James Vincent D'Arc was born in Los Angeles, California on August 7, 1950. In the early 1970s, D'Arc was accepted into Brigham Young University, where he majored in history. A film appreciation class taught by Dr. Charles M. Metten in 1973 motivated D’Arc to receive a PhD in film history from BYU in 1986. During his time as a student, he was also hired in what was then called the "Archives and Manuscripts Division” at BYU, where he began gathering film-related materials for the Archives. During 1990 D'Arc was also employed as a professor of film in BYU's Theatre and Media Arts College in addition to his position as a curator. James D'Arc retired from BYU in August 2017.

Jean Fausett Atthowe was born February 26, 1931, in Brooklyn, New York, to Lynn Fausett and Helen Wessels. She went to the University of Utah and subsequently worked at Sunset Magazine in Palo Alto, California. There, she met John (Jack) Atthowe and married him in 1954. They spent their first five years of marriage in Germany and England and returned to the United States to start a family. They moved to Montana, where Jean got her master's degree in fine arts at the University of Montana while raising two daughters. Jean and Jack retired to Stevensville, Montana in 1989. In 1992, she founded and was president of the Montana Spay/Neuter Task Force, an organization devoted to helping communities solve pet over-population problems. Jean Atthowe passed away December 19, 2016, in Richland, Oregon.