With more than twenty-five years at the forefront of the fashion industry, having graced every magazine cover from Vogue to Time, Christy Turlington Burns has established a diverse career as a model, writer, entrepreneur, spokesperson, advocate and now filmmaker. Philanthropy and service have long been a part of Christy's personal and professional mission to make a lasting impact on the world.

In 2005, she began working with the international humanitarian organization CARE and has since become their Advocate for Maternal Health. She has also been an Ambassador for (RED) since their launch in 2006. Her work on behalf of CARE and (RED) inspired her to pursue a Masters in Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School where she is currently enrolled.

In 2008, Christy began working on a documentary film profiling the status of maternal health worldwide. In her gripping directorial debut, Christy shares the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States. NO WOMAN, NO CRY made its world premiere at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City with US television broadcast premiering on May 7, 2011 on the new Oprah Winfrey Network. Concurrent with the debut of her documentary, Christy launched Every Mother Counts, an advocacy and mobilization campaign to increase education and support for maternal and child health. Every Mother Counts seeks to engage new audiences to better understand the challenges and the solutions while encouraging them to take action to improve the lives of girls and women worldwide. The keystone of the campaign is www.everymothercounts.org, an interactive platform providing the tools to raise awareness, education and action.

Nassim Assefi, a 2nd generation Iranian-American, is a global women's health specialist and novelist. She is a Jack Straw 2011 Writing Fellow and a Feminist Press 2010 Top 40 under 40 honoree. For the last decade, she has been an academic in Seattle, a humanitarian aid worker and underground salsa dance teacher in Kabul, an aspiring musician in Havana, and a novelist in Istanbul. In 2009, she was selected as a TEDGlobal Fellow, and curated TEDxRainier in Seattle on 10-10-10. She has traveled to more than 50 countries, and is based in Seattle when she is not abroad. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, University of Washington Medical School, and Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s residency program. She is the author of numerous scientific publications; Aria is her first novel. She is currently writing a second novel set in post-conflict Afghanistan entitled Say I Am You, seeing patients at The Country Doctor Community Health Clinics, serving as medical adviser to ZocDoc, actively involved with Hedgebrook, Whit Press, and the Guttmacher Institute, and living as a thrillionaire.