IDA Talent Guide 2023/24

We're very proud to present the 2023/24 IDA Talent Guide. Inside, you will find lists of the many artists, projects, and organizations that we have supported this past year.

At IDA, we support a wide range of nonfiction practices and practitioners from documentary filmmakers to immersive nonfiction media makers to grassroots initiatives and other organizations making change in the field. As we strive to bring a more inclusive documentary culture into being, IDA makes a firm and lasting commitment to access for historically marginalized makers through direct financial support, participatory program design, dedicated artist support, and international collaborations.

Nonfiction filmmaking is going through a range of changes. Some filmmakers want to premiere in theaters but keep the audience accessibility of streaming; others opt for short-form or more immediate nonfiction mediums, such as social media; and others are choosing to remain active in the long-form space while urging for changes within the traditional nonfiction industry. We are all part of the same ecosystem.

We're very proud of the artists and initiatives we support. Their work is brave and urgent. We will continue to make our programming and funding responsive to the needs of our field and the artists we champion.

If you are particularly moved by any one of these projects or mediamakers, and want to be put in touch with any of them, feel free to reach out to funds@documentary.org. We urge you to join us in supporting their vital work.

Keisha Knight Director of Funds & Advocacy

The IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund, with major support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has provided over 5 million dollars in production funding to documentary films taking on in-depth explorations of original, contemporary stories and integrating journalistic practice into the filmmaking process. Since 2017, the IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund has supported over 100 films by documentary filmmakers from around the world.

Enterprise Documentary Fund 2023

Top: The River Middle: Untitled Policing Documentary Bottom: Life After

#Nunstoo

Lorena Luciano Director

Lorena Luciano is an accomplished documentary film director and editor, recognized for her exceptional work in the motion pictures and TV industry (HBO, NETFLIX, JIGSAW Productions, YouTube Originals, EPIX/MGM+, RAI Italian Public TV, SKY TV, CANAL+). With a remarkable track record that includes receiving prestigious accolades such as an Emmy win, grants from the Sundance Institute and MacArthur Foundation, and numerous industry recognitions such as Best Directing and Best Documentary awards, Lorena has established herself as a leading force in her field.

Her ability to seamlessly blend artistic vision with technical expertise has resulted in critically acclaimed films that captivate audiences worldwide. Her work has been translated into over 10 different languages and distributed worldwide.

In a revelation never before spoken, a small group of nuns exposes a tormented truth within the Catholic Church: the harrowing tales of predatory priests abusing nuns. Shockwaves ripple through religious women determined to defy their second-class status as they ignite a movement to demand the justice they have long yearned for.

Piscopo Producer/Cinematographer

Emmy® Award winner Filippo Piscopo intersects his true passion as a film producer with impactful camera work.

Inspired by content resonating with diverse audiences, Filippo has crafted engaging stories supported, among other entities, by the Sundance Institute and featured at film venues such as the Venice Film Festival, IDFA’s Central Pitch, and the IFP’s Spotlight on Documentaries.

Granted the Social Justice Award by Amy Goodman, Filippo’s documentary work, often in collaboration with his wife and film director/partner Lorena Luciano, has opened to good reviews by mainstream media such as Variety and the New York Times and has been distributed globally.

Filippo

Confidential Project

Petra Costa Director

Petra Costa tells stories in the crossroads between the personal and the political. In 2020, The Edge of Democracy, was nominated for an Academy Award® and won the Peabody and Platino Award. In 2012, she directed Elena, which premiered at IDFA and won best film at the 2013 Havana Film Festival. In 2015, she co-directed Olmo and the Seagull with Lea Glob, winning the young jury prize in Locarno. She was involved in the production of Ecstasy, Babenco and Beba.

Alessandra Orofino

Co-director

and Producer

Alessandra Orofino is a writer, director and producer who for the past six years has been the showrunner on the weekly hit comedy news show Greg News, on HBO Latin America. She is also an experienced co-founder and non-profit leader with a background in community organizing and activism. In 2011, she launched NOSSAS, a Brazilian NGO. Now with 54 staff and a substantial budget, the organization is sustained through international philanthropy. Prior to that, she was a founding team member and head of the Brazil office at Purpose, a NYC-based agency. In 2014, she spoke at the TED Global stage. In 2019, she was selected as a fellow by the Obama Foundation. In 2022, she was honored with the Skoll Social Innovation Award. Her thoughts have been published in Folha de São Paulo, Le Monde, Libération, El País, Stanford Social Innovation Review and the New York Times. She is the Executive Producer of Beba (2021).

Hawa

40 YEARS after her arranged marriage as a child, Hawa is eager to finally begin an independent life and to be literate. However, with the return of the Taliban, her dreams, and those of her daughter and granddaughter are shattered.

Najiba Noori

Director

Najiba Noori was born in 1995 in Iran. She began working for media organisations as a volunteer when she was just 15. She has participated in several workshops for photography and filmmaking in Kabul, Afghanistan. She has made reports and photo stories for various organizations and agencies, including the AFP, Huffington Post, MSF, FMIC, NRC and UN Women in Afghanistan. She participated at the Close-Up program 2020-2021 and at IDFA Academy 2022. She joined AFP as video journalist in 2019. In 2021 she left her country when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan and lives in France. Hawa is her first feature-length documentary.

Rasul Ali Noori

Co-Director

Rasul Ali Noori was born in 1993 in Iran and graduated from journalism in Kabul. He has made several short videos for NRC, GIZ, and FMIC in Afghanistan. He was one of the cinematographers of the short film Hoof with the American Company Hungry Man in Bamiyan.

Life After

Reid Davenport Director

Reid Davenport makes films about disability from an overtly political perspective. His first feature documentary, I Didn’t See You There, won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Davenport was named a 2020 DOC NYC 40 Under 40 Filmmaker, a 2020 Points North Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Recipient, and a 2017 TED Fellow. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University.

Life After interrogates the contradictory political ideologies surrounding death and disability while coalescing the missing voices of the disabled community in the contemporary debate around medically assisted suicide.

Colleen Cassingham Producer

Colleen Cassingham is a producer at Multitude Films, where her work focuses on politically committed artful nonfiction. Most recently, she produced the Queer Futures shorts collection in association with Chicken & Egg Pictures (CPH:DOX 2023) and is currently producing Reid Davenport’s second feature Life After. Colleen co-produced It’s Only Life After All about the Indigo Girls (Sundance 2023), and her credits as Associate Producer include PRAY AWAY (Tribeca 2020), Through Our Eyes: Apart (Provincetown 2020), Call Center Blues (SXSW 2020), Always In Season (2019), The Feeling Of Being Watched (Tribeca 2018), and Love The Sinner (Tribeca 2017), which have been distributed by Netflix, Topic, HBOMax, POV, and Independent Lens. She is a 2023 Sundance Producing Fellow, a 2023 Impact Partners Producers Fellow. She was a Video Consortium/Sony 2021 Mentor, a 2019 Points North fellow, and a 2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow.

The Phantom Pain of Rojava

In 2015 the Kurdish guerrillas - both men and women - were praised as heroes by the world. They had fought against ISIS and won, but soon after, their allies left the region and the world’s spotlight changed focus. Today, many of the guerrillas are badly injured without arms or legs, and live in houses for wounded soldiers. In this film we follow five friends; Rojda who is blind, Fadakhar who lost two legs, Zarin who was shot in the head, Sorkhin with metal in her whole body, and Viyan, the folk singer who tells the story of Rojava and the dream of freedom. This is a film about life after war and also about the strength of continuing to fight for a dignified life.

Maryam Ebrahimi Director

Born in 1976, Maryam Ebrahimi studied art at Art Faculty in Tehran and continued her education in Sweden at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Later she started to work as producer and director in the documentary field. She co-directed No Burqas Behind Bars (2012), set in an Afghan women’s prison, and produced I Was Worth 50 Sheep (2010), and Prison Sisters (2016). Her last feature as a director is Stronger Than A Bullet which premiered at IDFA 2017. Maryam is a Chicken & Egg Award recipient 2021.

Stina Gardell Producer

Stina Gardell founded Mantaray Film in 2005 and has since produced 29 documentaries and co-produced 10 international documentaries. She has twice been awarded Best Documentary at Prix Italia in addition to a number of prestigious film awards. Her most recent production The Most Beautiful Boy In The World premiered at Sundance 2021 and was picked up by Films Boutique. Her film Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words (2015) premiered in Cannes where it received a Golden Eye Special Mention. And Joyce Carol Oates -A Body In The Service Of Mind premiered in Telluride 2021.

The River

The River is a vivid, character-driven film about Louisiana’s complicated relationship with the Mississippi River.

Caitlyn Greene Director

Caitlyn Greene is a filmmaker born to a long line of Louisiana Cajuns and raised in the American South, who now splits her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans. She loves complex tales that break the mold and has crafted them in everything from six-second shorts to six-part series. Caitlyn received a Primetime Emmy and an ACE Eddie Award for her editing on The Jinx, HBO’s Peabody Award-winning documentary series. Her recent documentary Short, The Diamond was acquired by The New Yorker after premiering at the CIFF where it won CIFF’s Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Other editing projects include When Lambs Become Lions, for which Caitlyn was awarded Best Editing at the Tribeca Festival and nominated for an IDA Documentary Award, as well as A Wilderness Of Error The River is Caitlyn’s feature directorial debut.

Sara Archambault

Producer

Sara Archambault is a creative producer dedicated to artful and impactful nonfiction filmmaking. Sara champions risk-taking films with bold vision that center a practice of equity, care, collaboration, and justice in their creation. Recent films include Riotsville, USA (Sundance, Magnolia Pictures); Truth Or Consequences (Rotterdam, Sentient Art Films), A Decent Home (Denver, America ReFramed) and the upcoming Richland. Sara’s award-winning films have screened in festivals around the world and received support from Sundance Film Institute, SFFILM, Catapult Film Fund, IDA, Hot Docs Pitch Forum, and Film Independent, among others. Sara was a 2020 Impact Partners Producing Fellow, a 2013 Sundance Creative Producers Lab Fellow and 2020 SF DocFest Vanguard Awardee.

