2019 Flaherty Seminar Fellows
The fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support from John Bruce, California Institute of the Arts, California College of the Arts, Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Duke University, The Film Study Center at Harvard University (FSC), Firelight Media, Tribeca Film Institute, The Flaherty Curatorial Fellowship, Kate Cashel Fund of The Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region, Lucy Kostelanetz, Leo Dratfield Endowment, LEF Foundation New England, Erica Levin, Jill Mosebach, Paul Ronder Endowment, Princess Grace Foundation-USA, Steve Schrader, Sol Worth Endowment, University of California San Diego, University of Colorado, University of Rochester, Vision Maker Media, and Waterman II Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation.
FLAHERTY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FELLOWS
David de Rozas is a multi-disciplinary artist and award-winning filmmaker living and working in Los Angeles. His practice merges experimental documentary and contemporary art forms, revisiting and relocating the past-present-future between the tensions of colonization and decolonization, and confronting the politics of memory as a way to reaffirm possibilities and action. David’s films have been screened and awarded in festivals worldwide, such as Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, Full Frame, and the inaugural Smithsonian African American Film Fest. De Rozas is working on his first feature that focuses on the current Los Angeles’ Downtown explosive development. The film aims to break the binaries that present the core of the city as a place in perpetual state of decomposition and recomposition. De Rozas lectures visual style, documentary, and experimental cinema at SFSU School of Cinema.
Tania Hernández Velasco is a Mexican filmmaker and film programmer. Her first feature film, "Titixe" (2018) is a sensory and poetic exploration of the neglect of rural roots and the loss of a primary relationship with nature in Central Mexico. The film has been selected in Festa del Cinema di Roma, FICUNAM (Estímulo Churubusco Award, TV UNAM Selection Award), Festival de Málaga (Special Jury Mention), Full Frame Festival, among others. Velasco holds a Masters Degree in Creative Documentary and a Postgraduate Diploma in Editing from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). She previously completed a BA in Film in Centro de Diseño, Cine y TV (Mexico City). Her documentary short films have premiered in festivals around the world including ZagrebDox and San Sebastian International Film Festival. She currently resides in Mexico City, where she is Senior Programmer for Los Cabos International Film Festival and develops her second feature film.
Steffanie Ling is currently the Artistic Director at Images Festival in Toronto. Previously, she was co-curator of Events + Exhibitions at VIVO Media Arts Centre; Vancouver (2017-18). Her criticism on contemporary art, cinema and literature have been published in Artforum.com, Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Flash Art, Hong Kong Review of Books, San Francisco Art Quarterly among others. Her art writing has appeared alongside exhibitions in Canada, United States and Europe and have also been conducted as performances, readings at the Vancouver Art Gallery and SFU Galleries as critical responses to the works of Takashi Murakami, James Benning and Feminist Land Art Retreat. Most recently, she began collaborating with musician and filmmaker Casey Wei to edit and publish STILLS: moving image tract, an experiment in correspondence criticism between Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. Her research is excited by tangible intersections of political form, moving image (cine-tracts, cine-poems and anti-bias educational videos), and anti-capitalist strategies.
Yu Zhang (kk) is based in Beijing, China. After getting her degree in oil painting, she has been working with numerous events as a curator/planner, and writing for media platforms including Art Newspaper (CN) and Artforum(CN). As the Director and Co-founder of World Organization of Video Culture Development (Beijing, CN), Zhang is devoted to create a better scene for artistic moving-images in China, through her curatorial effort in organizing film/video programs, public event, performance and publication, as well as through providing institutional support to young filmmakers/videomakers. She is also the Consultant of Almost Art Project, the first art festival in China that specializes in showcasing the works of outsider artists. In addition to art, Zhang had years-long experience in non-profit social work institutions such as Smile Angel Foundation and CSWF Yes Program, out of her interest in personal/collective self-organized practice towards a bottom-up social reform.
