Meet our 2025 Fellows!
Center for Documentary Media at the University of Colorado Boulder
Shahed Rahman is a PhD student in Advertising, Public Relations, and Media Design department at the University of Colorado Boulder. With more than two years of experience in the digital media/advertising industry, his media research focuses on AI-generated advertising content, the role of AI in programmatic advertising, and the factors driving engagement or annoyance in social media advertising. At CU Boulder, Shahed serves as a Teaching Assistant, instructing courses such as Introduction to Research Methods and Insights, and Social Media Strategies.
California Institute of the Arts School of Film/Video
Devin Jie Allen is an experimental filmmaker from San Francisco. He primarily works with 16mm and super 8mm engaging with socio-political histories and temporality.
Corrientes
Carmen Vasquez Uriol (Trujillo - Peru, 1998) Programmer, cultural manager, educator and documentary filmmaker with film studies in Spain. Her curatorial work focuses on experimental cinema, found footage and autobiographical documentary. Her main line of work focuses on women, memory and post-historical memory in Latin America. Through her production company Vuyana she works in the management of collective spaces that decentralize Peruvian cinematography. Since 2021 she directs and integrates the programming team of ATEMPORAL - Itinerant Latin American Film Festival, for which she was selected in Chile - Locarno Industry Academy 2023 and in the Programming Internship Weaving feminine looks of the Eureka festival (Colombia). In 2024 she was selected as director for the 19th edition of Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires (Argentina). She has worked with rural children in the Quechua community of Coasa, in Puno - Peru. She is currently working on the post-production of her first feature film On this afternoon of return.
Flaherty Curatorial
Bursenla is a film programmer by profession and her areas of interest lie at the intersection of gender, race, media, and representation. She has been the programmer for CinéV’s Film Market (2025), NFDC’s Film Bazaar (2022-2023), MIFF Doc Bazaar (2024) and Digital Disruptions Film Festival (2024). She was also a participant of the Emerging Curator’s Lab by the UK Asian Film Festival in 2024.
She holds a master’s degree in Media and Cultural Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, where she was part of the Cut.In Students' Film Festival Screening Committee. She has worked with the Media Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, producing and editing audio-visual content. During her time there, she also served as faculty for the Urban Fellows Programme, organised the Institute’s monthly film screenings as well as the annual Urban Lens Film Festival.
Flaherty Curatorial
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah are an artist duo based in London. Their work is focused on gathering people together to talk, to learn, to share food and sometimes to create films.
This gathering is facilitated through a project they established in 2019 called Other Cinemas which regularly hosts community screening and discussions in Brent which centre Black and non-white communities and help build solidarities by connecting struggles. They also run a year-long film school for a small group of Black and non-white artists which encourages them to learn, collaborate, create and build communities outside of institutional structures. This school is now in its fourth iteration.
The films Aburawa and Shah create reflect on the forces which shape the communities they belong to, such as displacement, race, environmental harm and other legacies of colonialism. Their films are also guided by questions of justice and how those in the margins create vital spaces for resistance, knowledge production, and alternative ways of being.
Works by Aburawa and Shah have been exhibited at LUX, Humber Street Gallery, Phillida Reid Gallery and as part of the Brent Biennial in 2022. Festival screenings have included CPH:DOX, Dokufest, London Short Film Festival (awarded Best Short Documentary in ’25) and Blackstar (awarded Best Short Documentary in 2024) and the audience award at Primed Film Festival in Marseille. Screenings of their work have taken place at Camden Arts Centre, Serpentine Galleries, BAFTA, Mosaic Rooms, Nottingham Contemporary, Framer Framed and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C
Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
Asher Guthertz is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is particularly interested in activist media, cultural institutional infrastructures, and exhibition environments.
George Stoney Memorial
Maria Estela Paiso (Philippines) has been in post-production since 2016, all while making hip-hop music videos under the alias METROMARIA—but her true dream is to control the weather. In 2021, she forayed into directing with her short film It's Raining Frogs Outside. Her most recent short, Objects Do Not Randomly Fall From The Sky, is about the fisherfolk in her hometown Zambales and their experience of China's territorial aggression in the West Philippine Sea. In her free time, she tries to get a 100 at karaoke (among other things).
Haverford College
Department of Visual Culture, Arts, and Media
Swagnita Das
“I am an undergraduate student at Haverford College with an interest in the Visual Studies Department. I am specifically interested in visual anthropology and animation. Outside of film, I enjoy singing, making jewelry, and nail art.”
LEF New England
Morgan Hulquist is an emerging documentary filmmaker based in Portland, Maine whose work explores latent place-based stories. She is currently directing and producing INVADERS, a lyrical portrait of citizen scientists who spend their free time scouring Maine’s coastline for marine invasive species, now in production.
From 2022 to 2025, Morgan was Associate Producer at Multitude Films, the independent production company dedicated to transformative culture change through nonfiction storytelling, where she participated in the company's Producer Apprenticeship program — dedicated to mentoring the next generation of documentary producers. Her credits include Life After(Sundance 2025/Independent Lens), Power (Sundance 2024/Netflix), Queer Futures (CPH: DOX 2023/Criterion Channel), How We Get Free (SFFILM 2023/Max) and Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (Tribeca 2022/Peacock), as well as Kristine Stolakis's forthcoming animated documentary alive!, now in post-production. She worked in communications at Chicken & Egg Films, a nonprofit supporting women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers, 2017–2021 and is also a freelance archival producer and documentary communications specialist.
