2023 Flaherty Fellows

Abby Lord

Flaherty Professional Development Fellow underwritten by Perspective Fund
Abby Lord (she/her) has worked at the Harvard Film Archives, MIT Open Documentary Labs, UnionDocs, and the Flaherty. She is currently Programs Associate at Perspective Fund, a philanthropic organization that supports social justice-oriented documentary films and organizations.

Blair Barnes

Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation Fellowship
Blair Barnes (he/him) is a creative from South Central Los Angeles. He is most interested in rendering the moment to contest and misplace space. Informed by his foundation as a photographer and art director, he enjoys the hybrid mode of address. Formerly he was at Vimeo, where he served as Curator. Prior to Vimeo, he contributed to the production and creative teams at Wieden+Kennedy and VIRTUE, the creative agency by VICE. He’s currently working on Shadow Ban, an experimental verité about occupied Palestine, censorship, and the fidelity to capitalism in relation to the subject. He received his BA from the University of Oregon, and will be pursuing an MFA at Northwestern in 2023.

Cam/a.c. Howard

LEF New England Fellowship
Cam a.c. Howard (they/them) is a writer, ‘zinemaker, and multidisciplinary artist, and the program coordinator at the Points North Institute in Maine, USA. Their work focuses on queer coming of age, community care, nature, music, and the future. a.c. has made short films, interactive workbooks, comics, podcasts, and fiction & nonfiction zines. Their writing has appeared in The Bollard, Oroboro, and their newsletter The Deal. They are currently working on an essay about Brian Eno, and a comic about trans-masculine lesbian identity. Cam studied radio and podcast production at the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and documentary filmmaking at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They live on Wabanaki land with their leopard gecko, Nero.

Courtney Montour

Kate Cashel Fund George Stoney Fellow
Courtney Montour is a Kanien’kehá:ka filmmaker from Kahnawà:ke in Quebec, Canada, whose work explores issues of Indigenous identity. Her documentary works include Mary Two-Axe Earley: I Am Indian Again, 2021, Flat Rocks, 2017, and Sex Spirit Strength, 2015. She is invested in supporting filmmaking and educational opportunities for Indigenous youth, as well as strengthening relationships and understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. She co-founded and coordinated McGill University’s Indigenous Field Studies course, held in Kahnawà:ke, for eight years. Courtney is currently directing a feature documentary on Team Indigenous Rising, a borderless nation team representing Turtle Island in Flat Track Roller Derby. She is a recipient of the 2022 NDN Collective Changemaker Fellowship.

Imani Dennison

Flaherty Curatorial Fellow
Imani Dennison (she/her/they/them) is a multidisciplinary lens-based artist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY by way of Louisville, Kentucky. Imani graduated from Howard University where they studied Political Science and Photography. Imani’s work interrogates histories of Black culture in the South and African diaspora, usually centered in folklore, fantasy, and oral histories. Imani is head Curator and Programmer at Black Science Fiction, a Black-led creative experiment dedicated to the preservation of Black imagination. Imani is a part of the 2022 Tribeca Queen Collective Directing Program where they are in production on their experimental documentary Bone Black: Midwives vs the South.

Jeremy Stulberg

NBC Original Voices Fellowship
Jeremy Stulberg is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer, producer and editor. He is a Sundance Documentary Fellow, an alumni of the Artists Academy at Film at Lincoln Center, as well as the recipient of grants from numerous organizations including the Sundance Institute, NYSCA, Tribeca Film Institute, ITVS, Colin Higgins Foundation, Arcus Foundation and Fledgling Fund.

Lauren Ruhnke

Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation Fellowship
Lauren Ruhnke (she/her/them/they) is a queer feminist scholar and current Anthropology PhD candidate at Temple University where she studies how queer digital media and film help foster experiences of community belonging. Lauren recently returned from Mumbai, India where she enjoyed exploring these topics in collaboration with queer activist groups centering digital and cinematic fora. A long-time Philadelphia resident, Lauren received her BA in Global Studies from Temple University, where her thesis research focused on transforming understandings of gender and sexual diversity in colonial India. Lauren’s work is inspired by the queer nightlife and performance cultures of Philadelphia as they’ve influenced her own pursuits of belonging and self-understanding.