The Strike

JoeBill

Muñoz Director/ Producer

JoeBill Muñoz is a Mexican-American director and producer. He’s recently produced several television series for Left/Right Media and the New York Times, and is currently directing and producing an independent feature documentary about solitary confinement in California prisons. His most recent film, Maletero, was commissioned by ITVS and premiered on PBS in 2023. As a producer, he’s worked on The Circus (Showtime), The New York Times Presents (Hulu), and The Grab (TIFF 2022), a feature documentary directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite in collaboration with Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting. His independent work has been supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, Firelight Media, ITVS, SFFILM, the Reva and David Logan Foundation, and others. Originally from Houston, Texas, he currently resides in New York City.

The Strike is a feature documentary that tells the story of a generation of California men who endured decades of solitary confinement and, against all odds, launched the largest hunger strike in U.S. history.

Lucas Guilkey

Director/ Producer

Lucas Guilkey is an award-winning documentary film producer and journalist based in Oakland, California. He is currently directing and producing a feature documentary about solitary confinement in California prisons, developed in the SFFILM FilmHouse residency and the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He recently served as story producer on Aftershock, a feature documentary about the US maternal health crisis that premiered at Sundance in 2022 and is streaming on Hulu/Disney+. His directorial debut, What Happened To Dujuan Armstrong?, a short documentary about the coverup of a young man’s death in county jail, won best documentary at the BAFTA student film awards and was nominated for best documentary short at the Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA). He is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Wesleyan University.

And So it Begins

Can kindness, truth and hope for democracy emerge victorious in an epic battle with fear, lies and surrender to autocracy? Can light conquer darkness? However it ends, the story serves as a testimony to the power of volunteerism and a cautionary tale about the consequences — for better or worse — of choices made.

Ramona Diaz Director, Writer, Producer

Ramona S. Diaz is a Peabody, Gotham, IDA, Emmy® award-winning, PGA and Independent Spirit awardnominated Asian-American filmmaker best known for her compelling character-driven documentaries that combine a profound appreciation for cinematic aesthetics and potent storytelling. Ramona’s films have demonstrated her ability to gain intimate access to the people she films – be they rock stars, first ladies, dissidents, mothers, teachers, or journalists – resulting in keenly observed moments and unforgettable nuanced narratives. Her films have been screened and won awards at Sundance, Berlin, Busan, Tribeca, SXSW, IDFA, HotDocs, and many other top-tier film festivals. Ramona’s feature-length independently-produced films— Imelda (IL, 2004), The Learning (POV,2011), Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (IL, 2012), Motherland (POV, 2017), A Thousand Cuts (Frontline, 2020)—have been nationally broadcast on PBS, Arte, and the BBC amongst others. Ramona is both a Guggenheim Fellow and a USA Fellow – prestigious awards given to artists with singular visions who have significantly contributed to the arts in the United States. She was recently named the inaugural McGurn Family Trust Resident in Film by the American Academy in Rome. Ramona is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Producers and Writers Guilds of America. In 2017, she received a Women at Sundance Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, and a Chicken & Egg Pictures Filmmaker Award. For the past ten years, Ramona has served as a film envoy for the U.S. State Department’s American Film Showcase in partnership with USC and, more recently, for Film Independent’s Global Media Makers program. Ramona is a graduate of Emerson College and holds an MA from Stanford University.

To Use a Mountain

Casey Carter Director

Casey Carter is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary designer whose work engages nonfiction storytelling in film, photography, data visualization, and cartography. Working through a mixture of portraiture, landscape, and evidentiary documents and media, his work centers on themes of governmentality, geography, and environmentalism. He was a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Film/Video Artist Fellow, a 2019 Points North Fellow, and a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow. His work as project director for Maya Lin’s What Is Missing? Foundation, won 2023 Webby Awards for Best Activism Website as well as Best Navigation/Structure for desktop and mobile websites. His interdisciplinary background (BS in Physics, BS in Photography, M.Arch, M.S. in Design Health) informs his work across media, art, and design.

Physics, geology, and democracy collide across the expansive American interior, in a series of vignettes from six candidate sites for a sacrificial nuclear dumping ground.

Colleen Cassingham Producer

Colleen Cassingham is a producer at Multitude Films, where her work focuses on politically committed artful nonfiction. Most recently, she produced the Queer Futures shorts collection in association with Chicken & Egg Pictures (CPH:DOX 2023) and is currently producing Reid Davenport’s second feature Life After. Colleen co-produced It’s Only Life After All about the Indigo Girls (Sundance 2023), and her credits as Associate Producer include PRAY AWAY (Tribeca 2020), Through Our Eyes: Apart (Provincetown 2020), Call Center Blues (SXSW 2020), Always In Season (2019), The Feeling Of Being Watched (Tribeca 2018), and Love The Sinner (Tribeca 2017), which have been distributed by Netflix, Topic, HBOMax, POV, and Independent Lens. She is a 2023 Sundance Producing Fellow, a 2023 Impact Partners Producers Fellow. She was a Video Consortium/Sony 2021 Mentor, a 2019 Points North fellow, and a 2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow.

Untitled Policing Documentary

Untitled Policing

Documentary is a film like no other, an explosive confessional told from behind the thin blue line. It examines police crime and the personal and political consequences of law enforcement wrongdoing on officers and their victims.

A MacArthur grant recipient and a Guggenheim Fellow, Charles Burnett’s body of work is recognized with an honorary Academy Award. His films include The Glass Shield, a groundbreaking narrative on police corruption and violence, My Brother’s Wedding, the classic Library of Congress National Film Registry selections Killer Of Sheep (among the registry’s first 50 films) and To Sleep With Anger (starring Danny Glover). Burnett’s nonfiction work includes The Blues, produced by Martin Scorsese, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property and the recent PBS documentary Power To Heal, on the painful and death-riddled history of segregation at southern U.S. hospitals.

Nicole Lucas Haimes Director /Producer

Nicole Lucas Haimes is an award-winning documentary filmmaker known for her richly observed character portrayals and incisive exploration of little-known worlds. Her television credits include CBS, BET, and the ABC News flagship documentary series, Turning Point. For PBS, Haimes produced and directed the Emmy-nominated Cracking The Code. She directed and Co-Executive Produced for A&E, Confessions of the DC Sniper, featuring the first exclusive interview with Lee Boyd Malvo. Her feature documentaries include the New York Times critic pick Chicken People, which opened at SXSW before its 2016 theatrical release. It received nominations for SXSW’s Gamechanger Award and Nashville’s Grand Jury prize. Her critically acclaimed film, The Good, The Bad, The Hungry, for ESPN Films 30 for 30, premiered at Tribeca in 2019. Her most recent effort, the doc short Outsider which she produced premiered at Montclair Film Festival 2023.

Nicole’s investigation, Who Killed Julian Pierce? for Mel magazine was selected as a Notable Narrative by the Neiman Storyboard and a Longform top ten crime article for 2017.

Charles Burnett Director

When They Were Here

Ivan MacDonald Director

Ivan MacDonald is a member of the Blackfeet tribe and an Emmy®-winning filmmaker. His most recent producing project Murder in Bighorn premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on Showtime. He is an inaugural fellow for the Netflix and Illuminative Producers fellowship and is alumni of the Firelight Media Documentary Film Lab. Currently he is the recipient of the Hulu and Firelight Kindling Fund and developing a film about the history of indigenous residential schools told through the lens of technology. His work has been supported by Sundance, ITVS and the Montana Film Office.

When They Were Here is a documentary about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis on the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana, told through the eyes of the families and community members left behind. The film traces experiences through time, place, and memory–and examines the legacy of violence in the place they call home.

Ivy MacDonald Director

Ivy MacDonald is an Emmy®-winning filmmaker and member of the Blackfeet Tribe. Her most recent producing project Murder in Bighorn premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and aired nationally on Showtime. She is currently directing and producing two feature-length documentaries about her community the Blackfeet Tribe. Her work has been supported by Sundance, ITVS and the Montana Film Office.

Mridu Chandra Producer

Mridu Chandra is a BAFTA and Emmy®nominated filmmaker based in New York City. She has over 20 years of experience as a creative producer of impactful documentaries and fiction films that cover topics of civil rights, environmental and racial justice, LGBTQ+ history, and gender equality. Her films have premiered at Sundance, Telluride, and SXSW; aired on PBS, Disney+, and on Netflix; and screened for members of U.S. Congress and the United Nations. Most recently, she produced Becoming Cousteau (BAFTA nominated for Best Documentary) for two-time Oscar nominee Liz Garbus and co-produced Cured (Emmy nominated for Best Research). In addition to her filmmaking practice, she is a committed field-builder and educator. From 2016 to 2019, she was the founding director of IF/Then Shorts– a film fund and distribution initiative supporting the professional development and increased visibility of underrepresented filmmakers across the US and worldwide.

Made possible by the New York Community Trust, the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund has supported feature-length documentary films that reflect the spirit and nature of Pare Lorentz’s work since 2011. The Fund provides production and post-production grants to be used in the creation of original, independent documentary films that illuminate issues in the United States. This year, IDA partnered with Indie Memphis, Mother Tongue Film Festival, and Union Docs to identify nominees for the fund.

Pare Lorentz Fund 2023

Top: Powwow People Middle: Uncharted Bottom: May the Soil Be Everywhere

May the Soil Be Everywhere

In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family survived wars, revolution, and a devastating famine. Hardship eventually forced the family to scatter. Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, the filmmaker sets out to unearth her family’s enduring bond with this long-forgotten village hidden deeply in the vast mountain range of Loess Plateau.