Originally from San Diego, Morgan is a member of the Maine Palestine Film Collective and an organizer of the Maine Palestine Film Festival.
Nazaara Media Lab
Sapan Taneja is a filmmaker and writer based in Bombay, with over eight years of experience working across documentary, fiction, and experimental formats like 8mm and 16mm film. “My work has been showcased at festivals such as MAMI Mumbai, Oberhausen, and MOMA Rio. As a curator, I’ve organized programs like “India on Film” at Serendipity Arts Festival and the Nazaria Arts Mela.
As a founding member of Nazaria Arts Collective, I collaborate with marginalized communities on participatory storytelling projects. My latest initiative, Reimagine, combines community engagement and cinematic learning to explore the transformative power of storytelling.”
Northwestern University Department of Radio, TV, and Film
Ines Sommer is a Chicago-based filmmaker, film programmer, and educator who has directed long-form documentaries, essay films, and experimental projects. Her directing credits include Count Me In, a MacArthur Foundation-supported film about grassroots democracy, and the award-winning Seasons of Change on Henry’s Farm, which follows organic farmer Henry Brockman as he grapples with the effects of climate change on his family farm. Her most recent documentary, The Hills, examines the toxic legacy of the steel industry on Chicago’s Southeast Side and is currently streaming on PBS station WTTW’s website. In addition to filmmaking, Ines has a long history of organizing public programs, including film series, festivals, and conferences. She is the founder of Doc Chicago, an initiative launched in 2019 to strengthen the regional documentary community through gatherings, screenings, and an annual mini-conference. Her contributions to Chicago’s film scene have been recognized multiple times in New City magazine’s "Film 50" list, which highlights "50 individuals who shape Chicago's film scene." Ines currently teaches film full-time at Northwestern University.
Patricia
Zimmermann Memorial
Reiko Tahara | "I am an immigrant and mother of a grown woman. I came to the US in 1991 from Tokyo as a scholarship student and got permanent residency as a filmmaker. I have taught at colleges in the NY area as an adjunct faculty since 2007 and worked as a translator for 15 years. I co-founded and have curated a DIY film festival in Japan under the theme of “Life, Art, Films” since 2010. Previously, I made films with grants, cut negatives for indie films, worked for TV, ran a serial in a popular Japanese film magazine, and operated a neighborhood video archiving shop.
My communities include: my old friends from the New School Film Office I worked for and managed in the 90s; Hunter College MFA in Integrated Media Arts where I’ve taught since 2010; my community garden in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn; the hotel/cafe community that my husband built and operates in Okayama, Japan; my film festival staff and fans; the Hunter Palestine Film Series organizing group (since Nov 2023); and my Brooklyn Japanese mother friends (we raised our kids together). I am committed to helping decolonize the world through my work as an educator, organizer, programmer, translator, and human being. Teaching resistance cinema, Palestine solidarity work through film programming, and community gardening are all part of that. In 2023, our garden was renamed after my mentor and one of the garden founders, an immigrant Black nurse and mother from the Caribbean.”
Flaherty Professional Development
Sofia Valiente is a photographer, filmmaker and storyteller based in Miami, Florida. Her photo books Miracle Village (2014) and Foreverglades (2019), and her film Ivy Ridge (2024) have received a World Press Photo Award, a Knight Foundation Grant, a Cannes New Waves Grand Prix Award, and Individual Artist Grants from the State of Florida. Her work has been published in numerous media outlets including Time, the Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Vice, and American Photo Magazine. Valiente is represented by Daniel Blau Gallery in Munich, her projects have been exhibited internationally in various shows in museums and photography festivals around the world.
Purin Pictures
Nadira Ilana is an indigenous Dusun filmmaker, writer, producer and film activist from Sabah, Malaysia. Her work is deeply inspired by her Borneo identity and driven by a commitment to telling stories rooted in indigenous culture, transcendental memory, and minority perspectives.
She is the founder of Telan Bulan Films, a production company inspired by decoloniality methods of filmmaking - exploring intangible cultures and amplifying underrepresented voices through ethical storytelling. Its film programming arm, CineBah, curates screenings that celebrate independent, indigenous and minoritised voices across Southeast Asian cinema.
Nadira’s debut feature film, Ballad of the Half-Boy (2025), is a contemporary iteration of a KadazanDusun folktale involving ravenous monsters and eclipses. Her creative and curatorial work has positioned her as an unmistakable voice in Borneo independent cinema. She is currently Head of the Bureau of Culture and Traditional Affairs for the Sabah Film and Visual Association.
She is an alum of Berlinale Talents, SGIFF SEA Film Lab, Bucheon Fantastic Film School, Luang Prabang Talent Lab and First Circle Lab Philippines. Nadira has served as a juror for festivals such as the BMW Shorties and Mini Film Festival. In 2019, she was appointed as an advisor to FINAS, representing the interests of Sabahan and emerging filmmakers in national film policy discussions.