Morisha Moodley

Northwestern University Fellow
Morisha Moodley (they/them) is a London and Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, arts administrator, and curator. Their practice finds its roots in moving image and the phenomenological experience of film and filmmaking. This is the starting point of artworks that traverse ideas of race, queerness, disability, and spirituality. Morisha’s current body of work navigates a crip approach to filmmaking: in addition to looking at illness, disability rituals and crip time, they are working to crip the time presented in film and how the film is interacted with. Their curatorial practice focuses on supporting young artists and process-based collaborative projects.

Paulus van Horne

University of Colorado Boulder Fellow
Paulus van Horne (they/them) is a multimedia artist and researcher born in Amsterdam, raised in New York City, now based in Boulder, Colorado. They are a PhD candidate in the Department of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado.
Paulus’ creative practice encompasses machine learning, radio production, video art, and large-scale audiovisual installation, involving documenting their interactions with autonomous digital technology. They infuse these interactions with themes of love, intimacy, gender, and sexuality. Paulus’ generates computer voices to read the text of these interactions in an effort to suggest subjecthood for these systems. They believe that, through various current uses of AI, this is where the human-computer relationship is heading, especially for therapy, companionship, and gratification.

Sasha Wortzel

Professional Development Fellow
Sasha Wortzel (she/her/they/them) uses film, video art, installation, sculpture, and sound to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Wortzel has screened and exhibited at MOMA DocFortnight, True/False, CPH:DOX, San Francisco International, Wexner Center for the Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, New Museum, The Kitchen, Henry Art Gallery, and Cooley Memorial Gallery, among others. Wortzel has received support from Ford Foundation, Sundance, Field of Vision, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Doc Society, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. Wortzel’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum, and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places.

Aaditya Aggarwal

Flaherty Curatorial Online Fellow
Aaditya Aggarwal is a film curator, writer and editor based in Toronto and New Delhi. Aaditya has previously programmed screenings at Images Festival, Regent Park Film Festival, Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, and London Ontario Media Arts Association, and has contributed writing on film to outlets like C Magazine, Rungh Magazine, POV Magazine, Canadian Art, and The New Inquiry. As part of the 2021-22 Discovered Programme at the San Francisco-based Canyon Cinema Foundation, Aaditya curated Prime Time Reverie, a screening of short experimental works historicizing the aesthetics of primetime broadcasting, particularly the subgenres of women's television. He recently co-edited and contributed writing to Toronto-based experimental media presenter Pleasure Dome’s ebook Imagining Futures of Experimental Media. Currently, Aaditya works as the Programs & Collections Coordinator at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), and is the 2023 Warner Bros. Discovery Programming Fellow at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Aaditya is a collective member of Sanghum Film.

Cassidy Smith

Portland State Online Fellow
Cassidy Smith (she/her) is a film student at Portland State University. Her passion for film has kept her involved at the former Northwest Film Center (now PAM CUT), the 48-hour Filmmaking Festival, and the All Jane Comedy Festival for femme-identifying comedians. Her short film work has been about interrupted coming-of-age experiences through exploring found footage. She is working on a research project for the Portland State McNair Scholar’s Program. Her project is a retrospective look at the brief, seven-film career of the esteemed choreographer of Trio A, Yvonne Rainer. Cassidy aspires to complete her undergraduate degree and attend graduate school in Archive and Preservation of the Moving Image.