Yehui Zhao Director

Yehui Zhao is a multi-media artist whose work explores migration, decolonization, heritage and regeneration. As an immigrant born in China and living in the US, Yehui thinks of film as her third language. Her work takes root in the feminist legacies of the global south, drawing inspirations from revolutionary history, womanhood and daughtership, and communities’ collective memory. Yehui’s films have been featured at UnionDocs, DOC NYC, Prismatic Ground, Microscope Gallery, Asian American International Film Festival, Spain Moving Images Festival, Timeless Awards, Festival of Animated Objects, and other programs. Yehui has published paintings, prints and writing at Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Review and Action, Spectacle. She is a recipient of New York State Council on the Arts grant and York Women in Film and Television Scholarship. Yehui holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University. Yehui currently serves as the Art Director of 128 Lit, an award-winning international art and literature magazine.

Powwow People

Powwow People is a feature-length documentary inviting viewers into the world of contemporary Native American powwow culture. Told through the poetic lens of visual artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka (HoChunk/Pechanga), the film is an intimate portrait of a Native American powwow organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film.

Sky Hopinka

Director/Producer/Camera/Editor

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. He was a guest curator at the Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and LUMA. He has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Art Matters, The Guggenheim, and Forge Project. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, and is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

John Cardellino Producer

John Cardellino is the Founder/Producer of future perfect limited, a US-based film and art production company. Current projects include Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People, Lawrence Burney’s Revisiting Ramona, and Savannah Wood’s Hard To Get and Dear Paid For. John was previously Producer of Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction Initiative, a program designed to encourage and support inventive artistic practice in documentary filmmaking. Supported artists and films included Garrett Bradley’s Time, RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Kitty Green’s The Assistant, Brett Story’s The Hottest August, Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead, and Sky Hopinka’s Maɬni – Towards The Ocean, Towards The Shore. John earned an MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

Adam Piron Producer

Adam Piron is a filmmaker based in Southern California. He’s a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, a Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) descendant and was raised in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to his filmmaking, he is the Director of Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program, and a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Programming Team. Piron has served on competition juries and panels for film festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Maoriland Film Festival, Palm Springs International ShortFest, Hot Springs Film Festival, and Art House Convergence. He has served as a mentor for the Whistler Film Festival’s Aboriginal Filmmaker Fellowship and as a NATIVe Partner Representative at the Berlin International Film Festival. He has also guest programmed showcases of Native Cinema at the Borscht Film Festival and the Eastern Oregon Film Festival and has also been a reader for Creative Capital.

Uncharted

Uncharted is an immersive dance performance inspired by 5,000 years of knowledge-generation from the continent of Africa. Uncharted challenges current limitations on the concept and form of an archive, by weaving together historical anecdotes, language, and performance, with transcontinental unions of Black movement and sound. It reimagines archives as an experience of embodied collective memory in a virtual space.

Ainlsee

Alem Robson Co-Director

Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist, and current Sundance-NEH Fellow. Her interdisciplinary practice involves an amalgam of film, installation, archival material, VR, and emerging technologies in digital art. Re-orienting emerging technologies to operate in service to, and from positions of decoloniality and Black consciousness, she creates counterimaginings and emancipatory narratives speaking to the liminal space between Africa and its diaspora. Her work has been exhibited by the New York Times, Vellum LA, Ars Electronica, MU, ZHdK, Forum des Images, and MoMA New York. Most recently, Robson has been invited to the Curator’s Special Projects “Guests From the Future” at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Robson’s nonfiction writing has been published by eFlux and Guggenheim, Art Africa, Vogue Italia, and OffRamp academic journal.

Kidus Hailesilassie Producer

Kidus Hailesilassie is an architect and speculative world builder whose practice intersects architecture and contemporary visual art. He focuses on hybrid forms of transcontinental expressions that reimagine and shape counter-narratives of Black consciousness. Kidus Hailesilassie is the creator of the Culture Archive, a multidimensional platform for research, think tanks, and dialogues that recenter the writing tapestry from African and diasporic writing systems. His recent project, the Uncharted Installation, an extension of the Culture Archive, won 2023 PitchBLACK by Black Public Media. His creative process includes physical installation design, production design, video installation, interactive environments, and still imagery. Since 2013, Kidus has collaborated with international artists and institutions such as Studio Other Spaces, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Forum des Images, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), and Contemporary And (C&). He is a former M.A. EDGE fellow at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, SCI-Arc.

Logan Elevate Grant 2023

The Logan Elevate Grant provides funds to emerging women and non-binary filmmakers of color directing feature-length journalistic documentary films. This grant provides story consulting for grantees and also funds educational programming throughout the year. This program is made possible by the generosity of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation and provided $380,000 to support 17 filmmakers since 2018.

Top: Coach Emily (wt)

Bottom: Untitled

Janay Boulos Director/Producer

Janay is a Lebanese journalist and filmmaker. She graduated with a Master’s degree in International Journalism from Brunel University. From 2012, she worked for BBC News in various roles, displaying versatility across TV, radio, and digital production. Her skills include shooting, editing, and field production in hostile environments.

In 2021, she started a production company, Habak Films, with her partner, Syrian filmmaker and activist Abd Al-Kader Habak. She has worked on several documentaries for BBC News and Al Jazeera Arabic and her focus centres around sharing stories of lived experiences within the Middle East, particularly from Lebanon and Syria.

Currently, she is immersing herself in the world of feature documentary production and has participated in several programmes such as IDFA Project Space, Documentary Campus Masterschool, Sheffield DocFest’s Future Producer School and Aflamuna Impact Lab. Boulos is currently working on a confidential project.

Pallavi Somusetty Director/Producer/Cinematographer

Pallavi Somusetty is an Oakland-based filmmaker who creates documentary portraits centering BIPOC voices in the hope that we feel fully seen in the complexities of our identities and journeys. She’s a series producer for A-Doc, and her feature debut in progress, Coach Emily (working title), is a 2023 DocLands DocPitch Industry Award Winner. Pallavi’s short doc, Escaping Agra, about a young transgender Indian teen’s escape from family, has screened in festivals across the world, and her award-winning cinematography has appeared on Nat Geo, PBS, and other media outlets. Her work has been supported by Center for Asian American Media, California Film Institute, IDA, The Puffin Foundation, Eddie Bauer, Studio IX Project, Center for Cultural Innovation, and more. Pallavi holds a documentary-focused Master in Journalism from UC Berkeley and a BA in Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz. In her spare time, she climbs rocks with her kids and supports incarcerated pregnant people as a doula.

Coach Emily

Emily Taylor, an Oakland-based queer Black rock climbing coach, fearlessly trains a diverse group of BIPOC girls and nonbinary kids, including her daughter Milo, to conquer not only the towering cliffs but also the pervasive discrimination they face in the great outdoors. As Emily empowers her students to claim their place in nature, she embarks on a profound journey of self-care, navigating the challenges that come with dismantling an industry rife with institutionalized discriminatory practices.

Arya Rothe Director/Producer

Arya Rothe is an Indian filmmaker and a co-founder of NoCut Film Collective, established in 2016 by filmmakers Cristina Hanes (Romania), Isabella Rinaldi (Italy), and Arya Rothe (India) after their studies within the DocNomads program. Their directorial debut, A Rifle and a Bag, received a Special Mention in the Bright Future Competition at the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film has been showcased at over 50 festivals and was also featured on MUBI. Arya Rothe has garnered support for her work from organizations such as the Doha Film Fund, IDFA Bertha Fund, DMZ Docs, AlterCine Foundation, and Creative Europe. Currently, she is co-producing two documentaries and has worked in various roles, including director, writer, and editor, on documentary projects for platforms like Arté, RTBF, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

Untitled

Somi, an indigenous woman from India, fought as an armed Naxalite to defend the land rights of her people. Now she has to fight for the same rights, but without her rifle. Her efforts to build a permanent home are cut short when another community claims ownership of her land.

The Direct Access Fund (DAF) awards small, targeted quick-response funds of up to $5,000 to media makers with disabilities. This fund and application approach was intentionally designed from data collected through the NAI Nonfiction Media Makers with Disabilities Survey, a community-based research project. This fund underwrites disabled media makers who practice fact-based storytelling at all career levels and are currently working on a project at any stage, including but not limited to: documentary, nonfiction podcasting, new media, immersive, and other types of nonfiction practice. The funding from this round’s cohort will go towards covering expenses such as insurance premiums, wheelchair-accessible vans, mental health support, medications, creative captioning and audio description, holistic therapies, festival travel, sign language interpreters for networking and screening opportunities, adaptive technologies and equipment, rent, crip time, etc.

Nonfiction Access Initiative Direct Access Fund 2023

Top: Prodigal Daughter Bottom: The Art of Dance

4 Holes

Pepe, an old Spaniard, has improvised his own golf course on the outskirts of Madrid. Daniela, a young Cuban filmmaker, discovers his routine as she tries to portray him. Both have hearing disabilities. Two very different generations and cultures meet through film.

Daniela Muñoz Barroso is a Cuban documentary filmmaker, producer and cinematographer. Her films understand and explore cinema from the perspective of her hypoacusia, proposing others soundscapes. An example of this is her feature documentary Mafifa (77’, 2021), premiered at IDFA’s Luminous and selected in numerous international festivals. It had its North American premiere at True/False Film Festival and screened at IDA SpringDocs 2023. She also directed the documentary short films Gloom (10', 2021), premiered at FICViña, Chile, with which she participated in the Open Doors program at the Locarno Film Festival, 2022, and recently finished 4 Holes, with world premiere at IDFA, and North American premiere at RIDM, Canada, at the end of 2023.

Her current feature-length documentary project Silence Diaries was selected for the Spanish Academy Residencies (2023-24), won the prestigious Chicken & Egg Pictures Research Grant awarded to women documentary filmmakers.

Daniela Muñoz Barroso Director/Producer

All Rivers Spill Their Secrets to the Sea

Jeanie Finlay Director

One of Britain’s most distinctive documentarists. Jeanie Finlay creates award-winning work for cinema and television, telling intimate stories to international audiences. She has made films for HBO, IFC, and four BBC Storyvilles.