GEORGE STONEY FELLOW
Tenzin Phuntsog is a filmmaker and artist who recently relocated to live and work in Montana. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Film at Montana State University. Before moving West, he worked for over ten years in New York producing a personal body of work from a uniquely Tibetan American perspective. His research interests lie in the inherent qualities of cinema and cultural preservation. His creative practices embrace both digital and analog film practices behind the camera and from a culturally restorative perspective. In 2005 he founded the Tibet Film Archive: Devoted to the preservation of rare celluloid films shot inside Tibet pre-occupation. His experience in preservation has had a profound effect on his personal work, recently culminating in his first feature documentary film “Rituals of Resistance” which screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 2018.
FLAHERTY CURATORIAL FELLOWS
Jheanelle Brown is a film curator and arts educator based in Los Angeles. Her curatorial practice is committed to honoring, expanding, and empowering Blackness in visual and filmic media. Her specific interests are oriented around experimental and non-fiction film and video, the relationship between musicality and cinema, political film and media, and West Indian film/video. She is currently guest co-curator for Black Radical Imagination with Darol Olu Kae, an associate programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum, and a curriculum developer for the Centennial High School film club. Jheanelle is co-curator, with Sarah Loyer, for Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today.
Tzutzumatzin Soto holds a Bachelor in Latin American studies and an MA in Political Communication and a MA in management and preservation of photographic collections. She has overseen the video, photo and digital movies collections at the Cineteca Nacional since 2012. She is an advocate of indigenous audiovisual archives preservation, the screening of archival materials and the research of Mexican avant-garde filmmaking. She has collaborated in the creation of programs for the exhibition of archival material in different festivals such as the Ambulante Documentary Film Festival and Reencuentros al margen with the Experimental Film Laboratory.
PHILADELPHIA FELLOWS (Supported by the Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation)
Bettina Escauriza is a Paraguayan- American filmmaker, writer, artist, and musician living in Philadelphia. She is a natural storyteller from a family of frustrated mystics, spectacular liars, ill-fated thieves, and awful politicians. Her work deals with Indigenous knowledge (specifically Guaraní epistemologies), colonization, migration, anarchism, and exile. Her aim as a filmmaker is to tell stories about Indigenous people and people of color that are lush, sensual, thrilling, and complex — whose aim is to tell the truth about the communities she comes from by centering narratives of joy, defiance, and resistance in the face of oppression. Bettina is a Sundance Knight Fellow, a Research and Curatorial Fellow at Slought (UPenn), and an IEar Fellow (RPI).
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lamont Nathaniel Gibson is a young artist whose in-depth emotional knowledge has helped him become a transformative Producer/Director. Lamont is a Senior, at the Film and Media Arts School at Temple University, concentrating in Directing. Lamont has produced/ written/directed a student short film titled “Omad" which explores hyper-masculinity in a homosexual relationship and what happens when a couple doesn't find common ground. He also produced and directed mini bio-documentary about an aspiring director and a student being push out due to gentrification in West Philadelphia section of Squirrel Hill. His main focus is social change and a variety of African American narratives from horror to drama.
Ben Mendelsohn is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) where his research focuses on the intersections of critical urban studies and documentary practices, especially along the global urban coast. His article, "Making the Urban Coast: A Geosocial Reading of Land, Sand, and Water in Lagos, Nigeria” appears in the December 2018 issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and his public scholarship has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Public Books. He is currently completing two films: As If Sand Were Stone, exploring earth moving along New York City’s waterfronts, and Building Lagos, about a Nigerian filmmaker’s aborted documentary about a controversial coastal megadevelopment.
Chet Catherine Pancake is an award-winning visual and sound artist whose film, installation, and fine art works address social critique and change as well as formal ingenuity and experimentation. Their work has been exhibited in major museums (Museum of Modern Art - MoMA) and critiqued in international art publications such as Artforum. They view their practice as deeply rooted in the local & personal, exploring their immediate community in Pennsylvania, their identity as a queer/trans person/parent, and on-going explorations of ecological/environmental/family trauma, solastalgia, and healing. They also engage in a rigorous practice of curating and supporting fellow artists through a fine arts gallery in their home. They are also an educator teaching at Temple University with research interests in the relationship of queerness and sound, art and technology, as well as evidence-based pedagogical approaches to overcoming inequity in high school technical training for students in freshman film and media arts classes.
Josette Todaro is a producer, director, filmmaker and multi-media artist who often integrates her two passions: performance and moving image. Her first film Arise and Go Now is an exploration of improvisational techniques on set. She is currently working on A Turning Point, a documentary with performative elements that parallels the history of an all girls’ farm school with the socio-political climate of the last 100 years. Before she turned to film studies, Josette was a professional stage director and producer in Philadelphia. Her critically acclaimed directorial work includes Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife and Octavio Solis' Lydia. Josette holds an M.F.A. from Temple University in Film and Media Arts and an M.A. from Villanova University in Theatre. Josette currently teaches film classes at Rowan and Temple Universities.
Michelle Y. Hurtubise is a Visual Anthropology PhD student at Temple University focusing her research on Indigenous media and the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto. With a background in art and activism, she did human rights and media work in Rio de Janeiro with Augusto Boal’s Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed through The New School as part of her Master’s thesis for New York University’s Center for Experimental Humanities. She also received an MFA in theatre from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied Asian performance and toured shows to the Hawaiian Islands and Tasmania. Originally from the West Coast, she grew up engaged with various social justice, performance and migration projects. Michelle enjoyed her last jobs with the Center for Artistic Activism and the Center for Media, Culture and History.
LEF NEW ENGLAND FELLOWS
Sabrina Avilés has worked as an independent film and video producer for over 25 years, many of which have taken her throughout Latin America, Canada and Europe. Her list of credits include American Experience’s “American Comandante,” “An Unexpected History: the Story of Hennessy and African Americans” and “The Raising of America,” a PBS documentary series about early childhood development produced by California Newsreel. In 2012, she worked on the Peabody award-winning PBS series, “Latino Americans.” That same year, she received development funds from the prestigious Independent Television Services (ITVS) to begin work on a documentary about the sterilization of Puerto Rican women. In 2016, Ms. Avilés became the Executive Director of the Boston Latino International Film Festival, after having served as its Associate Director from 2004 – 2007. Born in Washington Heights, Ms. Avilés’ family originates from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. She earned a B.S. in Broadcasting/Film from Boston University.
Carl Elsaesser’s practice, spanning non-fiction films, writing and installation projects, is concerned with ambient forces that inscribe potential. By paying attention to relations between and within economies, identities, ecologies and aesthetics while using tools and strategies cultivated through hybrid and experimental means, he aims to foster projects and practices that keep conversations open, curious and continuous. As Tan Lin has stated in his studies on paratexts, “Can literature resemble a cookbook or a Powerpoint lecture”. Elsaesser might add to this by asking, can film resemble a text message you are notified about throughout the day which causes both anxiety and desire? Can film resemble the rush of direct sensation that meditation brings awareness to? By thinking expansively with film his practice addresses relations that are often impossible to point at directly but are still specifically impactful. Carl’s work has screened internationally and won awards such as the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Gabby Sumney is a media artist and educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. They currently split their time as a Videographer for Harvard University and as an Affiliated Faculty Member at Emerson College, where they teach 16mm production and Media History. Gabby works in experimental nonfiction with a special emphasis on issues of identity and personal narrative.
Georden West is a media artist whose work explores historic authenticity, queer hagiography, and reimagines historical characters in the context of modernity. They build visual experiences reflective of the subculture, history, and daily lives of queer people, building filmic and installation experiences that resist universalization and commodification. Georden holds a BA and a Certificate in Advanced Leadership Studies from Hollins University and was the recipient of the Annie Terrill Bushnell and the Nicole Kohn Film Awards along with being a Batten Scholar. West was an Emerson Fellow and received their MFA from Emerson College in December 2018. Their work has been exhibited at the Distillery Gallery, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Olin Hall Galleries, and Greenpoint Gallery. Georden's fashion work has been exhibited domestically and internationally; they were nominated in categories including Best Director and Best Cinematography at the International Fashion Film Awards in 2018. They have assisted on shoots for clients including British Vogue , Calvin Klein, Dior, V Magazine , AnOther Magazine , and more, specializing in lighting design and cinematography.
CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF ARTS FELLOW
Born in Shan Dong China, Yumeng Guo now studying at CCA in San Francisco California is a collaborative driven person with 5 years of experience in film making. She has had a growing interest in non-fiction filming since her arrival in the U.S. in 2018. Yumeng focuses on biographical films that can convey various stories from common people. The stories that interest her the most are of hardship, struggle, and their ability to remain happy and positive through it all. Yumeng is constantly interested in learning new things and always looking for new inspiration. She enjoys working closely with others to be able to build relationships and draw inspiration to strengthen her work. Her primary goal in the near future is to create a documentary about her home town.
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS FELLOWS
Joie Estrella Horwitz is an artist, filmmaker and curator based in Los Angeles, California and Tucson, Arizona. Born in the small bordertown of Nogales, Arizona her work contemplates the in-between space borders cast onto the identities of those in proximity. She attempts to illuminate the multi-dimensional complexities surrounding otherness. Horwitz uses 16mm film, digital media, and multi-channel video installation to conceptually portray the intricacies and layering embedded in human interaction. The portraits she develops explore diverse cultural identities that work to elucidate stereotypical portrayals in media through voyeurism, questions of surveillance, and the witnessing of evidence. Her past curatorial experience was in partnership with the collaborative curatorial practice, Sorry Archive, that uses diverse disciplines and unconventional display formats to frame exhibitions and produce an ever-shifting series of events. She is currently completing her MFA in Film/Video at CalArts where she has received the Lillian Disney Scholarship and Visiting Artist Fellowship.
Rob Rice is director and neuroscientist from Western Massachusetts. He is currently in postproduction on his first feature, In Memory of Mark Staggs, an elusive hybrid about class and family starring more than thirty first-time-performers from a tiny desert community in Eastern California alongside one or two traditionally trained actors from Los Angeles. Before that he worked in rural Mormon communities in Southern Idaho, made the experimental horror short Hand Fruit and Loss for Words, a music video on 16mm for Colyn Cameron’s album Sad and Easy. After completing an M.S. in Neuroscience, he worked for two years as a genetic engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is currently living in Los Angeles and attending the Film Directing MFA program at CalArts where his practice focuses on existential risk, American extremism, the body and the mind.
CENTER FOR ASIAN AMERICAN MEDIA (CAAM) FELLOW
Vicky Du is a Taiwanese-American filmmaker based in New York. Her short film GAYSIANS (Frameline, 2016) screened at 35+ film festivals around the world, had a public television broadcast on KQED, and was distributed to 1000+ middle and high school LGBTQ student groups. Vicky has also directed a short documentary for PBS Art21's "New York Close Up" digital series and was the Associate Producer of FREE SOLO (Oscar Winner, 2019). Vicky has directed, produced and edited digital and broadcast short documentaries for National Geographic, The New York Times, The History Channel, and The New Yorker. She is a worker-owner of Meerkat Media, and she has a BA in Biological Anthropology from Columbia University. Vicky is currently working on her first feature documentary on intergenerational trauma and Chinese diaspora with support from Points North Institute, CAAM, BAVC and ITVS.
DUKE UNIVERSITY FELLOWS
Michael Anthony Betts, II: BA UNC-Chapel Hill, 2011; is currently pursuing his MFA in Experimental Documentary Arts at Duke University. Betts has worked as a Sound Designer for North Carolina regional theater companies and provided exhibition audio for Hidden Voice's None of the Above and Serving Life: Revisioning Justice. He worked on Howard Craft’s The Miraculous and Mundane and shot for NPR’s Marketplace “Pass-through” episode in January 2019. His design with Sonny Kelly’s The Talk travels to the Atlantic Coast Conference and Smithsonian Institute’s’ ACCelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival 2019. Notable collaborations: Mike Wiley Productions' Podcast Parallel Lives, a joint endeavor with UNC professor Dr. Miguel La Serna surrounding Latin American geopolitical armed conflicts, death row inmate Michael J. Braxton’s audio memoir, production for Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies Doc/X Lab’s Shortwave Radio, mixing for independent film short Push The Point, and Princess Grace fellow Sarah Riazati’s Monumental.
Alex Morelli is a documentary artist and educator from Stamford, CT. His moving image work draws from personal nonfiction, cinéma vérité, and experimental film traditions, with particular attention to marginalized characters and communities. In addition to teaching film and video making alongside Ross McElwee, Alfred Guzzetti, Josh Gibson, and Anna Kipervaser, he has worked in production at HBO Documentaries and as a freelance cinematographer and editor. In recent years he has pitched at the Salem Film Festival and Independent Film Festival Boston, and his latest short, Truth or Dar , premiered at Cosmic Rays Film Festival in Chapel Hill, NC. A recipient of grants from the LEF and Puffin foundations as well as the Film Study Center at Harvard, he is currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke.
THE FILM STUDY CENTER AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY (FSC) FELLOWS
Shireen Hamza is a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University. Her doctoral research is on the history of ṭibb (which some call Islamic medicine), and how it came to include both Galenic and Ayurvedic concepts in the Indian Ocean World. She is interested in introducing non-Western knowledges into mainstream curricula, and to that end, has produced interviews and narrative podcasts for Ventricles and The Ottoman History Podcast. This led her to work towards a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, where she has been exploring the potential of sound and image to represent multiple ways of knowing the body. For her capstone project, she will be working with contemporary practitioners of ṭibb in South Asia. Shireen is also a translator of Arabic literature.
John Hulsey is an artist and filmmaker. His first film, This Side of History, premiered at Cinéma du Réel in 2019, where it received the Prix International de la Scam. He studied at Harvard University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of Paris-III Sorbonne Nouvelle. His videos and public projects have been exhibited internationally at The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Human Resources Los Angeles, the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennial, among other venues. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Cinéma, and Creative Time Reports.
FIRELIGHT MEDIA FELLOW
Vaishali Sinha is an award-winning filmmaker originally from India. She is the director/producer of the recently released feature documentary ASK THE SEXPERT about a highly popular 93-year-old sex advice columnist in India. The film premiered at Hot Docs International Film Festival 2017, won the jury award for Best Documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival, received a nomination for a Grierson Award in 2018 and the Critics Choice Award for "Best Documentary" in India in 2018. ASK THE SEXPERT has traveled to over 40 prestigious film festivals globally and was invited to IDFA Amsterdam as "Best of Fests". The film is available on digital platforms. Vaishali also Co-Directed/Produced the feature documentary MADE IN INDIA about the personal stories behind the phenomenon of outsourcing surrogate mothers to India. The film premiered at Hot Docs Film Festival, won several jury awards and aired on PBS in 2012. It was also nominated for the Ridenhour Prize for excellence in truth-telling.
PRINCESS GRACE FOUNDATION USA-FELLOWS
Daniel Chein is a Taiwanese American documentary filmmaker whose work explores transculturalism and expressions of identity in the performative. His feature documentary in development, Sonsplitter, profiles a German Turk dancer for the internationally renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, weaving together his identity, trauma, and search for belonging. Daniel is a recipient of the BAVC National Mediamaker Fellowship and the Princess Grace Award in Film. He is a member of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc) and a board member of the Global Lives Project. Daniel is currently a SFFILM FilmHouse Resident and visiting faculty at the University of California Berkeley. He holds a BA in Anthropology and received his MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University.
Hung P. Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker, based in San Francisco. He graduated from UC Berkeley, and attended the film program at Loyola Marymount University, where he was awarded the School of Film and Television Dean's Award, the top graduate program honor. Hung was a Sony Pictures Entertainment Fellow, and recipient of the Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation. His documentary Going Home premiered at Tribeca, won prizes at Palm Springs International, Festival of Short Films, Vietnamese International Film Festival, and was nominated for an IDA award. It has been taught at Stanford, NYU and Hunter College. Nguyen is a pioneer in viral video advertising, leading the ad industry's first viral campaigns for Levi's, Pepsi, Taco Bell and others. His campaigns have attracted national media attention, with coverage on GMA, MTV, NYT and thousands of other digital and broadcast outlets.
TRIBECA FILM INSTITUTE FELLOW
Mridu Chandra is the Director of IF/Then Shorts- a new initiative developed by Tribeca Film Institute to stimulate the production and multi-platform distribution of short form documentary storytelling. She is a filmmaker and producer of award-winning documentaries and independent feature films that explore topics of civil rights and peace, gender and sexuality, environmental justice, and the law. Credits include producing Ask the Sexpert (Hot Docs/ Doc World), Out In The Night (LAFF/ POV) and The Canal Street Madam (SXSW); and co-producing Brother Outsider (Sundance/ POV), This Changes Everything (TIFF), and Electoral Dysfunction (WTTW / PBS). Additionally, she has over 15 years of experience as a visual media researcher and clearance specialist for documentaries such as WHOSE STREETS? and Shadow World, and has taught documentary research, development, and rights clearance courses at The New School, NYU’s School of Continuing Studies, and at The New York Film Academy.
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER FELLOWS
Eliseo Ortiz’s work has been presented as films, videos, installation work and more recently as performances, action pieces, games, processes and publications. He has been involved in numerous collective exhibitions, film festivals and conferences. His installation and performance work have been presented in Mono No Aware in NYC and Centro Cultural Tlatelolco in Mexico City, his experimental films had been selected for the San Diego Underground Film Festival and Experiment in Cinema in the U.S. He has been benefited by the National Fund for Culture and Arts of Mexico and the Fulbright Program. He hold an M.F.A. degree in media arts from the University at Buffalo and is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Joshua Westerman is a Colorado based interdisciplinary artist and musician who works with installation art, graphic scores, field recordings, appropriated content, improvisation, and video. His work utilizes and critiques emergent media and aesthetics while still showing a fondness for established disciplines. Recent performances have focused on the gamification of intimacy. Most often he works with the contemporary social and political issues brought about by the ubiquity of digital technology. Josh is a graduate of California Institute for the Arts where received an MFA in Experimental Sound Practices and Integrated Media. He is currently attending the University of Colorado Boulder where he is a PhD candidate in Critical Media Practices. His mentors are Laura Steenberge, Tom Leeser, Clay Chaplin and Tara L. Knight. He has had works premiered by Iris Sidikman, Thomas Sturm, the Calarts Ensemble, SICPP ensembles and at the New Music Lab in Montreal.
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER FELLOW
Madeline Ullrich is a PhD student in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester, where she is focusing on television studies, contemporary cinema and media studies, with intersecting interests in feminism(s), queer theory, and gay and lesbian studies. She completed her Master’s degree in art history at the University of British Columbia with the thesis titled “Partial Vision: Remediations of the Algerian Veil in Film and Scholarship After Fanon.” Before graduate school, Madeline lived in Washington, D.C. where she worked and interned at a number of museum institutions and cultural organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Smithsonian
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO FELLOW
Asa Mendelsohn is from New York. He makes performances, film, and media projects that develop through a process of recording, writing, and collaboration, often focusing on personal relationships and desire as ways to navigate seemingly inaccessible infrastructures, histories, and systems of power. Asa works as an educator and organizer, and often with other artists as a writer, editor, and performer. He has performed and exhibited at venues including Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, and Anthology Film Archives, New York. Asa studied visual arts and anthropology at the University of Chicago, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Vienna. He is currently an MFA candidate in visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he is learning about voice and security, passing, crossing, and resistance.
VISION MAKER MEDIA
KATSITSIONNI FOX - WRITER/DIRECTOR/PRODUCER - MOHAWK has been making films since 2003 in the Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne, where she resides. Her most recent film is “Ohero:kon - Under the Husk” a 26-min documentary following the journey of two Mohawk girls as they take part in their traditional passage rites to becoming Mohawk Women. Katsitsionni received the Jane Glassco Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the imagineNATIVE Film Festival in 2016 as well as the Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking Award at LA Skins Fest in 2016. This film received funding from Vision Maker Media and has been broadcast on many PBS stations in 2017. She is currently producing a series of twelve short segments for REMATRIATION - a Native American women's online, multi-media magazine that will be launched in 2018. It is focused on healing and empowerment of Native women through the sharing of their stories and successes. Katsitsionni is currently in production for her latest documentary “Without a Whisper”. Without a Whisper is an untold story of how Native American women helped to fire the struggle of American Women for freedom and equality in the suffrage movement. This story is shared by Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner and Mohawk Clan mother Wakerakatste Herne with the backdrop of today’s women’s movement.