Dylan Huw

Flaherty Curatorial Online Fellow
Dylan Huw is a writer and curator living in Cardiff, Wales. His critical writing, which centers queer and documentary practices in contemporary art and cinema, has recently appeared in Artforum, Frieze, e-flux Criticism, and Art Monthly. Operating from a first-language Welsh-speaking and queer subjectivity, his research and curatorial work is guided by an interest in processes of translation, vocabulary-making, and collective experimentation across disciplinary and cultural contexts. In 2022, he was a Jerwood Writer in Residence and a finalist for the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC8). He majored in Film Studies at King’s College London and has an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Lucy Kerr

Flaherty Professional Development Online Felllow
Lucy Kerr (she/her/they/them) is a filmmaker, artist, choreographer, and educator. Her work explores performance: of family, gender, class, or labor; in cinema and theater; or the every day. In 2022, she was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker Magazine. Kerr received a dual MFA in Film/Video and Art from California Institute of the Arts on the Lillian Disney Scholarship. Her feature film in progress Family Portrait garnered her the feature film grant from Austin Film Society, the AirFrance Prize from FIDLab, and the New Horizons Award from US in Progress. Kerr’s projects have been presented by IFFR, FIDMarseille, San Sebastian, SFMoMA, REDCAT, Anthology Film Archives, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, and others.

Shuci/Monica Liang

California College of the Arts Online Fellow
Shuci/Monica Liang (she/her) is from southern China and is excited to participate in this year’s Seminar. As an ally of the community, Monica believes that representation matters and that non-fiction film is a powerful tool for creating greater understanding and empathy. She looks forward to learning more about how filmmakers are addressing LGBTQ+ themes and issues, and engaging in thoughtful discussions with fellow participants.

Teresa Braggs

Flaherty Professional Development Online Fellow
Teresa Braggs (she/her) experiments with sound, images, texts, and digital material in their practice. Strongly committed to the documentary form, they are interested in exploring the various possibilities of non-fiction storytelling. Teresa prefers to work with found and gleaned public objects (cinema, texts, sounds, spaces) and by recording personal encounters to move against the logic of a common sense. Teresa’s graduation documentary project premiered at the Berlinale in 2022, won an award at the festival and has since screened at IFFR, Beldocs, and other prestigious festivals around the world.
Born in 1997 in Calcutta, India, Teresa graduated from Mount Carmel College in Bangalore, India, where they now live and work.

Amy Jenkins

Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
Amy Jenkins (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist. She was awarded the 2022-23 Harvard Film Studies Center LEF Fellowship, the 2019 Ewing Award for Interdisciplinary Art, and 2018 New Hampshire Film Festival Filmmaker of the Year. Her interdisciplinary artworks have been shown at museums including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the National Gallery of Art, (DC), and Haifa Museum, Israel. Jenkins’ documentary feature Instructions on Parting premiered at MoMA Doc Fortnight 2018 and won Best Feature Documentary at Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ohio. Her short film Wishes premiered at the Camden International Film Festival in 2019. Jenkins’ in progress documentary, the feature Adam’s Apple, is a collaborative project with her teenage transgender son. It is supported by LEF Foundation, Points North Institute, Perspective Fund, Center for Independent Documentary, Harvard and Gotham, with a projected premiere in 2025.

Brit Fryer

Black Public Media Fellow
Brit Fryer is a Brooklyn-based queer and trans filmmaker, originally from Chicago’s South Side. He has directed several films, including The Script (co-directed with Noah Schamus) which premiered at 2023’s CPH:DOX and Caro Comes Out which premiered on HBOMax after winning the Knight Made in MIA Award. His other films include Across, Beyond, and Over and Trans·ience. In addition to his work as a director, he produced Crystal Kayiza’s Rest Stop, winner of the 2023 Short Film Jury Award for US Fiction at Sundance. He has showcased work at Indie Grits, NewFest, BFI Flare, Inside Out, Blackstar, and more. Brit and his work have been supported by the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Creative Culture, GLAAD, and HBO / Gotham's Documentary Development Initiative.

Chloe Zimmerman

LEF New England Fellowship
Chloe Zimmerman (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator engaging with ecologies, documentary poetics, collaborative learning, and making across disciplines. She currently teaches film, writing, and fungi-based workshops at RISD, MassArt, and Brown University. She is the curator of an upcoming film and poetry series called ESSAI. Chloe was a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and recently completed an MFA at Brown University.