Including; Sheffield Documentary Festival audience award winner Your Fat Friend, BIFA nominated Seahorse, Emmy® nominated Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch, BIFA nominated The Great Hip Hop Hoax & BIFA winning Orion: The Man Who Would Be King.

Jeanie received a 2023 Chicken & Egg award, an honorary Doctorate by Nottingham Trent University and won an inspiration award at Sheffield Doc/Fest. Her work has been showcased in retrospectives at MOMI, True Story, Criterion Collection and the BFI.

She is currently making her tenth feature film.

Like a biblical plague, a devastating tidemark of poisoned crabs appears on the Northern coastline of England. A story of corruption, betrayal, and environmental collapse, told by the fishermen whose Brexit votes were the catalyst for disaster.

Charlie Phillips Producer

Charlie Phillips (I am Charlie) is a documentary film producer, commissioner, programmer, and consultant based in Folkestone, Kent. He works with documentary makers from all across the world as producer and consultant on creative and financing strategies. He was previously the Head of Video at The Guardian for eight years, overseeing all moving image for The Guardian's platforms, including creating its award-winning documentary strand, which included the winner of the short documentary Oscar® in 2021 (Colette), the Oscar® short documentary nominee in 2019 (Black Sheep) and BAFTA Best Short in 2022 (The Black Cop).

He executive produced the feature documentary Seahorse and the series Scouting For Girls. He is also currently the main programmer for Folkestone Documentary Festival, and was previously Deputy Director and EP Industry Participation at Sheffield Doc/Fest, running the MeetMarket there for seven years, and leading training and mentoring programmes.

Arctic Blue

An unsettling underwater encounter leads an ambitious wildlife filmmaker to confront a reality he’s been trying to escape for 30 years.

Ismaele Tortella Director

Italian director Ismaele Tortella began his career as a wildlife photographer before moving to Tromsø, Norway and specializing as an Arctic cinematographer and documentary director. He has worked as a freelance cinematographer and drone pilot on international productions for the BBC, Silverback and DeepSea

Producer Anita Norfolk is the founder of Norwegian FOLK FILM. She has co-produced a string of internationally acclaimed feature documentaries, most recently Motherland (2023, winner CPH:DOX, nominated for the European Film Awards) and How To Save A Dead Friend (ACID Cannes, Grand Jury Prize DOC NYC).

Anita Norfolk Producer

Being Michelle

Atin Mehra

Director/Producer/Director Of Photography

Award-winning filmmaker Atin Mehra was born and raised in Varanasi, India and currently resides with his family in Los Angeles, CA. In 1999 Atin picked up his first camera and began taking photographs. Atin’s uncanny ability to connect with individuals from behind the lens eventually led him into filmmaking. His own struggles with abuse and discrimination in India draw him to stories of marginalized individuals and communities. Atin lived and worked in India until 2005, when he moved to the US with his wife and filmmaking partner, Mae Thornton Mehra. They have been producing social justice and impact driven films together for over 15 years at Orange Kite Productions. Being Michelle (2022) is Atin’s directorial debut for which he is a 2022 Firelight Media Impact Campaign Fund Grantee.

Being Michelle is an award-winning feature-length documentary film about a deaf woman with autism who survived incarceration and abuse and now uses her artwork to depict the trauma she survived and heal from her past.

Mae Thornton Mehra Producer

Mae Thornton Mehra has been producing social justice and impact driven films with her husband and filmmaker, Atin Mehra at Orange Kite Productions for over 15 years. She prides herself on openly creative collaborations between film participants and diverse production teams as she believes that impact begins within the filmmaking process itself. In 2020, Mae and Atin co-founded the nonprofit Thriving Roots Initiative to further their work of social impact documentary filmmaking. Mae is Producer on Being Michelle (2022), a documentary film that is helping to change the way Deaf and Disabled people are treated in criminal justice systems in the US and globally.

Calakmul at the Edge of the Sun

Erika Vianey Lopez Gomez Director

Erika Vianey Lopez Gomez is internationally recognized for her commitment to harmony between humanity and nature. In 2013, she played a crucial role as the executive producer in the creation of the documentary short film Calakmul World Heritage, as part of a research and documentation project in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of Campeche, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, UNESCO, and the Federal Government of Mexico. This film received an honorary mention from the World Wildlife Fund Sassari for its stunning biodiversity images. Currently, Erika is actively engaged in the dissemination phase of the research project "Living Human Treasures of the State of Yucatán," which she presents through the documentary short film Ah Mucen Cab,The Honey Keeper. This film honors Fermín Dzib May as a bearer and transmitter of ritual knowledge related to the melipona beecheii bee. Ah Mucen Cab has been featured in festivals such as DOCS MX, Cinema Planeta, El Lugar que Habitamos, and others, and is part of the Mexico showcase in Berlin.

1 million hectares of tropical forest, approximately 90 communities inhabiting it, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, the second-largest tropical forest in the American continent, is in the midst of a transformation, facing the arrival of mega-projects and gentrification processes.

It's worth mentioning that Erika López received support from the Doc Society's Emergence Film Fund during the pandemic to continue her documentary research activities. She is currently an active member of Vivero Ambulante, a group composed of 34 filmmakers dedicated to strengthening networks of filmmakers working in defense of land and the environment. She is also part of Climate Story Lab, a project supported by BILM, Doc Society, and Mullu TV, where she is gaining expertise in developing her feature film project within the Ecuadorian Amazon. Her ongoing documentary feature project is titled Calakmul: On the Edge of the Sun, which explores the challenges faced by the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve from a community perspective. Erika has been recognized by UNESCO for her conservation work in Mexico's first Mixed Heritage site, and her contributions to these documentaries represent a continuous commitment to creating meaningful and relevant content in challenging times.

Crip Crap

Kennedy Producer

Kennedy (she/they) is a Fat, Queer, Crip, writer and media maker. From Omaha, Nebraska, and now based in Chicago, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Women and Gender Studies with an individualized concentration in Disability Studies from DePaul University. Kennedy has experience working directly with people with various types of disabilities in nonprofit settings and consulting on disability and accessibility in medical, academic, arts and culture, and other industries. Her visual art and photo project (made in collaboration with Marley Molkentin) titled Care has been featured at Gallery 400, Tangled Art Gallery, in the Chicago Reader, Disability Visibility Project blog, and the anthology Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire edited by Alice Wong. Their musical Care: The Musical was a finalist for the William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Playwright Residency and the recipient of Residency Fellowships from 3Arts/Bodies of Work and the Ragdale Foundation. Kennedy’s in progress works include a television show and children’s books. She is a Libra who loves plants, her cat, and feminist country music.

Meet us at the crossroads of disability and anything — politics, culture, and more! We’ll get into it on Crip Crap: The Podcast. With Justin Cooper, filmmaker, photographer, and founder of Cooper Industries and Kennedy Healy, writer, media maker, and founder of Crip Crap. Music by Christea Parent a.k.a. MoLess.

Justin Cooper Producer

Justin Cooper (he/him) is a Black visual artist and disability advocate who has worked professionally in art and film since 2012. The lack of media representation amongst people with disabilities motivated him to work on his documentary film The Wheelchair Chronicles. As an advocate, Justin is the President of the Young Professionals Council at Access Living and works with the racial and social justice advocacy group AYLP (Advance Your Leadership Power). He also works as a committee member for the annual Chicago Disability Pride Parade and as a board member for the Illinois Partners for Human Service (IPHS). As an artist, Justin founded his own media company, Cooper Industries, in 2018 that focuses on his filmmaking and photography work. In 2020, Justin was selected as a Junior Artist In Residence for the Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL) in conjunction with Access Living, and in 2021 was a 3Arts/Bodies of Work Residency Fellow. Justin views his work as a personal form of expressing himself. Justin combines his artist, advocate, and activist work to highlight how disability is defined by societal, environmental, social, and physical barriers.

Looking for Tchaiko

Looking for Tchaiko is a documentary collage by a child of Pan-Africanist activists in the Caribbean Postcolonial Independence Movement. Interweaving her story with those of her agemates and elders, the filmmaker — now a mother wanting to repair generations of harm and raise a resilient child up to the task of defending and protecting the earth — excavates the roots of her family’s namesakes.

Tchaiko Omawale Director/Producer

Tchaiko Omawale is a director-writer, and producer whose filmmaking is influenced by growing up in eight countries by the age of 16. Her impulses for fantasy connect to African indigeneity and the healing powers of body and spirit. She centers an ethic of care, a creative process grounded in intuition, and deep listening to her body, her dreams, and her motherhood. Tchaiko’s debut feature film Solace, about a Black girl navigating an eating disorder, is streaming on Paramount+ and KweliTV, and won Special Jury Mention for Best Ensemble cast at the LA Film Festival and an Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival. Tchaiko’s short fantasy film SITA was exhibited in the Project Row House show “Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter” co-curated by Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. Tchaiko’s episodic work includes Queen Sugar, Sacrifice,and Good Trouble

Arielle Knight Producer

Arielle Knight is a New York-based filmmaker and creative producer. Through her own filmmaking practice and in collaboration with like-minded creators, Arielle aims to inundate the world with the dreams, visions, and beauty of diverse perspectives on screen. Arielle has directed emotionally resonant short form and commercial projects for clients like Lexus, Audible and eBay. She has also worked to champion progressive political issues and candidates through her work with Everytown Against Gun Violence, the Stacy Abrams campaign and ActBlue. Her work has been sustained through the support of the Jacob Burns Creative Culture Fellowship, Chicken and Egg, NYC Women’s Fund for Media in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts, If/Then and Field of Vision. Arielle is a member of the Brown Girls Doc Mafia. In 2020 she was selected as one of four emerging directors to receive funding and support from Tribeca Studios and Queen Latifah’s Queen Collective, her short film A Song of Grace premiered at the Tribeca film festival in 2021 and won Best Documentary short at the 2021 Idlewild Film Festival. Arielle is currently developing her first directorial feature project.