Through her creative and curatorial work, Nadira continues to expand space for indigenous and minority narratives within cinema. Find out more at telanbulanfilms.com."
Shine Global
Ebony Blanding is a writer and director with deep Southern roots and a passion for telling the stories of Black people navigating the world and internal discoveries. She explores the complexities and possibilities of Blackness and female relationships on screen through narrative, experimental and documentary film.
Winner of the 2022 SeriesFest Level Forward Impact Award, her short film Jordan earned a development deal for its bold storytelling and commitment to uplifting underrepresented and alternatively abled voices.
Blanding has written and directed branded content for Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, documentaries for major artists, and multiple award-winning short films, including Levitate Levitate Levitate, streamed at Atlanta International Airport. Her commissioned period piece, Georgia Voting Rights, is playing in the state's capitol.
Co-founder of art film house, House of June, Blanding has presented films at educational institutions including Spelman College, Emory University and John H. Hopkins University. Her work has screened at Atlanta Film Society, Cape Town International Film Festival, SXSW, among others.
Recipient of the 2024 Emerging Creative Residency Program Fellowship with Trilith Institute, Blanding assumes the role of the institute's first Emerging Creative in Residence. Her upcoming project, A Mess of Memories, marks her directorial debut feature film and serves as Trilith Institute Productions' inaugural major undertaking.
Additionally, her commitment to her craft has garnered her positions in esteemed fellowships, including the 2021 Blackmagic Collective Future Directors of Studio Features Fellowship, and involvement in the Atlanta Film Society’s Filmmaker-In-Residence Program from 2017 to 2019.
The New School
Shenghan Gao was born and raised in Chengdu, China, the city of pandas and spicy food. She is now based in New York. She is interested in learning and unlearning our senses of belonging. The topics that interest her are often the most mundane units in our life: the names we call ourselves, the food we cook and eat, and the bodies we move in. Sometimes she makes films, sometimes she designs workshops, sometimes she forages, and sometimes she just cooks and eats. She loves collecting wind moving through leaves and mugworts in the streets of New York. She holds a bachelor degree in history and arts from Minerva University, and is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at the New School in NYC.
Vancouver International Film Festival
Ruun Nuur is an independent cinematic practitioner with a diasporic gaze hyper-focused on Black and Muslim peoples.
She is the co-founder of NO EVIL EYE CINEMA, a radical nomadic microcinema, a Features Programmer at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and most recently, Documentary Programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Nuur is an organizational leader whose work resides at the intersection of cinema, research, and accessible programming, with a mission to ignite the moving image and its audiences to deeply consider and connect.
She is the Creative Producer of They Won’t Call It Murder (Field of Vision, 2022), a poetic exploration of police violence in Columbus, Ohio. The film was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick and screened at BAMcinemaFest, Camden International Film Festival, AFI Fest, DOCNYC, and more.
As a curator and educator, Nuur has designed accessible, alternative film education programs across the U.S. and virtually. While in college, she founded SVLLY(wood), a feminist print film magazine described by Interview Magazine as ""the vanguard of a new age of underground cinephilia.""
She has served on juries for Indie Memphis, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and spoken at the Doha Film Institute, True/False, and the New York Film Festival. Her essays and interviews appear in Film Comment, DAZED, i-D, Hyperallergic, and more. Nuur is a 2022–24 Wexner Center Artist-in-Residence and a 2022 Tejumola Olaniyan Creative Writers-in-Residence Fellow.
Chicken & Egg Films
Tobi Phang-Lyn is a New York City-based cinephile and nonfiction program manager. As the Industry & Artist Development Manager at Chicken & Egg Films, she provides women and gender-expansive filmmakers with access to a supportive creative community, thoughtful feedback or mentorship, funding pathways, and more. She also helps build strategic partnerships with peers in the wider documentary ecosystem that further champion filmmakers and their work.
Tobi was previously at The Gotham Film & Media Institute she led the organization's year-round public programming and marketing efforts, including the annual Gotham Week conference and Gotham Awards. Tobi has served on review committees for a number of festivals and organizations including Tyler Perry Studios, CIFF, UFO, BlackStar, and The Gotham Week Project Market. Tobi got her start in communications at Columbia University and the University of Florida, her alma mater. She holds a BS in Digital Communications.