Enrique Rivera

LEF New England Fellowship
Enrique Rivera (he/him) is a Puerto Rican filmmaker born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He uses his passion for research-driven documentary and archival preservation highlight and empower stories from BIPOC and marginalized communities. While elevating nuanced and inclusionary perspectives, his practice revisits conversations surrounding decolonization, abolition, and our relationships with land and agriculture. His documentary work on legal institutions, belief systems, trafficking, and cultural icons has appeared on Netflix, HBO Max, National Geographic, CNN, and The Atlantic. Most recently he was the producer of the HBO Max documentary series Menudo: Forever Young. He is a graduate of Emerson College.

jasmine lynea

Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation Fellowship
jasmine lynea (she/her/they/them) is a non-binary film director and writer based in Philadelphia. She documents her vibrant imagination and redesigns familiar worlds with fantastical possibilities through filmmaking,

After graduating from Temple University, jasmine self-produced and directed two short films that screened at several film festivals nationally: Take 5 and Stay Black, Baby. In 2018, jasmine established a new relationship with film, becoming a high-school film teacher at Samuel Fels. There she was awarded the Leeway Art and Change Grant to launch the Root and Branch Arts Festival. During this time she was also awarded the 2020 Scribe Philadelphia Media Fund to continue her work as a film director and writer for her experimental short film How to Survive a Mourning, which screened at WWCC 16th Annual Juried Art Exhibition and was granted an Honorable Mention Award in 2021.

As a fellow for BlackStars Inaugural Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab, jasmine wrote, directed, and edited a new short sci-fi fantasy The Love Machine. Since premiering at BlackStar’s Film Festival, the film has screened at several film festivals nationally and internationally.

With the support of the Independent Public Media Foundation, jasmine is currently in the creative process of her next short film Della Can Fly!

José De Sancristóbal

Northwestern University Fellow
José De Sancristóbal (he/him) is an artist that explores the interplay between narrative and image-making processes, examining how these interact to construct meaning and shape perception. Employing photography, video, film, and installation, he delves into the personal, shared, and inherited stories that create a sense of self beyond the frame of a single life. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Universidad de Monterrey, during which he also studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. He recently received his MFA from the Art, Theory, and Practice Department at Northwestern University as a Fulbright Fellow.

Lindsay Buchman

Skidmore College Fellow
Lindsay Buchman (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and publisher living and working in Philadelphia, PA and Saratoga Springs, NY. Her work explores image-making and writing through print and lens-based media, moving image, artist books, and installation. Buchman holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited at LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, New York Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, SPRINT Milano, Spazio Maiocchi, TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, and Torrance Art Museum. She is a recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship and is currently in residence at the Lower East Side Printshop (2023-24). Buchman is a Visiting Artist-in-Residence at Skidmore College.

Nnenna Onuoha

Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
Nnenna Onuoha (she/her) is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores the monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States, asking: How do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform, and why? Nnenna’s work has been shown at the Brücke-museum, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Galerie im Turm, and the Kunstverein Hamburg. She is currently a doctoral researcher in Media Anthropology at Harvard University, and Global History at the University of Potsdam, and a 2023-4 Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow.

Renpei Geng

California College of the Arts Fellowship
Renpei Geng (he/him) is a poet, filmmaker, and actor, currently enrolled in the MFA Film program at California College of the Arts. He works in poetry, performance, theatre, and film to explore community and individual; conscious and subconscious; and self-dissolution and intimacy.

Stephen Wardell

LEF New England Fellowship
Stephen Wardell is an American filmmaker whose experimental narratives move fluidly between fiction, documentary, and essay. Their playful films investigate systems of power and explore the contemporary forces that construct queer identity. Recent screenings include: Visions du Réel, L’Alternativa Independent Film Fest Barcelona, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. From the Midwest, currently they live in Boston, MA.

alejandro t. acierto

Flaherty Professional Development Online Fellow
alejandro t. acierto (he/him) is an artist, musician, and curator whose projects are informed by legacies of colonialism found within human relationships to technology and material cultures. Often taking shape within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, his works have been shown internationally at the Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), ISSUE (NYC), Radialsystem (Berlin), and MCA Chicago, among others. He was Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University, Core Faculty Fellow at Warren Wilson College in the MA for Critical Craft Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance at Arizona State University, New College on the occupied territories of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh peoples.