Midwaste

Liz Roberts Co-Director

Liz Roberts makes artwork that is often collaborative and rooted in moving image and sound. Liz has exhibited widely with film festivals, museums, art galleries, and alternative spaces. The short film Midwaste premiered at Hot Docs in 2022. She lives in Berkeley, California with her teenage son.

Bree Laursen Co-Director

Bree Laursen was born in Thailand and raised in Decorah, Iowa. A resident of New Orleans since 2000, Bree is an active member of her community in the Bywater district where she resides with her wife. This will be Bree's first return to directing since the documentary she and Liz filmed in 1996.

Two friends from the midwest reunite after 25 years by using a VHS archive to connect the long thread of their past selves to who they are now. Midwaste is a vivid and personal exploration of drug use, race, and the criminal justice system.

Sarah Strunin Producer

Sarah Strunin is a documentary producer living in Los Angeles, CA. She recently worked as a Producer at This Machine Filmworks. Prior to that, she co-produced director Liza Mandelup’s feature film, Caterpillar, which premiered at SXSW in 2023, as well as the documentary series Murf The Surf by Director R.J. Cutler. In 2018 and 2019 she worked as a Story Producer on R.J. Cutler’s Apple TV+ Series Dear and the acclaimed STARZ documentary series Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult, directed by Cecilia Peck. Sarah was a Points North Fellow in 2023. Her background as a casting and story producer and her affinity for connecting with people, motivates her interest in telling character-driven stories that can speak to the global issues of our time and the human experiences that connect us all.

Qadriyyah ‘Q’ Shamsid-Deen Producer

Qadriyyah ‘Q’ Shamsid-Deen is a film and tv creative advocating for powerful passionate, groundbreaking non-fiction stories with a focus on women, people of color and community development. Previously an executive at Higher Ground Productions, the Obamas' production company for Netflix - she went on to produce the Emmy, BAFTA, and NAACP nominated hybrid children’s food and travel show Waffles & Mochi and Waffles & Mochi’s Restaurant staring Michelle Obama. She also produced and directed the Home series for Apple TV+.

As a program director for Ryan Murphy Television’s Half Initiative, Q worked to make Hollywood more inclusive by creating equal opportunities for women and minorities behind the camera.

Prodigal Daughter

When artist and filmmaker Mabel Valdiviezo reunites with her family in Peru after sixteen years of silence, she confronts childhood memories and her troubled past as an immigrant in the United States. Diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, Mabel embarks on a deeply emotional journey to heal her fractured family ties, using her art as a bridge between two worlds. Prodigal Daughter is a poignant exploration of family, reconciliation, and the power of love and creativity.

Mabel Valdiviezo Director/Producer

Mabel Valdiviezo is an award-winning non-binary indigenous Latine filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and alumna of the Sundance Producers Conference. Utilizing a poetic vocabulary, her work explores migration, gender equality, mental health, and spirituality. Valdiviezo is a Gotham Documentary Lab fellow, and her work has been supported by AXS Film Fund, BGDM, NALIP, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Fleishhacker Foundation. Her film credits include Carlos Baron, Poeta Pan, documentary short, PBS/ KQED (director/producer), The Water’s Muse, experimental short (director/ producer), Sands of Silence, feature documentary, PBS World (associate producer), River Webs, PBS (feature doc editor), and Women with Altitude, (feature doc editor). Her narrative film Soledad Is Gone Forever premiered at Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and received the Women in Film Emerging Filmmaker Award. Her script, Soledad’s Awakening, was a finalist at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Mabel is a member of UFC, BGDM, FWD-Doc, and NALIP.

Sara Maamouri Editor/ Producer

Sara Maamouri is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and editor who has explored a diverse range of topics for over 20 years. Her work touches on social, educational, and political issues. Her recent films include Black Mothers Love & Resist (SFFILM 2022), directed by Débora Silva Souza, and Clarissa’s Battle (HRWFF NYC 2022), directed by Tamara Perkins and produced by Maamouri. Maamouri edited and produced We Are Not Princesses (premiered at Doc NYC 2018), and edited and co-produced the Peabody Award-winning film The Judge (premiered at TIFF 2017 and won the Best Bay Area Documentary Feature at SFFILM Festival 2018). A multilingual Tunisian educated in New York and California, Maamouri brings cultural sensitivity to her editing, production, and story development, creating impact-focused narratives to attract and engage rapidly evolving audiences.

Raving For Access

Raving for Access unveils the vibrant and little-known world of queer-crip nightlife and offers a captivating exploration of a community that intersects the experiences of queer and disabled individuals. Through intimate interviews, captivating visuals, and immersive storytelling, audiences are introduced to a diverse group of key players within the queer-crip nightlife scene, including passionate party organizers who navigate societal barriers to create inclusive spaces that foster a sense of belonging and freedom, and party-goers who find solace and acceptance in these unique spaces.

Cuéntame Collective

Cuéntame is a grassroots organization dedicated to disrupting mainstream narratives surrounding disability through collaboration and care. Founded in 2016 by siblings Connor and Ryan Roach, Cuéntame addresses the noted lack of representation of disabled individuals in mainstream media. Since its inception, Cuéntame has produced impactful projects such as the documentary film Cuéntame: Historias de Activismo, which highlights the efforts of five women advocating for accessibility in Lima, Perú. Their publication, Exploring the Impact of Ableism: A COVID-19 Photo Essay Series, delves into the experiences of disabled individuals during the pandemic's first year in 2020. Beyond media projects, Cuéntame provides free community workshops in Perú to support disabled individuals and their families with occupational therapy both at home and in the community. Twice recipients of the Awesome Foundation Disability grant, team members have also been invited to speak at esteemed events like the Reel Abilities Film Festival and various universities on accessibility.

Cuéntame's team consists of:

• Ryan Michael Roach (they/them), a co-founder and healthcare professional, focuses on reshaping societal perceptions of disability. Their expertise in occupational therapy spans populations in the United States and South America, while their collaborative art endeavors empower disabled individuals in mediar epresentation in front of and behind the camera.

• Connor Roach (they/them), co-founder with a degree in photography and design from the University of Applied Sciences Europe- Berlin, specializes in storytelling challenging mainstream narratives of disability, chronic illness, neurodiversity and queerness. Drawing from personal experience, their dedication to the disability community is evident in their artwork, contributing to a more inclusive representation of disability and queer culture.

• Martín Lazarte (he/him), the animator and designer, brings a wealth of experience in graphic design and illustration, particularly in campaigns for marginalized communities. His artistic exploration covers themes such as queer relationships, family, and nature.

Reconstructing Education: The Freedmen's Bureau Schools

The contentious post-Civil War public/ private partnership between Black communities, the U.S. Government, and the White charitable societies that founded The Freedmen's Bureau schools across the South to educate freed African Americans during the Reconstruction era is told in this documentary through an exploration of southern history and the Bureau’s management records of schools in Prince George's County, Maryland.

Talaya Grimes Filmmaker

Talaya Grimes is the Founder and Chief Creative of T Muse Media. Colleagues have dubbed her the master of everything, a living library, and the queen of getting it done, perfect monikers for a Director/Producer/ Researcher & Project Manager. Since 2018, she has produced three short films by independent creatives (N.0.S., HESS, and Studio With A View), two plays (Stuck & The Woman Who Would Be King), and one podcast (Forest From Trees). She was the Director of Communication and Development and Grants Manager for Humanities DC and Communications and Program Manager for African Grantmakers’ Affinity Group. Her work experience includes various production roles on productions for Discovery Channel, National Geographic, PBS, and Smithsonian Networks. Talaya was a Board Member of Women in Film & Video in Washington, DC, Women in Film & Television International, and a co-founder of Creative Edge Collaborative, a film collaborative in Maryland. She has degrees in Media Studies and Government and Politics.

Renegades Series

Renegades is a digital series of 10-minute documentary shorts showcasing the lives of diverse, littleknown Americans with disabilities: renegades, rebels and revolutionaries and their impact on and contributions to U.S. society.

Amanda Upson Director/Producer

Amanda Upson transitioned from legal practice in labor and employment law to become an independent producer. Her first film, Magnum Opus, a spy thriller with timely themes, premiered at the 2018 Virginia Film Festival. She produced the social justice documentary, A Long March, 2022

Better Angels Lavine Fellowship Recipient, about FilipinoAmerican veterans. Named one of FORBES “40 to Watch Over 40,” Upson speaks regularly about representation and accessibility. She serves on the Inclusion and Structural Equality Committee of Documentary Producers Alliance, was selected for the 2021 RespectAbility Entertainment Professionals Lab, was selected for Realscreen’s 2022

DIALOG Mentorship Program, and named DOC NYC New Leader 2022. She is an active member of the Colorado Disabled Bar Association, Deaf and Hard of Hearing Bar Association, and is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar. Currently, she serves as Interim Director of FWD-Doc, a global, intersectional community of disabled creators and allies working in media to build a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable entertainment industry, by cultivating and championing disabled media-makers, and elevating stories by, for, and about disabled people.

Somebody's Gone

Hubert

Taylon Co-Director, Grantee

Hubert Taylor was born and raised in a musical family in Fitzgerald, Georgia, where he still lives today. He learned to play piano and organ at a young age, but he found his true calling in running audio at his father’s church. After serving in the Navy, Hubert returned to Fitzgerald, where he worked as a record producer, musician, cameraman, high school cheerleading coach, and martial arts educator. In 1983 he shot and edited the independent film Shades of Black. Somebody's Gone is his first feature production, and has received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2022 Points North Fellowship.

Brother Theotis Taylor harvested turpentine, preached, and sang spirituals in a sublime falsetto that made him the pride of South Georgia. Driven by a divine vision, his son, Hubert, filmed it all. Forty years later, Somebody’s Gone completes the story of a great artist through the archive of his prodigal son.