Center for Documentary Media at the University of Colorado Boulder
Jerónimo Reyes-Retana is a researcher, artist, and community organizer from Mexico City whose work examines the poetics of infrastructure and the politics of noise in Latin American contact zones—sites shaped by the environmental, geopolitical, and social anxieties arising from the pursuit of progress. His work has been exhibited at Museo Tamayo, MX; Museo Anahuacalli, MX; Casa del Lago, MX; Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, MX; the Texas Biennial, US; Co-Lab Projects, US; and Mario Kreuzberg, CH; Distant Gallery, NL; among others. His writing has been published by Toda la Teoría del Universo; The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA); xCoAx: Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X; Storefront for Art and Architecture; Centro de la Imagen; and Sociology Lens: Carceral Edgelands. Reyes-Retana has received the FONCA-CONACYT Fellowship through the Mexican National Council for Arts, Culture, and Technology, as well as the Public and Educational Program Grant from Museo Jumex in Mexico City for his community-based initiative Public Art Program: For a Shared (Outer)Space. In 2025, his film installation Void in Resonance received the CIFO-Ars Electronica Award. His work is part of the Cisneros-Fontanals collection. Reyes-Retana holds an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from the University of Texas at Austin, and he is currently a doctoral candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
California College of the Arts
Filmmaker, and photographer, Joseph Abraham Montes, was born and raised in Southern California but is now based in San Francisco. After graduating from Humboldt State University in 2022 with a degree in filmmaking and a minor in Native American Studies, Abraham has found solace in the art of the video essay. Most of his work revolves around themes of sexuality, post-colonialism, nostalgia and authenticity. His current favorite book is Coexistence by Billy-Rae Belcourt and he is learning to take himself less seriously. He will always want to learn more.
California Institute of the Arts School of Film/Video
abbi page (they/she) is a Jamaican-American interdisciplinary writer, performer, educator, and filmmaker, originally from outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Their multimedia practice explores Black Feminist Metaphysics, theoretical and creative research on fundamental components of black feminist existence, such as being, knowing, materiality, cause, identity, time, and space. they graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Africana Studies and Literary Arts, with honors as a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship. they are currently pursuing their MFAs in Creative Writing and Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. they are a recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Fellowship, the Linda J. Albertano Poetry Fellowship, and the Ethel Robinson Award as well as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Corrientes
Nohelí Morales is a Mexican film programmer and cultural manager. She founded Cine Mixteca and Pitaya Cine to bring cinema to communities in Oaxaca (Mexico) and is committed to fostering collective, community-driven film exhibition projects.
Flaherty Curatorial
Curator, programmer, and film exhibitor, as well as a teacher and researcher, Isabel Rojas is currently the artistic director of the Seminar Publics and Audiences of the Future at the UNAM International Film Festival. She is co-founder and director of the OaxacaCine collective (2011-2025). Among her areas of interest, she explores notions of cultural infrastructures, sustainability, and the commons. From a situated and relational perspective, within her artistic practice, she creates spaces for dialogue and the collective construction of knowledge through experimental projects that blend coexistence, study, and research.
Participant member of Doc's Kingdom (2024), Flaherty (2022-2024), Berlinale Talents Alumni, Cine Cauce (2023) and Artistic Differences (2023-2025). She has been a tutor, selection committee and jury member at Cinema Tropical, Doclisboa, Morelia International Film Festival, Ambulante, IMCINE, Proimagenes Colombia and Centro de Cine y Creación Chile, among others.
Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
Lynette (Qiuyang 秋阳) Shen comes from Shanghai, China. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on experimental films and videos made in the Sinophone world, and is currently working on a dissertation that explores the intersection of bad-quality images and diaspora. Along with the development of her academic career, she has been working as an independent curator and writer and maintains lens-based practices.
Duke University
MFA | EDA
Emma Volz is a documentary filmmaker from Mesa, Arizona, whose work examines where portraits of female resilience intersect with familial efforts to cultivate communal folklore, traditions, language, and religion. She graduated with a BA in Media Arts Studies from Brigham Young University and is a current MFA graduate student at Duke University.
Harvard Film
Study Center
Lilia Kilburn (she/her) is an artist and PhD candidate in anthropology and critical media practice at Harvard, where she is also a Film Study Center Fellow. She lives and works between Massachusetts and Cameroon, and makes films that examine the ties between these regions. She holds an SM in comparative media studies from MIT, where she worked as a projectionist, and a BA from Amherst College. She teaches regularly and this year contributed to public programming at the Harvard Film Archive and the ICA Boston. She also spends time gardening and weaving, and these practices sometimes make their way into her films.
Haverford College
Department of Visual Culture, Arts, and Media
tianyi is an Anthropology and East Asian Languages & Cultures Major and Visual Studies Minor at Bryn Mawr College. Their work explores the intersections of filmmaking, queer and Marxian theory, and diasporic experience. Tianyi’s current project draws from both visual and non-visual ethnography to document environmental modification and the surfing community in Wanning, Hainan, China.
LEF New England
Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist, photographer, and filmmaker and a PhD candidate at Emory University. Her current work focuses on the Atlanta forest at the center of the conflict over “Cop City,” where she integrates ethnographic research and a visual art practice to explore how the contested landscape—once the site of a city prison farm and antebellum plantation—motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Through this work, she has produced two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest (2023, 40 min.) and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work (co-produced with Marion Lary, 2023, 12 min.) and a photography exhibition, Ways of the Atlanta Forest (2025, Institute 193). Her writing and photographs have been published in n+1, Jewish Currents, Trans Studies Quarterly, Mergoat Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essay “Not One Tree” (co-authored with Grace Glass, 2023, n+1) was awarded the Krause Essay Prize. She received her BA at the University of Chicago.