Charmaine Poh

Flaherty Professional Development Online Fellow
Charmaine Poh (she/her/they/them) is an artist from Singapore working across media, moving image, and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. Her current focus, The Young Body Universe, is a series of enactments considering the potentialities of the feminist techno-body. Her work centers the affects of vulnerability, desire, and intimacy from the vantage point of subversion. Charmaine grew up as an actor studying international relations and visual anthropology. She developed a photography practice using documentary and ethnographic methodologies before looping back into using performance as a driving force. The birth of The Young Body Universe stems from the artist’s experience as a child actor in Singapore in the early 2000s. She is a co-founder of the magazine Jom. In the fall of 2022, she started her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Juliana Custer

Portland State University Online Fellow
Juliana Cuister (she/her) is a latinx filmmaker and director based in Portland, Oregon. Her films focus on coming-of-age narratives through the lens of POC, mental health issues, and queer narratives.

Katherine C. M. Adams

Flaherty Curatorial Online Fellow
Katherine C. M. Adams (she/her) is a curator and writer working with artists across moving image, performance, and the visual arts. Within film and moving image, her recent research has addressed experimental documentary and artistic practices that critically engage the infrastructures of cinema, with a thematic focus on conditions of exile, statelessness, and precarity as they complicate processes of documentation. She is currently Assistant Curator at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds a Master’s in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, and a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Yale University.

Marilia Kaisar

UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research Online Fellow
Marilia Kaisar (she/her) is a video artist, scholar, and architect from Greece. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Pratt Institute and a diploma in Architectural Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Bridging the boundaries between theory and practice, her work uses experience and creative practice to theorize how we intimately and sexually relate through technology. Her films have been exhibited in the Small File Media Festival, Bad Video Art Festival, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Her work has been published in MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, Passage Journal, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Clog, and Mark Magazine.

Nelson Aldape

Seminario El Público del Futuro Flaherty Fellow
Nelson Aldape (he/him) is a filmmaker, film producer, and cultural manager based in the pacific coast of México in Tecomán, Colima. He is director of Cine Foro Tecomán and Tecomán Film Festival, and avmember of the LGBTQ+ pride committee of Tecomán. His short documentary film Tecuani, Hombre Jaguar was nominated Best Documentary by the Mexican Academy of Cinema. Nelson was fellow of The Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts FONCA 2020.

Arda Oz

Syracuse University Fellow
Arda Oz (they/them) is a doctoral candidate and artist focusing on non-Western popular cultures. Their research lies at the intersections of transnational queer and feminist studies, affect studies, and performance studies. Their scholarly investments primarily engage with Turkish cinema’s potential to house unregulated pleasures, transgressive desires, and other manifestations of sexual and gender dissidence as it relates to popular cinemas and cultures in the Global South.

Brook Vann

University of Colorado Boulder Fellow
Brook Vann is a PhD student in the Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practice at CU Boulder. “Within my research and practice, I explore gender and queerness through motion-capture, sound design, ceramics, and data analysis. I use these various technologies to better understand the abundant and subtle translations between body, space and movement and how they affect gender.”

Celeste Orozco

Flaherty Curatorial Fellow
Journalist and film programmer Celeste Orozco (she/her/they/them) is curator at Conti Cine and Futures Queer Art Festival, and host at Cineclub Secreto.

Claudia Zamora-Valencia

Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation Fellowship
Claudia Zamora-Valencia (she/her) works at the intersection of ethnography, non-fiction cinema, and community organizing. She is pursuing a PhD in anthropology at Temple University. Her research interests include labor markets, infrastructure, the state, and nature. She earned an MFA from Hunter College and, since 2012, has collaborated with grassroots groups that advocate for immigrant and labor rights in New York City. Claudia has published in academic journals and her personal and collaborative films have screened at Ambulante Film Festival, Society for Visual Anthropology, LASA, Camden Film Festival, DOC NYC, UnionDocs, and PBS Digital Studios. She is a member of Meerkat Media Collective and was a fellow of the SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation. Claudia grew up in Oaxaca and lives and works in Philadelphia and NYC.

