOD WIFE and the recent Netflix hit ECHOES. She was EP and showrunner on John Ridley’s AMERICAN CRIME for which she was nominated for the EMMY and WGA Awards. Julie wrote the screenplays for RUBY’S BUCKET OF BLOOD starring Angela Bassett, and FEMALE PERVERSIONS starring Tilda Swinton, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Michael Rau (Moderator) is a live performance director specializing in new plays, opera, and digital media projects. He has directed projects internationally in Germany, the UK, Brazil, Ireland, Denmark, Mexico, Canada, Australia and the Czech Republic. He has created work in New York City at Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, Ars Nova, and The Bushwick Starr.  Regionally, his work has been seen the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, and the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville. His work with composer Kate Soper has been performed at the Seattle Symphony, and The New York Festival of Song at the Dimenna Center. He has developed new plays at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. His production of “temping” was selected by the Guardian and the Telegraph as one of the best productions of the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He is a recipient of a 2021 Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Award from Google, as well as fellowships from the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, Germany.  He has been an assistant director for Francesca Zambello, John Turturro, Robert Woodruff and associate director for Anne Bogart, Les Waters, and Ivo Van Hove. At Stanford, he is an affiliate faculty member with the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a professor of directing in the Theater and Performance Studies Department where he serves as the head for the Theater-Making Concentration as well as the Artistic Director for the department.