Nazaara Media Lab
Farha Khatun is an Indian filmmaker and editor trained in film editing at Roopkala Kendro, Kolkata. She uses documentaries to voice the struggles of people from marginalised communities, telling stories often overshadowed by power. Her films feature a forgotten trans footballer, a woman in her 60s from Bhopal challenging patriarchy, a lone forest builder, and communities nurturing dying traditions. She won two National Film Awards in India for “I am Bonnie” and “Holy Rights,” both screened internationally. Her personal experiences have deepened her focus on women's lives. Farha co-founded Bitchitra Collective, a support network for women and non-binary filmmakers.
Farha has also served as a selection committee member for 15th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK) and Jury member for 10th International Film Festival of Shimla, 13th International HALF Film Festival, 30th Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) & 38th IDA Documentary Awards.
Northwestern University: Art, Theory, Practice
Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist currently based in Beirut and Chicago.
Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, often using the Palestinian context as an urgent microcosm. Within her drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.
Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021–2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.
Abukhadra is also a cultural worker and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).
Patricia Zimmermann Memorial
A.E. Hunt is a broke filmmaker, critic, programmer, and theatrical distributor. He is currently broke.
Flaherty Professional Development
Elroy Pinto is a filmmaker and writer based in Mumbai, India. His first film, Kaifiyat (2019) won the Cinema Experimenta Award at the 2021 Signs Film Festival and is an experimental documentary that intersperses fictionalised performance-driven tableaus of the historical origins of culture-rich cities of 15th-century Deccan India with archival and contemporary footage of Ustad Nizamuddin Khan’s family living through communalism in India. His second film, Samvega-Pasada (2025), is a narrative fiction that offers a modern adaptation of the Buddhist epic Manimekalai while providing a cultural critique of Hindutva nationalism. His short film, "Islands of Labour", was presented at a conference in UNATC in Bucharest on the Archives, Cinema and Collective Healing. His filmmaking and writing practice navigate the intersection of class and caste analysis in contemporary India and explores the epic structure in Indian cinema and the interpretations of Brechtian, Eisensteinian and Rasa theory to synthesise an aesthetics of liberation. Elroy writes on culture, cinema, and history and his work has appeared in international and national publications such as Public-Parking, The Satyashodhak, Maidanaam and Sambhashan. He holds a Master's degree in Global Cinemas from SOAS, University of London. He has learned Gwalior gayiki from the Marxist-feminist vocalist, Neela Bhagwat and studied filmmaking under the tutelage of Kumar Shahani. Currently, he is a film programmer at the Nirmik Cultural Arts Centre, a radical Ambedkarite space in Mumbai. Elroy is the recipient of the prestigious Indian Foundation for the Arts Production Grant (2024-2025).
Purin Pictures
Alyssandra Maxine is a writer and editor based in Metro Manila. Her main interests lie in exploring the evolving or neglected forms of film criticism and creating meaningful cross-cultural dialogs, particularly within Southeast Asia. She is the managing editor of MARG1N, a print-only independent magazine, and an assistant in the Center for New Cinema, a pedagogical initiative within the Philippines. Her previous bylines include Film Comment, Streamlined, and Eastern Kicks. She has been a fellow for film critic labs in QCinema and Udine's Far East Film Festival and later served as a mentor in the former. Alyssandra's current project is an experimental hypertext piece attempting to encapsulate an 11-hour film through 4 distinct subjects.
The New School
Sabrina Frómeta (she/ella) is a multidisciplinary artist, cacao farmer, and cultural strategist whose work flows at the intersection of memory, myth, and movement. Born of Ayiti and Quisqueya, raised in pre-gentrified Bushwick, Sabrina’s practice stretches across coastlines—from the Caribbean to the Rocky Mountains to Brooklyn—where she builds portals for collective remembering and creative resistance.
Her current project, Nothin’ But Islands, is a living myth and movement experiment that conjures Yucāley—a speculative island sanctuary where Black and Indigenous peoples return through ritual, sound, and storytelling. It is a film in progress, a dance archive, and a participatory invitation to name, move, and dream ourselves into new futures.
Sabrina is the founder of YAYA, a diasporic creative studio rooted in land, story, and liberatory play. Her work lives in collaboration—with Lincoln Center, Netflix Global, Weeksville Heritage Center, United Masters, The New School, Brooklyn Psychedelic Society, and communities across the Caribbean and beyond. As a cacao farmer, she carries the ancestral wisdom of tending, fermenting, and listening—an earth-centered rhythm that shapes all of her practice.
It is not about spectacle—it is about remembering, refusing, and making space. Through movement, breath, and cinematic storytelling, she asks: What do we carry? What do we release? What worlds can we build if we let our bodies speak first?
Sabrina is honored to join the 2025 Flaherty Film Seminar as a fellow, where she looks forward to gathering, wrestling, and reimagining the real—together."
The New School
Aisha Servia is a writer and filmmaker. Her filmmaking practice is born of the archives and a subsequent questioning of past-present-futures, informed by both her familial and national history in the postcolony. Her work contends with relationships in flux between the self to family and community, the self to nation, and the self to [E/e]arth. A graduate of Screen Studies and Sociology, her process is interdisciplinary and research-driven, rooted in explorations of collective memory and personal histories. Working in fiction and non-fiction, narrative and experimental modes of storytelling, she seeks to collapse the distance between the national, the ecological, the so-called universal, and the personal, as she plucks out fragments of memory and threads them together for the screen.
Her film hairloom (i) was screened as part of Film Diary III: Coldest Winter at Millennium Film Workshop, with satellite screenings in Lahore and Tehran. She was part of Fox Maxy’s Mental Wellness Film Workshop at the Vera List Center, and her film, CCCCC (seaseaseaseasea), created for the workshop, was screened as part of RELEASE at UnionDocs. Sah! and Serious People — films she co-wrote — premiered at Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF) 2024.
Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation
Ian McKenna (he/him) is a video journalist based in Philadelphia, PA. He currently works at More Perfect Union, a non-profit advocacy journalism outlet focused on building power for the working class, where he reports, produces, shoots, and edits videos on the real struggles and challenges of the working class and the abuses and wrongdoing of corporate power.
Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation
Melissa Langer (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer based in Philadelphia. She works primarily in nonfiction and experimental film, and is currently directing her first feature, "In Excess" (Jihlava New Visions Forum - U.S. DOCS 2023), a gritty dive into the inner workings of a city’s sanitation infrastructure that examines labor, capital, and displacement in modern America. She’s screened and exhibited works at MoMA’s DocFornight, True/False, Telluride, Camden, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Icebox Project Space, among others, and has received a Cinema Eye Honors nomination in nonfiction filmmaking. She was a 2024 Artist in Residence at RAIR in NE Philadelphia and is a member of the experimental artist collective Vox Populi.
Chicken & Egg Films
As the Senior Program Manager at Chicken & Egg Pictures, Elaisha Stokes (she/her) oversees the Chicken & Egg Award and the Research & Development grants for mid-career filmmakers.
Prior to this position, Elaisha served as Senior Producer for CBS Original Documentaries, where she oversaw several documentary series for Paramount+ and streaming platforms. Her documentary work has been featured on National Geographic, CNN, The New York Times, and Vice. She has received awards and grants from the Nation Institute, the Pulitzer Family, the Emmy Foundation, and the Ontario Arts Council. In 2018, she was a Sundance New Voices fellow and a Cine Qua Non screenwriting fellow. Her films have screened at BFI London, the Maryland Film Festival, the Brooklyn Film Festival, London Shorts, and Planet in Focus. Elaisha is a 2024 Doc NYC New Leader. She holds a Master’s degree in Documentary Filmmaking from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
California Institute of the Arts School of Film/Video
Ej Yeh was born and raised in China, and it’s been 8 years in the States–since he was 18. He drank his first shot of vodka, paid his first car insurance bill, hit his first joint, and shot his first roll of 16mm film in this country. It’s a journey of navigating a world of in-betweenness. His films offer a gaze into the rites of passage that lead to adulthood, delving into the intricacy of relationships and the quest for self amid cultural interplay. It’s a world shaped as much by translation as by intuition.
Ej's short documentary Room For Two was selected by AmDocs Film Festival. He is the producer of A Whale Who Drank a Fish Bowl, a fictional feature film that was selected for Cinema On The Bayou Film Festival and Houston AAPI Film Festival. Ej is also an award-winning cinematographer at Houston International Film Festival.
Having received scholarships from both schools, Ej earned his BA from Syracuse University and his MFA from the Film Directing Program at California Institute of the Arts.
California Institute of the Arts School of Film/Video
Andrea Granera is an experimental filmmaker who believes all film is simultaneously fiction and nonfiction. Her work traverses girlhood, questions of post-colonial feminism, and the search for a Fourth Cinema. She is currently getting her MFA in Film Directing and Creative Writing at CalArts.
Corrientes
Federico Pintos is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and curator from Argentina whose practice explores the intersections of contemporary documentary, personal archives, and transmedia storytelling. His work blends autofiction, essayistic narration, and experimental forms to investigate identity, memory, and the political dimension of intimacy.
His previous project Artificial Generation reimagines the history of Argentine video art across a feature film, a neural network performance, and an interactive game. He is currently developing Something’s pulling me gently, a documentary essay on masculinity, fatherhood, and inherited trauma within his own family.
Flaherty Curatorial
Mariana Souza is a film curator, researcher, and independent educator exploring the intersections between visual languages. Artistic director of Correnteza – Atlantic International Film Festival and creator of the research project Aporias and Fractals – Racial Identities in the Americas and Visual Culture. Through Aporias and Fractals, investigates the multiplicities of identity and diasporas in the Americas, with a focus on moving images and the Black and Indigenous presence and heritage across the continent, as well as their influence on contemporary visual culture.
Master’s student at the School of Communication, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
Cecilia Kryzda is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies how infrastructure, past mythologies, and future visions commingle. Current interests include nature behind glass, including greenhouses and aquariums, and how they articulate our mediated relationship to the environment scientifically and aesthetically.
After earning her BA in Cinema and Media studies from Carleton College and her MA in Communication Studies (specializing in Media History and Culture) from the University of Iowa, Cecilia worked in Philadelphia at a communications firm and as a high school digital literacy teacher.
Beyond her research, Cecilia can be found curled up with a good book, respectfully admiring a (preferably round) cat, and looking forward to her next food experience.
Duke University
MFA | EDA
Germán López Tirado (b. 1991) is a filmmaker from México based in North Carolina. He's an MFA graduate from Duke University and a recipient of the Robert E. Pristo Filmmaking Award. In his work he explores memory, nostalgia and personal history through experimental documentary combining analog (16mm) and digital filmmaking. His practice is rooted in film as an embodied medium, using it not only as documentation but as a site of emotional and cultural preservation. His films have been exhibited in festivals including Cindependent in Cincinnati, Ohio; Binghamton SEFF in Binghamton, New York; South Georgia Film Festival in Valdosta, Georgia; and NEOSFest in Monterrey, México.
Haverford College
Department of Visual Culture, Arts, and Media
Ben Suchanic is a filmmaker and cinema enthusiast. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Video and Film Production from Wilmington University. He is the Audio-Visual Support Technician at Haverford College and currently resides in Wilmington, DE.
Haverford College
Department of Visual Culture, Arts, and Media
Anna West is a political anthropologist interested in the intersections of health, place, governance, and belonging. Anna directs the Health Studies program at Haverford College, where her courses invite students to critically examine the structural drivers of health, the colonial origins of global health, and the social construction of medical knowledge. Her work is animated by concerns with sedimented landscapes, spatial justice, audit cultures, surveillance states, and embodiment. Currently, she is exploring how urban design initiatives to mitigate the health effects of extreme heat shape possibilities for public life.
LEF New England
Matteo Moretti is a Greek-Italian-American filmmaker and cinematographer specializing in documentary and narrative work that explores the intersection of culture, environment, and people. He’s drawn to stories that preserve living traditions, often capturing the quiet beauty and complexity of people and places worldwide.
Northwestern University Department of Radio, TV, and Film
Maya Castronovo is a filmmaker and documentarian from Wisconsin. Her work uses historical objects and archives in order to explore the connections between collective memory and environmental apocalypse. Her writing on documentary aesthetics has appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and the Journal of Folklore and Education. She has a B.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University.
Patricia
Zimmermann Memorial
Bouchra Assou is an independent researcher, film programmer, writer, and archivist of Moroccan origin based in Montreal, Canada. She is the founder and curator of Dhakira Collective: an independent research, archival and curatorial platform that foregrounds art, cinema, and music outside the western canon with a focus on cinema from the SWANA region (South West Asia & North Africa) and the co-founder and director of programming of the North African Queer Film Festival.
Flaherty Professional
Development
Adjani Guerrero Arumpac is an independent Filipina documentary filmmaker, educator, and researcher. A recipient of the UK Government Chevening Scholarship, she earned her Master of Arts in Digital Media and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. As a tenured faculty member at the University of the Philippines Film Institute, she combines academic rigor with creative practice, fostering socially engaged storytelling through her teaching, research, and artistic works. Her works have been showcased in local and international festivals and biennales. Notable venues include the Gwangju Biennale, the Asia-Pacific Triennial, and film festivals such as the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, ChopShots Documentary Film Festival, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, Jocelyne Saab’s Cultural Resistance International Film Festival, among others.
Flaherty Professional
Development
Maria Paradinas is a film programmer and moving-image curator from London, where she currently lives. Her practice is rooted in an interest in visual archives, particularly as they relate to histories that have been erased, mis-recorded, or obscured.
She is haunted by the spectre of the past and engages with the omissions and distortions that shape representation of oppressed peoples within dominant historical narratives in her work. She is especially interested in how archives invite us to consider structures of power and trace suppressed or fugitive counter-histories. In 2023 she founded Selene’s Archive, a curatorial project exploring these ideas through film programming and sonic activations.
Maria was on the selection committee for the BFI London Film Festival’s Experimenta strand for the 2023 and 2024 editions, and has programmed for HERVISIONS, the London Short Film Festival, Flatpack Festival, and the Barbican Centre. She has also been involved in Brixton Community Cinema, a pop-up initiative bringing affordable international and independent film to a community facing uneven access to arts institutions.
Purin Pictures
Rizky Rahad (he/him) is an Indonesian filmmaker, programmer, and ethnographer whose work explores radical, often queer, aesthetics as a means to escape regimes of control and cultivate new forms of living otherwise. Currently co-running queer cinema collective QAMERAD in Bali, Rizky’s latest film H-O-R chronicles survivors of anti-trans violence escaping state surveillance to re-stage their image, while his latest book QUEERS SHOOT BACK! imagines a liberatory queer cinema beyond the limits of neoliberal visibility politics. Rizky was selected for the 2024 British Council’s Connection through Culture Grant, 2021 Chevening Scholarship and 2019 Berlinale Talents; his work has been screened at VICE, Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, Queer East, and Fringe! Film and Arts Fest.
The New School
Isabella Rodriguez is a Mexican-American filmmaker and researcher exploring borderland stories through experimental and documentary film. A recent graduate of The New School, she centers memory, connection, and cultural resilience in her work.