Cyrus Moussavi Co-Director

Cyrus Moussavi is an Iranian-American filmmaker and producer of musical artifacts. He is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee and Points North Fellow for Somebody's Gone. His films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, Anthology Film Archives, and the Blum & Poe Gallery, LA, among others, and his music-related news documentaries have been published by NBC News, Time, and the Wall Street Journal. Since 2019, he has been owner of Mississippi Records, an independent record label releasing overlooked music. He works directly with artists and their heirs to equitably reintroduce their work to an international audience.

Brittany Nugent Producer

Brittany Nugent produced Lonnie Holley and Cyrus Moussavi's “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019 and streamed on the Criterion Channel. Her work has screened internationally at institutions including Blum + Poe, The Speed Art Museum, BAMCinemaFest, The Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, Mawaheb Fest St. Petersburg and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She is a three-time judge for the IDA Awards and as a published visual and media anthropologist, she has served as a guest lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin.

The Art of Dance

Kevin John Fitzgerald Director

Kevin John Fitzgerald is an Award-Winning and Critically Acclaimed filmmaker of Indigenous heritage and African descent known for his feature documentary film Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme. It screened at numerous film festivals worldwide and won several awards including the HBO Documentary Award and Kodak Maverick Award. Kevin is also a former radio and club DJ and music artist having performed with Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Wu-Tang Clan, Macey Grey, and Black Eyed Peas. He attended USC Film School and was taught directing by Jay Roach, GA (Austin Powers), screenwriting by Robert Mckee and sound by Tom Holman (inventor of THX) of Lucas film.

Kevin directed and produced a documentary on Macy Gray. He followed this with the film 7-Days In Paris about Ben Harper. Kevin was also the Director of Photography on the documentary film Sound of Spirit, featuring Common.

The Art of Dance is an unprecedented cinematic experience that ignites inspiration and dares us to come alive by tracing the evolutionary healing power of Indigenous and African movement, music, culture, and community. Innovative and immersive, this documentary awakens our souls through the beauty and courage of some of the world’s most celebrated dancers on a journey of connection.

Anand Ramaya Producer

Founder & Principal of KarmaFilm, Anand Ramayya is a multiple Gemini Award (Canada's Emmy®) winning producer focused on filmmaker driven animation, documentary and drama.

Ramayya's films have sold widely, screened at numerous festivals internationally and been recognized for reflecting diversity. In addition to producing, Ramayya is a passionate documentary filmmaker and father of Owen and Inna Mead-Ramayya.

The Broken R

"My name is Ricardo. For 24 years I've struggled to pronounce the letter R, causing me to suppress my voice. This documentary essay is an intimate journey in search of my voice’s identity and the effort to liberate it, reflected by my personal journey going back to my parent's home."

Ricardo Ruales Director

Born in Ecuador, Ricardo Ruales directed the short documentary film The silence of time, which participated in several festivals around the world. He collaborates with the International Documentary Festival of Ecuador EDOC and has been a member of INCUBADORA S.A. since 2017, and is the screenwriter of the feature films Cuenteros and Duhkha. The Broken R is his first feature-length documentary film. It has been selected at Conecta, SANFIC (NALIP and We Plot awards), Labex (development award), Pitch Edoc, Lau Haizetara, IDFA Academy, Documentary Campus (CPH:DOX Award) and When East Meets West (Tasrkovsky Award).

Soledad Santelices Producer

Soledad Santelices Is founding partner of the production company INCUBADORA S.A. Her work as a producer has been developed between Ecuador and Chile. She produced the feature films Much better than you, winner of best film at the Warsaw Film Festival, and The Facilitator. She was head of the L90 Digital Cinema project where she advised 20 fiction and documentary feature films. She was the creator of the LADAE Experimentation Laboratory. Producer of several festivals and exhibitions in Ecuador, she produced You (are not) here, a series made during the lockdown of the pandemic. She is currently producing Cuenteros (national production fund), The Broken R (ICCA development fund, Ibermedia development fund, Sundance Doc development fund, Bertha Fund development fund), and Duhkha (Cine Qua Non script workshop selection).

Total Running Time

Total Running Time explores temporalities of care, abstracting the halted rhythms of the day and strictly controlled telecommunications for incarcerated people. Scrambled text, interrupted messages, light without the sun: Sales uses these gestures of disrupted social and sensorial experience to interrogate the material entanglements between incarceration, disabled life, labor, and the extraction of time.

Josephine Sales Director

Josephine Sales is an artist working with time-based media, sculpture and performance to consider how disability may expand our relational capacity. The artist's work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kai Matsumiya, New York and The Shed. Recent engagements include Black Box Residency at University of California Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology (2022-2023), and scenic design for Kinetic Light's Wired. Sales received an MFA in Photography from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College and lives and works in New York City.

Turbulence: Jamais Vu

A unique mixed reality project exploring movement and the fragility of perception, drawn from director Ben Joseph Andrews’ experience of a chronic vestibular disability.

Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts are an XR artist duo based on Wathaurong country (kayjup/Linton) in Australia. They are passionate storytellers who seek to reawaken curiosity and instil a sense of awe and wonder to the world that surrounds and permeates us.

Their work integrates interactive technologies within public-facing installations (location-based XR) to create collective experiences from the ecstatic to the sublime. They have produced some of the largest location-based works in Australia, including innovative installations Allthestarstheybleedtogether (2016) and Starless (2017), both commissioned by City of Melbourne. Their 2022 project Gondwana, premiered at Sundance 2022 before showing at SXSW, Sheffield Doc/ Fest, DocAviv, MIT Open Doc Lab, ACMI, Science Gallery Michigan, and Kunstahl Charlottenborg (Denmark) among others.

Gondwana has been one of the most critically and commercially successful XR works made in Australia, winning Best Interactive/Immersive at the 2022 Australian Directors Guild Awards and the Australian International Documentary Festival awards; it continues to tour as a travelling installation with bookings secured until 2025, facilitated by leading XR distributor Astrea Immersive.

Their most recent project, Turbulence: Jamais Vu, premiered at IDFA in 2023 where it won ‘Best Immersive Non-Fiction’ in competition and was awarded ‘Best Project’ in the DocLab Forum.

They have presented keynotes for NYU Tisch School of Art, MIT Open Doc Lab and spoken widely at Sundance New Frontier, ACMI, MIFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Melbourne Knowledge Week, Electric Dreams XR Conference, and Melbourne Festival.

Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts Co-Directors

Untitled Pennhurst Documentary

Nathan R. Stenberg Co-Director

Nathan R. Stenberg is a firstgeneration developmentally disabled college graduate from a low-income, single-parent family in rural Minnesota. Stenberg works as an artist, consultant, certified personal trainer, public speaker, and scholar-activist. He is interested in how the stories we tell about disabled people influence everything from depictions of disability in popular entertainment to policy decisions for the disability community in the United States. He is currently the inaugural Director of Disability, Culture & Inclusion at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.

Mike Attie Co-Director

Mike Attie is an award-winning filmmaker whose films have screened at major international film festivals including CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, San Francisco and Sundance. He is an associate professor of film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Attie’s feature documentary In Country was supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Points North Institute and the Gotham Doc Lab. His 2020 short documentary film Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa played at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, won the grand jury award at AFI Docs and was shortlisted for an Academy Award in the Documentary Short Subject category. Attie is also the parent of a child who is on the autism spectrum.

After a class action lawsuit shutters an institution for disabled people due to years of horrific abuse, a new group of disabled actors reclaims the space to create a haunted house inspired by their own collective history.

Katarina Poljak Co-Director

Katarina Poljak is an awardwinning filmmaker whose work has screened at The Kimmel Center, Vox Populi Gallery, and several international film festivals including ARFF Paris, Queen Palm International, LGBTQ Unbordered International and Rethink Dance. Their performance-based films are informed by a critique of social traditions and technology. They are a 2022 Artist in Residence at Mascher Space Cooperative and are working to bring a new short film, Source Architecture, to life. Their interest is in telling characterdriven stories that can speak to the global issues of our time and the human experiences that connect us all.

Daniel J. Chalfen Producer

Daniel J. Chalfen is co-founder of Naked Edge Films and creative consultant to The deNovo Initiative, is a Peabody and duPont-winning and multiple-Emmy® nominated film and television producer. His recent films include Loudmouth (executive produced by John Legend, Showtime/BET); Delikado (PBS/POV); Captains of Zaatari (Hulu); the Netflix Original Pray Away (executive produced by Ryan Murphy); the Sundance 2019 awardwinners The Infiltrators and Always in Season; the Tribeca 2018 awardwinner United Skates (executive produced by John Legend, HBO); and Bathtubs Over Broadway (executive produced by Jason Blum & David Letterman, Focus). Recently released deNovo supported films include Pay or Die, Eternal Memory, Body Parts, Bad Axe, Black Mothers, and I Didn’t See You There

Vivian's Wild Ride

Vivien Hillgrove Director/Producer

Vivien Hillgrove is a documentary film director and a picture and dialogue editor in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 50 years of experience in the film business. Her feature picture editing credits include The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry and June. Her sound editing credits include Blue Velvet, Mosquito Coast, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Never Cry Wolf, One From the Heart, and many others. She edited eight of Lourdes Portillo’s films including La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead, The Devil Never Sleeps, Corpus, and Senorita Extraviada, as well as three films by Deann Borshay Liem: First Person, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee and Geographies of Kinship She is a member of AMPAS, and has served as an advisor for numerous Sundance Documentary Composer/Edit Labs. Vivien’s Wild Ride is her directorial debut.

After a long career in cinema, veteran film editor Vivien Hillgrove discovers she is losing her sight, catapulting her into unknown territory where she is haunted by a previous loss. What unfolds is an unconventional documentary memoir that invites viewers into the artist’s inner world while she grapples with encroaching blindness and struggles to reinvent herself at age 70.

Deann Borshay Liem Producer

Deann Borshay Liem is an Emmy® Awardwinning documentarian known for her landmark adoption films, First Person Plural, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee and Geographies of Kinship, as well as films that explore the legacies of war and militarism, including Memory of Forgotten War, the Legacies of the Korean War Oral History Project, and Crossings. She has served in a producing capacity on numerous films including The Apology, Mimi & Dona, Seeing Allred, Dorothea Lange: Grab A Hunk of Lightning, The Eddy Zheng Story, Kelly Loves Tony, AKA Don Bonus and many others. Deann’s work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Independent Television Services, California Humanities, Sundance Institute and many others.

Dawn

Valadez Producer and Impact Producer

Dawn Valadez is a queer, Xicana filmmaker, social worker, artist, youth development specialist, resource wrangler, and impact strategist. Her award-winning feature documentary Going on 13 premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Dawn is co-director/ producer of The Pushouts and has been awarded numerous awards and honors, including the Al Bendich Berkeley Film Foundation Award, a Chicago Media Project Impact Prize, and the Imagen Awards' Best Documentary Award.

What Kind of Mother

Ten years after her mother’s suicide, the filmmaker takes a short road trip around British Columbia to visit people who had been in proximity to her late mother. What Kind of Mother follows the filmmaker’s attempt to come to terms with who her mother was, as she considers having children herself. A meditation on illness, memory, and motherhood.

Olivia Dreisinger Director

Olivia Dreisinger is a disabled writer and filmmaker. Her own fluctuating abilities often dictate how she produces work—a process that regularly leads her to new and generative mediums to explore. She is interested in animals, disability, and unexplained phenomena.

Her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, the National Film Board of Canada, and IDA. In 2021, she received the Emerging Digital Artist Award from EQ Bank. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at the University of British Columbia in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine.

Who Moves America

Covering a staggering 350,000 workers, the contract between UPS and the Teamsters union expires mid-summer 2023, and the threat of one of the largest strikes in U.S. history looms large. This intimate, character-driven documentary depicts the ins and outs of this highly consequential labor battle, following Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and a diverse array of rank-and-file UPS workers in New York, California, and Kentucky as they put everything on the line to win better working conditions.

Yael Bridge Director

Yael Bridge is an Emmy®-nominated documentary producer and director. Her directorial feature debut, The Big Scary "S" Word premiered at Hot Docs 2020 and on Hulu in 2022. Previously, she produced Left On Purpose, winner of the Audience Award at DOC NYC as well as the Netflix Original film, Saving Capitalism, starring former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, which was nominated for an Emmy® Award in Business and Economics. She served as Head of Production at Inequality Media, where her viral videos tackling complex political issues have gained over 500 million views. Yael was included in DocNYC’s 40 Under 40 list of 2021 and was a 2022 resident at the Jewish Film Institute. She is the Co-President of the Documentary Producers Alliance and proudly serves as chair of their Labor Committee. She holds an MFA in documentary film and video from Stanford University and an MA in media studies from the New School.

Field Building Fund 2023

Based on the principles of trust-based philanthropy and mutual aid, the IDA Field-Building Fund supports equity and diversity in the field by giving microgrants and rapid-response support to independent grassroots organizations/initiatives and individuals. Piloted in 2020, the Organizational Field-Building Grant awards up to $5,000 to organizations/initiatives with operating budgets under $50,000. The project-specific grant is awarded quarterly to two or three organizations. Nominations are elicited from previous grantees, IDA team members, and partners. This fund is made possible through the generosity of individual donors (big and small), foundation partners, corporate sponsors and IDA advertizers.

The Neighborhood Women Making Movies Project

Izmir, Turkey

About the Collective

"The Neighborhood Women Making Movies Project" brings together women from diverse backgrounds in cinema workshops across different regions of Turkey. Following an intensive six-month training in various aspects of filmmaking, women proceed to shoot their own films.

About the Supported Workshop

The Bilge Olgac Cinema Workshop will take place in Izmir. Approximately, 20 women from diverse backgrounds are expected to attend this workshop. The objective is to teach the fundamentals of filmmaking and to assist women in developing and producing nonfiction and fiction films. The start date is February 26, 2024.

Docubox

The East African Documentary Film Fund- Docubox, exists to support & to enable talented, driven, and focused East African filmmakers, with important and unique stories to tell, to produce high impact independent documentary films that unearth new realities about worlds, identities, and people for audiences in East Africa and around the world through granting opportunities, capacity building through workshops and masterclasses, and audience building through Impact Screening Campaigns in schools & communities.

IDA Supported Artist Award 2023

The IDA Supported Artist Award, a branch of the IDA Field-Building Fund, partners with regional festivals to distribute $2,500 and IDA support to film projects. So far, IDA has partnered with Docs by the Sea and Durban Filmmart to select films from their pitch programs.

Top: The Old Land Middle: Always Bottom: Cirta

Docs by the Sea (DbtS) is an annual international documentary lab and forum based in Bali, Indonesia, dedicated to cultivating creative documentary projects from Asia. As part of DbtS, Asian documentary projects receive mentorship and pitching opportunities, establishing connections with other filmmakers in Asia as well as international industry guests.

IDA partnered with Docs by the Sea to select Always and The Old Land as IDA Supported Artist Awardees.

A young poet Gong Youbin who embarks on a journey of self-discovery, expressing his emotional connection to his family and memories of childhood through poetry.

Chen Deming Director

Chen Deming, an independent director and photographer currently based in Beijing. He studied at the Li Xianting Film School. His first feature documentary film Song of Shiratori, which was selected into the 43rd NAFA Nordic Ethnographic Documentary Film Festival and won the Silver Award at the 4th Chinese Ethnographic Documentary Exhibition and the Best Newcomer Award at the Chinese Documentary Academy Awards. Among them, Deming's 18 min short Night Tour was selected for the 13th FIRST Youth Film Exhibition.

Hansen Lin Producer

Hansen Lin is an independent filmmaker currently based in China and New York. He holds a master's degree in social documentary filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts. His collaborative works have been published on platforms such as HBO, Amazon Prime, Tencent, and BOSS Zhipin, and have been shortlisted for multiple international film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, and HotDocs.

The Old Land

On the banks of the Banjir Kanal Barat River in the bustling city of Jakarta, Panana (67), an elderly man who has spent 30 years living on the river's flow with his traditional "getek" boat, is dealing with challenges of river pollution, water level fluctuations, and unpredictable weather. Every day, he works to ferry local residents across the river using his "getek" boat.

David Darmadi

David Darmadi is a filmmaker from Sumatra, Indonesia. His work has screened at international festivals such as Visions Du Reel-Nyon Swiss, Sheffield Doc/Fest UK, Singapore International Film Festival, Arkipel Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival and Images Festival Toronto.

Zaky THPM

Zaky THPM - Studied at Jakarta Art Institute majoring in cinematography and started his career as a crossdivisional film crew. He also has produced several short films. After graduating from film school, he started his career as a producer working with David Darmadi in 2021.

In the city of El Kef, where the oncebeloved Cirta cinema now stands as a café, Cirta intertwines the tales of Bahri Rahali and Lamine Nahdi, childhood friends turned renowned comedians, with the faded glory of a cultural icon. Through a hybrid of fiction and documentary, the film explores the interplay of memory, nostalgia, and the passage of time against the backdrop of a community's cherished landmark, illuminating universal themes of intergenerational relationships and the enduring power of storytelling.

The Durban FilmMart is Africa's premier finance and co-production market. The DFM provides selected African filmmakers with projects in development an opportunity to pitch film projects to leading financiers and content buyers. The DFM is produced by the Durban FilmMart Institute which was created to provide effective programs and services in order to promote, support and facilitate investment in the African film industries, so that African film industry professionals and products are competitive and celebrated globally.

IDA partnered with Durban FilmMart to select Cirta as IDA Supported Artist Awardee.

Saif Chida Director

Saif Chida is a Tunisian director, artistic director of the Act Kef – Arts association for cinema and theatre in Kef and cinema teacher in a primary school. He designs cultural programs for Kef schools, participates in the creation of several music and film festivals (FCKEF, artistic caravan).

Producer

Saif Chida is a Tunisian director, artistic director of the Act Kef – Arts association for cinema and theatre in Kef and cinema teacher in a primary school. He designs cultural programs for Kef schools, participates in the creation of several music and film festivals (FCKEF, artistic caravan).

Dhia Jerbi

Getting Real Fellowship 2024

Launched in 2022, IDA’s Getting Real Fellowship is designed to create community amongst nonfiction writers, makers, and workers who would not normally have connected in such an intimate way. The second cohort of the fellowship comprises 16 fellows— eight filmmakers and eight industry professionals from the U.S. and around the world—who are burgeoning creative leaders in documentary film. From April 15–18, 2024, we will welcome them to Getting Real ’24 as one of the conference’s official Delegations. After the conclusion of the conference, fellows will co-program a yearlong series of public and private panels and workshops, building a robust, global, and peer-to-peer network.

Arno Mokros

Co-Director, UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) | USA

Arno Mokros (he/they) is a queer/ trans film producer and co-director of UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org), a nonprofit that makes space for the next generation of truly independent filmmakers to work, connect, and thrive. Based in New York State, UFO's programs include an 18-month Short Film Lab for early-career directors hosted at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), feature filmmaker residencies in The Catskills, and other partnershipdriven initiatives to cultivate a more robust filmmaker support ecosystem. He also coordinates NewFest's grant for emerging LGBTQ+ filmmakers, and recently produced the independent feature film, Summer Solstice, directed by Noah Schamus.

Atiqa Kawakami Filmmaker | Japan

Atiqa Kawakami was born in Yokohama, Japan. In 2001, she was awarded the second prize in the Kirin Art Award for her first short documentary titled "Pilgrimage". In 2004, she embarked on a project documenting the final years of legendary butō dancer Ōno Kazuo. Her first feature-length film, called With Each Passing Breath had a world premier at Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2023. In addition to directing, she has also worked as a producer, participating in the Japan-Taiwan co-production of Tocha (2008) as a co-producer and Clearness (2007) as an associate producer. She also produced French filmmaker Vincent Moon's Japan tours in 2017 and 2018.

Berry Hahn Sales Agent | South Africa

Berry Hahn represents author-driven fiction and documentary features at Square Eyes, sales company which helps outstanding non-mainstream films find the audience and recognition they deserve. Regularly serving as jury member and decision-maker on various international events, she has been actively involved in supporting emerging storytellers shaping a strong film ecosystem between the Global South and North. Berry was previously on Generation Africa, a STEPS panAfrican collection of documentaries about migration experienced by African youth, and a Producer on Mzansi in the time of Covid-19, a collection exploring the pandemic's impact on disadvantaged South African communities. In 2021, she was a film programmer on feature documentaries for the Durban International Film Festival. Realness Institute alumna, she participated in U30 in 2023 with Locarno Pro and in the Southern Africa-Locarno Industry Academy in 2021. Berry is a Documentary Association of Europe, International Documentary Association, and Collectif 50/50 member.

Bethania Maia

Executive Producer at Vaporosa Cultural/ Director of RastroDocumentary Film Festival | Brazil

Bethania Maia has been producing and programming exhibitions and festivals since 2011 and curating since 2014. She's worked as executive producer on independent audiovisual projects since 2018, having produced music videos, short and feature films, seminars and publications. She is the co-creator of Rastro – Documentary Film Festival and founder of Vaporosa Cultural, a production company based in Brasilia, capital of Brazil, with a focus on Latin American Afro-diasporic narratives.

Colleen Thurston

Director/Producer, Film Programmer USA

Colleen Thurston is a documentary storyteller and film curator from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her films explore the relationships between humans and the natural world and focus on Indigenous perspectives. Colleen has produced for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, PBS, and federal, tribal, and non profit organizations. Her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide. She has received support from Firelight Media, the Sundance Institute, Patagonia, ITVS, the Redford Center and Creative Capital.

Colleen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, the project coordinator for the Indigenous video series, Native Lens, and is a programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and Make Believe Seattle. She’s curated film programs for institutions such as the Momentary (Bentonville, AR), UCLA Film and Television Archives and Vidiots (Los Angeles, CA), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). Colleen is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Iryna Tantsiura

Programmer, Filma Feminist Film Festival | Ukraine

Iryna Tantsiura is a programmer at Filma Feminist Film Festival focusing on intersectional feminist values, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, inclusion, and a culture of consent. She has a queer feminist activist background and decade of experience in human rights related projects. In addition to the above, she also works as an independent researcher. She is based in Kyiv, Ukraine.

J. Faye Yuan

Filmmaker | USA

Jameisha Prescod

Artist / Filmmaker | United Kingdom

Born in Shanghai and raised in Indiana, J. Faye Yuan is a New Yorkbased bilingual curator, producer, and documentary editor. With support from Tribeca Creators Market, Doha Film Institute, and Women Make Movies, Faye produced and edited her first feature about a maverick Chinese animal activist. In 2022, she edited an award-winning film documenting the 100-year long history of jazz in China. She is a 2023 PBS Diverse Voices Fellow, where she will direct and produce a digital series episode about natural disasters and extreme weather. In addition to filmmaking, she is a curator for the Queens Memory Project – a community-led archiving program supported by Queens Public Library and Queens College. She is the host of the third season of the Queens Memory Podcast about the diverse Asian immigrant experience in Queens, NY.

Jameisha Prescod is an artistfilmmaker and writer from South London. Their work uses storytelling, moving image and digital technology to seek connections between medicine, disability and Black history.

As an artist, Jameisha uses their research-based practice as a means of archiving stories about Black-disabled experiences from the past and present by centering voices from people of African descent on the continent and across the diaspora.

Jameisha is also the founder and creative director of You Look Okay To Me, the online space for chronic illness. They explore the social and cultural aspects of living with a chronic condition through visual mediums.

Jameisha is currently an associate artist at Forma Arts & Media in London and a trustee for London Arts & Health Forum.

Juan Pedro Agurcia

Artistic Director, Tercer Cine / Producer and Programs Manager, The Flaherty | Honduras

Juan Pedro Agurcia works in cinema production, programming, promotion and distribution. His efforts center around access and experimentation with forms of gathering and creating community through film. He’s cofounder of Tercer Cine, the only independent exhibition project in Honduras, where he serves as Artistic Director and Programmer. He is the Producer and Programs Manager at The Flaherty. He has previously collaborated with organizations like Cinema Tropical, UnionDocs, Camden International Film Festival, among others. He served as juror for the Ícaro International Central American Film Festival in Honduras and was part of the selection committee for the IDA Documentary Awards (2022, 2023). He was selected to take part in the Locarno Industry Academy Latin America in Morelia (2022) and FICUNAM’s Seminario Público del Futuro (2022). He is the co-founder and editor of Corrientes, a trilingual digital platform dedicated to expanding access and opening conversation with and through experimental Latin American cinema.

Kayla Myers

Programmer and Black Creators Forum Manager, Indie Memphis | USA

Kayla Myers is a film programmer, writer, and filmmaker. Currently, she works as a programmer and Black Creators Forum Manager at Indie Memphis. She’s previously held roles as the Series Producer for The DocYard in Cambridge, MA, and as a Features Programmer for the 2021 and 2022 San Francisco Documentary Festivals. In addition, Kayla’s writing has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Them., and Vox Magazine. She is passionate about intersectional feminist practices within film, making films more accessible to those not living in large filmmaking centers, and developing audiences with a thoughtful, community-centered approach.

Marouan Omara

Filmmaker / Lecturer / Programmer Egypt

Marouan Omara is a filmmaker, educator, programmer, and arts administrator. He passionately supports Arab and African cinema, offering expertise and mentorship to organizations as Rough Cut Lab Africa, Hot Docs-Blue Ice Film Fund, Doha Film Institute, and The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.

Marouan's films blur the lines between fiction and documentary, utilizing cinema as a genuine tool of research. His last feature-length film Dreamaway achieved significant recognition. It was shortlisted for an Egyptian Oscar® nomination and named the best Egyptian film of 2019 by the Egyptian Critics Association. His films are regularly featured at prestigious festivals such as Berlinale, IFF Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary IFF, London FF, Yamagata IDFF, Ji.hlava IDFF, and DOK Leipzig.

Since 2012, Marouan has been an Associate Lecturer of Film Production at the German University of CairoGUC, where he shares his knowledge with aspiring filmmakers, contributing to the industry's future in Egypt and beyond.

Natali Chkhartishvili

Project Manager / Audience Designer Georgia

Natalie Chkhartishvili is a graduate of School of Governance and Social Sciences from Free University Georgia. She has been involved in cultural projects, Kolga Tbilisi Photo Festival, where she has been assisting in curating the exhibitions. In 2019 Natali joined the Chai Khana team as a project manager. Currently she coordinates creative documentary distribution project - KineDok Georgia, works on festival submissions, and offline organizes screenings. Natalie also assists Chai Khana in strategic fundraising.

Shilpi Gulati

Filmmaker / Academic | India

Shilpi Gulati is a filmmaker and academic based in Mumbai. She has been working at the intersections of documentary history, theory and practice for over 15 years. Her films explore feminist and queer narratives, visual and performing arts and issues of identity, home, and nationhood in the South Asian context. She has twice received the President's National Film Award in India for her documentaries Qissa-e Parsi (2014) and Lock and Key (2017).

A Fulbright scholar, Shilpi recently completed her Ph.D. at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she critically looked at the ecosystem of production and exhibition of contemporary Indian documentaries. She is currently teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and has been actively engaged in campaigns against censorship, protecting national film archives, programming community media workshops and developing support networks for independent filmmakers in South Asia.

Soe Arkar Htun

Producer | Myanmar

Sophia Rhee

Writer / Producer | USA

Tony Nguyen

Cultural Worker | USA

Soe Arkar Htun is a Deputy Director of Yangon Film School and one of the co-founders of Kefka Film Production. The first short documentary he directed in 2014, A Political Life, won the Watersprite (UK) ‘Filmmaker of the Future Award’ and was nominated for Best ASEAN documentary at Salaya Documentary Film Festival in Thailand. He worked as an editor and sound recordist in various projects before focusing on his producing career. In 2018, he received a scholarship to study international film production at the Busan Asian Film School in South Korea. Later, he and two other colleagues founded Kefka Film Production. Soe Arkar Htun is also an alumnus of the Locarno Open Door Lab, Asiadoc Producer’s Workshop in Cambodia, the Hanoi International Film Festival Talent Campus, and Fajr International Film Festival Talent Campus. In 2020, he produced The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong, supported by the Luang Prabang Film Festival, as part of its Mekong 2030 program. He recently released his latest feature-length documentary project, Song of Souls, directed by Sai Naw Kham in Sheffield Doc Fest 2023.

Sophia Rhee is a writer and producer based in Chicago. Trained as a visual artist and ethnographer, Sophia has worked on non-fiction films and contemporary moving image artworks that have been presented at the Berlin International Film Festival, Metro Pictures Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She is committed to building a career in Chicago and developing resources and equitable pathways for documentary professionals in the Midwest.

Tony Nguyen is a Des Moinesborn, Dallas-based cultural worker who recruits talent for movement organizations, distributes for Sentient. Art.Film., co-founded the Latin American Film Festival of Dallas, programs for the Austin Asian American Film Festival, operates the digital infrastructure at Viet Film Fest, and founded Spacy, the first ever microcinema in Dallas, TX.

IDA Funds Team

Keisha Knight Director of IDA Funds keisha.knight@documentary.org

Maria A. Santos IDA Funds Program Officer maria.santos@documentary.org

Katy Hurley IDA Funds Coordinator katy.hurley@documentary.org

Ranell Shubert Nonfiction Access Initiative Funds Program Manager ranell.shubert@documentary.org

Cielo Saucedo

Nonfiction Access Initiative Funds Program and Access Coordinator cielo.saucedo@documentary.org

IDA Artist Programs Team

Abby Sun Director of Artist Programs & Editor of Documentary Magazine abby.sun@documentary.org

Gabriella Ortega Artist Programs Manager gabriella.ricketts@documentary.org