Gabriel G. Torres

Gabriel G. Torres (they/them) is a Colombian American interdisciplinary artist and community catalyst. Gabriel’s work has been presented in NYC, Hong Kong, Colombia, and Tel Aviv. Recently, Gabriel has been working on a series of activations and projects to bring awareness to the de-stigmatization of substance abuse in the queer community, aiming at creating new pathways to envision communal healing. This work has been featured in SXSW, Latino Theater Co, The Department of Health in NYC, and more. The initiatives started with support from The Laundromat Project, Stonewall Foundation, and Loisaida INC. This year, Gabriel is excited to create space for artists and the community to be part of this conversation with a Lens-based exhibition at The Center and Loisaida Inc, and a theater festival at The Tank NYC.

Jean-Paul Jones

California Institute of the Arts Fellowship
Jean-Paul Jones (he/him) is a Los Angeles native who has also lived in San Francisco, where he worked as an educator, stage performer, drag queen, and church musician. Although he is new to film, he is well-versed in many facets of production within stage, dance, and live music. He is in post-production for musical short film The Apple as part of his post-graduate coursework in the CalArts Program in Film Directing. The Apple is an adaptation of a campy, 70s-disco musical of the same name. It is a wild ride through the story of Adam and Eve–set in the future and gender-swapped, asking: What if the story was that Adam bit the apple? Would we now live in a matriarchy?

Josias Lopez

California Institute of the Arts Fellowship
Josias Lopez is a Los Angeles artist, filmmaker, and programmer. His work engages with the fluctuations in queer sensibilities—the discrete and converging aesthetics of queerness—in his fiction, non-fiction, and multi-channel installation work, exploring the alternative experiences of these realities in physical spaces and and the cinematic screen. He curates Queerdiosyncrasies, a program for experimental films made by queer people. He engages in forming forward-thinking communities within his art practice. He enrolled in the Film/Video MFA program at California Institute of the Arts.

Maliyamungu Gift Muhande

Flaherty Professional Development Fellowship underwritten by Wieden + Kennedy
Maliyamungu Gift Muhande (she/her/they/them) is a Congolese non-fiction filmmaker, artist, and educator based in New York.

Pati Cruz Martínez

Firelight Media Fellow

Pati Cruz Martínez (they/them) was born cuir (queer) and brought up catholic in Borikén (Puerto Rico)–the catholic slowly disappeared, the cuir stuck around. Pati spent a few years in New York (BA at Vassar College, 2008-2012) and another few years in Cuba (Film Directing at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV, 2015-2018). In 2020, they co-wrote and directed the short film La amante (The Mistress) which has been selected at international film festivals including Raindance Film Festival, trinidad+tobago film festival, Philadelphia Latino Film Festival (LOLA award), Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, and Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (Silver Image Award). Pati is currently working on the feature-length documentary Nació Simón, which is part of Firelight Media’s Documentary Lab 2021-23.

Rudy Gerson

Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation Fellowship
Rudy Gerson (he/him/them/they) is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Las Vegas, Nevada who uses print, installation, text, and video to build ceremony with the gaps and fissures of recorded history. Their work emphasizes the speculative possibilities of the scrap–both its fragmentary and unachieved quality and as a method of dislodging information from its intended use. Informed by Jewish mysticism and queer desires of diaspora, their practice invites a critical nostalgia, an errant method of historical apprehension in a conditional tense.