The New School
Meghna Yesudas is a writer and media-maker from Mumbai, India, residing in New York City, where she is obtaining an MA in Media Studies at The New School. Her non-fiction storytelling practice takes the form of memoir, poetry, video, essay film, and experimental film, and contends with the entanglements of familial histories, selfhood, collective memory, migration, and patriarchal surveillance. Previously, she served as Digital & Features Editor of the dirty magazine, defining the editorial voice of the independent publication covering the arts, picking from messy underbellies of cities. She helmed research and writing for two annual print issues entitled “DEATH,” dissecting the annihilation of order and philosophies of the afterlife, and “IDENTITY,” charting socio-cultural histories of queer communities in India. Her work on The Unfiltered History Tour—a guerrilla tour of the British Museum’s stolen objects undertaken by people indigenous to the lands of the artefact—awarded her Copywriter of the Year (2022) in the Cannes Lions Creativity Report. Examining archives, letters, life writing, and photographs as sites of decoloniality, her work seeks to trace affective residues of resistance, fuelled by an unabashed, almost credulous belief in joy paving the path to liberation.
Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation
Laurie Robins is an artist and filmmaker based in Philadelphia. He received an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths, University of London) and was a studio participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Robins has been artist in residence at Askeaton Contemporary Arts (IE), the South London Gallery (UK) and IMMA (IE). His work has been shown at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (IE), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (US), Transmediale 2019 (DE), South London Gallery (UK), UCLA (US) and IMPAKT (NL). Recently he received a Velocity Grant to develop a photographic project documenting work and union organising in the Philadelphia Higher Education and Medical industries. This project will be exhibited at the Philadelphia AFL-CIO building in early 2026.
Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation
Melissa Beatriz is a documentary filmmaker, cultural producer, and researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of social justice, media arts/culture, and policy. She is the Founder/Director of Actívate Stories, a media arts entity that produces collaborative documentaries, engages in cultural preservation, and develops creative strategies focused on art and social change.
Melissa is currently directing two documentary films, as a first-time director. La Lucha Sigue (The Fight Continues) is a short animated documentary that centers three immigrant rights leaders who work to shut down the Berks Detention Center in Pennsylvania, one of three prisons nationwide that had detained immigrant children and families. Philly Rumba is a short archival documentary that features African American and Latin American percussionists/cultural keepers who have played a role in preserving the culture of rumba percussion in the Philadelphia region.
Melissa is a 2022 Al Día 40 Under 40 honoree, 2019 Leeway Transformation Awardee, and 2020 Fellow of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Leadership Institute. Her media work has been supported by Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Scribe Video Center, Independence Public Media Foundation, Velocity Fund, Doc Society: Good Pitch Local Philadelphia, Leeway Foundation, Double Exposure Scholars, and Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Philadelphia Day Lab.
Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation
Sydney Alicia Rodriguez (they/she) is an Afrolatinx producer, cultural worker, and former theater kid from PG County, MD focused on resourcing the emerging generation of Black and Brown worldbuilders. As a Program Manager at BlackStar Projects, Sydney has co-produced eleven short films as part of the Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab and spearheaded the program of the William & Louise Greaves Filmmaker Seminar from 2021-2024. They produced the short narrative film gales. which premiered at the 2021 BlackStar Film Festival, and went on to play at American Black Film Festival, the 30th Anniversary Pan African Film Festival, and more. Sydney’s film programming work includes curating the BlackStar Film Festival program in collaboration with the festival director and selection committee, serving as a juror for the TriCo Film Festival and the Diamond Screen Film Fest at Temple University and serving on the Cinema Eye Feature Film Nominations Committee from 2021-2023. Sydney is currently producing a short animated film titled, Tell Me When You Get Home, about a 15-year-old girl in a remote mountainous village, who over the course of a single evening, discovers that her late mother’s spirit is calling to her from the other side.
Outside of work hours, you can find Sydney wandering the trails of a local park, tending to their garden, attending screenings and local art shows, perusing a flea market, visiting family, writing, or cozying up with a book. If it’s warm out, catch them at the tennis courts or your neighborhood swimming hole.
Flaherty Professional Development
Advik Beni is a South African filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles.
Through a practice steeped in South African traditions of orality, their work aims to create imagined spaces for marginalised people to express grief and trauma. They are interested in how these non-hierarchical, hybrid models of filmmaking can encourage a collective mutability amongst rhizomatic pathways—that may lead to an actuality of positive impact on communities; whilst preserving a cultural tradition eclipsed by Western modes of storytelling.
They are a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where they received an MFA in Film Directing. Their work has been supported by San Sebastián International Film Festival, Sundance, FID Marseille, Prismatic Ground, New Orleans Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Points North Institute, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival amongst others. They are a member of the Bahía Collective —a group of friends and filmmakers who collaborate in curating and making, centralizing ideas of memory, resistance and migrations
In the current climate of increased destruction, Western oppression and genocide, Advik is focused on how we can witness each other’s existence, and all that entails, in an attempt to facilitate a tangibility of cross-border solidarity that prioritises care.