Tahj

Firelight Media Fellow
Tahj is an award-winning filmmaker and artist whose work across film, video, photography, and performance illuminates the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. In 2009, Harris founded Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC (DDFR) a socially engaged transmedia project that incorporates community organizing, performance, virtual gathering spaces, and storytelling into 65+ unique audio-visual events in 75+ cities. DDFR culminated in the national broadcast of Family Pictures USA on PBS, garnering an audience of over 5.3 million, which was critically received by the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He continues to speak and teach on the value of the family photo album as a tool for social change and is a Professor in the Practice at Yale University. In 2021, Harris launched the Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling to spread the work he has been engaged in over the past 10+ years and expand upon it through robust research, evaluation, scholarly discussion and artistic interpretation. The Institute is funded by The Ford Foundation, Heinz Endowments, the Wyncote Foundation and will be housed at Yale University.

Andrea Hoyos

Corrientes Online Fellow
Andrea Hoyos (she/her/he/him/they/them) studied at EPIC (Escuela Peruana de la Industria Cinematográfica) in Lima, Peru.
She is a director, screenwriter, and film teacher. In 2017, she directed the short film Arrecifes, winner of the Ministry of Culture award (DAFO). In 2018 she won the award for Production of the Ministry of Culture in Peru (DAFO ) for her feature film Autoerotica. She was selected for Berlinale Talents 2023. She is pursuing her Master’s degree at Catalyst in Berlin and is in the process of developing her second feature film. Her work is characterized by its focus on sexual and reproductive rights and the representation of bodies outside the norm.

Chisato Hughes

UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research Online Fellow
Chisato Hughes (they/them) is a documentary filmmaker interested in hybrid forms and the speculative. They directed and produced Many Moons—part ghost-film, part observational documentary—now on its festival run. Currently they are working on a piece about San Francisco's Treasure Island.

Leandro Listorti

Seminario El Público del Futuro Flaherty Fellow
Leandro Listorti (he/him) is an artist, filmmaker, producer, programmer, and archivist. He works in the fringes of archive footage and experimental practices. He served as film programmer at BAFICI Film Festival for ten years. He has been in charge of the Technical Coordination and Film Programming at the Buenos Aires Film Museum since 2015. In 2016, he co-founded MaravillaCine with Paula Zyngierman, a production company based in Buenos Aires. His project The Shadow of the Fishes received the Hubert Bals Fund 2022 for Script and Project Development. That same year he was selected to be part of the Joaquin Jordá Residence.
His films have been shown internationally, including BFI London, Viennale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel, IDFA, National Art Gallery, and Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Miranda Mungai

Flaherty Curatorial Online Fellow
Miranda Mungai (she/her) is a film curator, events producer, and facilitator with an interest in the intersection of sociality, new media, and experimental non-fiction film. She engages with the potentiality that emerges from the synergy between film, neutral exhibition spaces, and non-hierarchical, generative discussion. She has a first class degree in Film Studies from King’s College London and has worked for the London Short Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Sheffield Documentary Festival, and various arts institutions, community projects, and activist networks in the UK.

Oana Tenter

UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research Online Fellow
Oana Tenter is a Romanian documentary filmmaker, currently based in California on a Fulbright scholarship. She is a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz MFA in Social Documentation. Her work leads her to immersions into histories and their bearings into the present. She is drawn to vérité, the reflexive, and the speculative.

Rui Song

California College of the Arts Online Fellow
Rui Song (she/her) is a graduate student studying film and television production in California College of the Arts, they hold an undergraduate degree in communication. Rui is also a choreographer and dance teacher, and enjoys combining dance and film in her visual work.

Valentina Giraldo Sanchez

Corrientes Online Fellow
Film critic, curator, and tarot reader Valentina Giraldo Sanchez (she/her) works in decolonial studies and feminist theory. She was born between the Darien and Amazon jungles.

Sage Hall

Portland State University Online Fellow
Sage Hall (she/her) is queer filmmaker attending Portland State University. Sage is passionate about LGBTQ+ topics. In addition to attending classes, she is currently an apprentice editor, and enjoys videography. She admires film theorists Jean Baudrillard, Christian Metz, and Andre Bazin. She finds that documentaries succeed in expressing a rawness that other film genres often struggle to reach. Sage is immensely glad to be involved with the Flaherty Seminar.

ABOUT OUR FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM