Past
Grantees

Siji Awoyinka is an award-winning multidisciplinary aural and visual storyteller. Born in London to Nigerian parents, he spent much of his early childhood in Lagos and London before moving to New York to further pursue his creative ambitions. His documentary feature film, Elder’s Corner, premiered at Sheffield Docs, UK, DOC NYC, Blackstar Film Festival, HOTDOCS, and went on to win an Ethnomusicology Commendation Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival, and the Audience Award for Best Sounds Feature at Indie Memphis Film Festival (2021). His projects have received funding support from NYSCA, Open Society, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lucius & Eva Eastman Foundation.

Project Statement

Ejire is a feature-length documentary film that explores the mysticism of twins through the power of memory, ritual, restitution, and song. It follows the iconic Lijadu Sisters, a beloved Nigerian musical duo, through the final years of Kehinde’s life and Taiwo's reemergence.

Using archival footage, family pictures, vintage memorabilia, and scenes reenacted and captured on 16mm film, the film seeks to invoke and explore the past, and how memory/alternate memory may act as a catharsis for healing, guidance, and transformation. Ejire serves not only as a tribute to the unique twin connection but also as a broader exploration of identity, loss, and the human desire for wholeness in the face of profound change.

Maggie Brennan is a Queens-based animator, director, writer, musician, etc. She is the creator of Agoraphilia, a series for Adult Swim SMALLS, which she also animated, directed, co-wrote, and scored. She wrote, directed, animated, and scored the short film Our Bed Is Green, which premiered at SXSW and went on to play numerous Oscar-qualifying festivals worldwide, winning “Best Animation” at the Tacoma Film Festival. She also wrote, animated, and voiced a micro series for A Studio Digital about mall kiosk owners. Before moving into animation, she created comics, some of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Fader, Inverse, and other publications. Her work often focuses on fiddly characters, technology, and perplexing visual minutiae.

Project Statement

Venerations is an animated short film about a religious mother and her very online daughter who independently obsess over two different sets of mysterious human remains: the relics of a beloved virgin Saint and the case file of an unidentified murder victim. Surreal and subtly comic, Venerations reflects on things like mythmaking, materiality, and the strangeness of womanhood.

Julia Chien is a Taiwanese American filmmaker and animator born and raised in suburban Maryland, currently based in Brooklyn. Julia’s films all center lonely, lowly animals. There is something extremely genuine and relatable about being alone at the bottom of a food chain. Her films explore the internal, the textural, and the gooey. Julia’s practice plays with traditional mixed-media animation techniques, live puppetry, and how the two can intersect. Her films have screened internationally at festivals such as Animafest Zagreb, Sweaty Eyeballs, Athens Animfest, Animafantasia, and more. Julia recently performed her first theatrical work, a multimedia puppet piece, as an artist-in-residence with the Object Movement Festival at the Center at West Park. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 with a BFA in Film/Animation/Video. She now teaches traditional animation techniques at RISD. She works professionally as a VFX artist and has worked on Emmy Award-winning productions.

Project Statement

My mother grew up on a farm in a small village just outside of Taichung, Taiwan, during the Kuomintang’s takeover of the country. She lived in a big family of four daughters and three sons. Her father, my grandfather, was a stern and often abusive patriarch, but he adored his animals. He kept dogs, pigs, turkeys, and chickens. When my mother was nine, her uncle visited the farm with a gift: a Formosan Rock Macaque in a cage. My grandfather named her Saru. Based on my mother’s true story, her name was SARU is an experimental animated narrative short film using a mixture of ink, paint-on-glass, shadow, and manipulated live-action footage. Through the character of Saru, the film explores the complex family dynamics my mother experienced as a child and still experiences today. Saru spent years caged and chained to my family. She deserves an honorable end to her story.

Safiyah Chiniere is a Jamaican American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She uses film to amplify the stories and voices of people of color, women, femmes, and the LGBTQIA+ community, often disrupting the gender binary and expanding how we see identity on screen. A self-taught filmmaker, New Jersey-born and Virginia Beach-bred, Chiniere grounds her work in the interior lives of these communities and has developed a visual style that moves with care and intention. Chiniere’s short film You Don’t Have to Like Me premiered at NewFest, Frameline, Inside Out, and BFI Flare London and presents a fresh, intimate approach to capturing faces, bodies, and the many expressions of closeness. She slows the pace and magnifies space to make room for vulnerability, authenticity, and catharsis, highlighting people and moments that are often overlooked, dismissed, or delegitimized while maintaining wholehearted and sincere storytelling. 

Project Statement

All For Her is a portrait of a granddaughter’s love and care for her grandmother while she fights to hold on to her own independence and navigate dating as a lesbian woman. The film explores the complexities of caregiving and how it can quietly pull you away from yourself. During COVID, Chiniere cared for her grandmother, who was unexpectedly diagnosed with dementia and passed away silently in 2023, the day after her birthday. That loss moved her to honor her grandmother’s legacy while staying true to the meaning of caretaking and the realities of balancing a social and romantic life.

Many caregivers sacrifice personal dreams to show up for the people we love. This film highlights the resilience and beauty in that choice—the constant push and pull between duty and the need for selfhood. Grounded in queer experience and tender intimacy, the story makes room for stillness. All For Her gives voice to those caring for family while trying to live their own lives and shedding light on the emotional toll caregiving often hides.

Lydia Cornett is a filmmaker, composer and artist. Her work explores the contours of labor, language and artistic expression across nonfiction and experimental forms. Her films have screened at festivals such as True/False Film Festival, Camden Film Festival, Rooftop Films, Sheffield DocFest, Slamdance, BAMCinemaFest, Hamptons International Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker in 2023. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, POV Shorts, Vimeo Staff Picks, Nowness, and Paper Magazine.

Cornett has held residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Jacob Burns Film Center, UnionDocs, BRICLab, and Marble House Project. She has received support for her work from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Pulitzer Center, the Princess Grace Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Field of Vision, the Fulbright Program, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Project Statement

The Grain of Voice, Lydia's feature directorial debut, explores the ineffable essence of the human voice and its bodily origins, weaving together portraits of vocalists who blur the boundaries of genre, gender, ability, and technology.

Sekiya Dorsett’s thought-provoking films have won her much praise. The Revival: Women and the Word, which premiered in 2017 and was quickly acquired by Women Make Movies. Dorsett also directed a four-episode documentary series for NBC News titled Stonewall Revolution which is currently on Peacock—an achievement that earned her both a GLAAD Media Award and NLGJA’s Excellence in Digital Journalism accolade. Barnard College named her their inaugural Artemis Rising Foundation Fellow for excellence in non-fiction storytelling. Her most recent film, Caribbean Queen in association with Caribbean Equality Project, addressing LGBTQ stigma in Caribbean communities, premiered at BAM during NewFest 2023, earning both the Audience Award and recognition for her directing. She is a Firelight Media Fellow for 2024–2026. Her films have been screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Urbanworld Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Outfest Film Festival.

Project Statement

Amid shifting borders and rising intolerance, a Black lesbian couple from the Caribbean looks back on twenty years of love and longing. As they attempt to become mothers in a country that threatens to erase them, their story becomes a tender, urgent act of resistance. 20 Years of Longing is a personal memory, a collective memory, and an ongoing future. It is an intimate, character-driven documentary that follows a married Black lesbian couple from Haiti and the Bahamas, as they navigate love, immigration, faith, and queer family-making in a country that refuses to fully see us. It is not just a love story. It is a testimony.

Ash Goh Hua is a Singapore-born and raised, New York-based filmmaker. Utilizing both documentary and narrative forms, Goh tells personal stories that reveal the inherently embodied politics of relation, society and culture. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2022, Goh is a 2024 Berlinale Talent and a 2025 Creative Capital Award recipient.

Project Statement

SUBTERRANEA is a short narrative film about Fang Lin, a teenager who does not want to exist. Between her naggy mother, a stifling environment, and a falling out with her best friend, she feels utterly trapped in ennui. Meanwhile, the magic of Singapore’s natural world begins to rumble, threatening to break the levee.

Crystal Kayiza is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. A member of the New Negress Film Society, she is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and the Sundance Ignite Fellowship. Her most recent film, Rest Stop, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the 2023 Jury Prize for Best US Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by POV. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Crystal is currently in production on her first feature film.

Project Statement

As keepers of one of the oldest Black cemeteries in Mississippi, The Worthy Women of Watkins Street nurture the liminal space between past, present, and future. The Gardeners is a feature non-fiction film that archives the labor of these aging worldbuilders, offering a blueprint to navigate memory, legacy and mortality while revealing the divine spirit residing in their daily lives.

Matt Nadel is a filmmaker and journalist interested in stories about justice, survival, and historical memory. His short documentaries have been distributed by outlets like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and PBS. Matt’s most recent film, Cashing Out (The New Yorker 2025), tells the story of a controversial industry that emerged in the early days of AIDS—and his own unlikely connection to it. Previously, Matt directed An Unlikely Last Resort for Getting Out of Prison, a first-person documentary about clemency released by New York Times Opinion, and CANS Can’t Stand (The New Yorker 2023), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. Matt is from Florida and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Project Statement

In the shadows of the American prison system, a network of self-taught legal warriors, known as jailhouse lawyers, are using the law to dismantle the carceral machine from within. Jailhouse Lawyer, the debut feature documentary from director Matt Nadel, enters this hidden world through the story of Quentin Lewis, a veteran jailhouse lawyer in New York who defends his peers against the abuses of the prison system—and, in the process, offers them hope, protection, and a path to rehabilitation. But even with an extraordinary record of legal victories, there's one case Lewis is still fighting to win: his own. Blending vérité captured in prison, intimate longitudinal interviews, and never-before-digitized archives, Jailhouse Lawyer offers a rare portrait of the hidden figures who, from behind prison walls, are using the law to transform themselves and the system that confines them.

Rodrigo Olivar is a multidisciplinary director from Mexico City, based in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to shining a light on multicultural narratives. He holds a BFA in Media Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana (CDMX) and an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts (New York). For over eight years, he served as Head of Video at Remezcla, the leading Latino media company, where he directed and produced award-winning content. His films have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, NY Latino Film Festival, and Morelia Film Festival, among many others. His latest short, Thank You, Have a Nice Day, won the Max Latino Short Competition. Through his work, Rodrigo explores the intersections of culture, identity, and resilience, crafting visually compelling stories that connect communities and spark dialogue.

Project Statement

We Save Us (El pueblo salva al pueblo) is a feature-length documentary about Indigenous Mexican delivery workers in New York City confronting a wave of violent robberies. With no support from authorities, they draw on the traditions of their hometown to form a civil guard, reclaiming safety and dignity. As their organizing grows, new challenges test their resolve and expand their solidarity, revealing the strength of collective action.

The film blends cinematic vérité with on-body cameras, social media content, and motion graphics to create an immersive portrait of workers who keep New York running yet remain invisible. Supported by Gotham Week Project Market and Tribeca Work-in-Progress, We Save Us reframes narratives of labor, migration, and justice—showing not only the hardships these workers endure, but also the power of community to envision change.

Chloe Sarbib is an American and French Algerian DGA filmmaker drawn to characters who get in their own way. She is a 2025 Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Lab fellow whose previous shorts have won Best Student Short at Provincetown Film Festival, Best New York Short at NewFest, and the DGA Student Film Jury Award, and have played many Oscar- and BAFTA-qualifying festivals. She was selected for Tribeca/Chanel’s Through Her Lens program and directed an episode of the CW/Netflix’s In the Dark. An alumna of Yale (BA) and Columbia (MFA), where she won the Zaki Gordon Award for excellence in screenwriting, she’s received support from Cine Qua Non, Saltonstall, Indian Paintbrush, and more. She also studied at La Fémis in Paris and FAMU in Prague. Based in Brooklyn, she teaches at Montclair State University.

Project Statement

Brace Yourself is a dark comedy fiction short film about 15-year-old Mia Boukris, who is going to kill herself… but not until she gets her braces off.

Sally Tran is a NYC-based writer and director, originally from Vietnam and New Zealand. Her work centers on stories of underrepresented communities, often drawing from her Vietnamese roots. She blends scripted and unscripted formats, creating a distinct narrative voice whose tone carries through both story and execution.

Her short Grandma Four Color Cards premiered at SXSW 2025, while her narrative short Don’t (2024) received support from NYCWF, NYFA, MOME, Panavision, and the Vimeo BIPOC Fund, premiering internationally at TIFF. She is in post-production on Still a Go Between and received funding for Love Cycle from NALIP and Netflix. 

Project Statement

Born to Kill: Love, Money, Sin is a raw feature-length mixed media documentary that uncovers the untold stories of Vietnamese refugees in New York City after the fall of Saigon. Confronted with systemic neglect and racial hostility, many were forced to navigate two worlds: one of hard-fought survival and another of crime and violence.

Through the voices of refugees, the film explores the desperate choices that shaped their lives. Some fight for a better future. Others are drawn into the notorious Born to Kill gang, which was founded by fellow refugee David Thai as both a brotherhood and a weapon against a city that treated them as disposable. The mantra Love, Money, Sin became their code, binding them together through loyalty, blood, and sacrifice. The film has also received support from BRIC and the Tribeca Film Institute.

Dominique Nieves is a disabled Nuyorican filmmaker. She was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Writer-Director for her Telly Award-winning magic realism film, Our Lady Lupe, which was produced in association with PBS for their Primetime Broadcast Special, The Latino Experience. She used Our Lady Lupe to feature her favorite things: Latina leads, brujería, and a dog.

Nieves entered the industry as an actress, but one-dimensional roles for Latinas led her to found Iron Glove Productions, highlighting underrepresented voices authentically on-screen. Her work has garnered recognition from CINEQUEST, HollyShorts, and screened throughout the United States. She has been recognized as a Telemundo Unstoppable Woman and was recently honored by Columbia University’s Lion Pride, celebrating her as an outstanding alumnus who uses her artistic work to uplift her community. As an ardent supporter of Latinx voices, Dominique created the Read Latinx Writers Initiative, pairing over 450 emerging Latinx writers with mentors.

Revolve is a narrative film centering Zaya, a disabled Afro-Latina teen who takes on the intersection of gun violence and gentrification in her Washington Heights neighborhood through artistic advocacy. In an attempt to take control of saying goodbye to her first love, she takes him to her art studio hidden in her uncle’s Botánica. She scoffs at Santería, but a close encounter with gun violence may soon make her a believer. Zaya is distinct from other superheroes because she doesn’t look like one; not because she’s a girl, or Afro-Latina, or using a wheelchair, but because she’s not green, or gigantic, or covered in armor.

Anthony Banua-Simon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2021 "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and DOC NYC's 2022 "40 Under 40". His debut feature documentary, Cane Fire, played at the 2020 Hot Docs Film Festival as well as the 2021 MoMA Doc Fortnight and won Best Documentary Feature at the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival and the 2021 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Cane Fire was distributed theatrically by Cinema Guild and is available to stream on The Criterion Channel. The film has received praise in RogerEbert.com, Jacobin, Film Threat, and Hyperallergic, among several other outlets. His short documentary about two former workers of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Third Shift, won “Best Short Documentary” at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival and previously streamed on The Criterion Channel. Anthony has been featured in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine, Screen Slate, and HuffPost.

After more than a century of industrial farming and testing of harmful pesticides from both the sugar and biotech industries on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, feature documentary The Experiment Station looks towards a growing food sovereignty movement led by Native Hawaiians and how it contends with Hawaii’s legacy of colonialism and extractive capitalism. What was once considered an impossibility in restructuring Hawaii’s economy has now become an ecological necessity for survival.

Karina Dandashi is a multicultural Arab-American Muslim filmmaker born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Her films explore nuances in identity through the intersection of family, religion, and culture in Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) and Muslim communities in America. Her work has been featured in numerous Oscar-Qualifying festivals around the U.S. and recently screened at The Museum of Modern Art. Karina is a 2020 Creative Culture Fellow at The Jacob Burns Film Center and a 2021 Sundance Ignite Fellow. She was featured in Marie Claire’s inaugural Creators Issue as one of the “Top 21 Creators to Watch"" in 2022. Her feature film debut, Out of Water, was chosen for the 2023 Film Independent Screenwriting Lab.

Out of Water is a feature-length film about a young woman coming of age in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a Syrian-born Muslim father and an American mother. While trying to pass her driver's license test, ignore feelings for her best friend, make it through Ramadan, and pick the perfect dress for her Twilight-themed junior prom, Sama’s days are packed. She often finds solace by escaping reality through pop-culture fueled daydreams. When Sama’s grandpa arrives from Syria, her relationships with her family members and her identities, including her sexuality, are put to the test. Sama attempts to answer the question: what does it mean to belong somewhere? And why am I being haunted by a life-sized Daniel Tiger puppet?

Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. Reid’s film, I Didn’t See You There, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards. It was also a Gotham Nominee for Best Documentary and won awards at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival. Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com described the film as “first-person poetry in captivating motion.” Vox called it a “must-see.” Life After, is being produced by Multitude Films and has received support from The Ford Foundation, Sundance, Field of Vision, and Catapult Film Fund. In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A Cerebral Game, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

The starting point of Life After is the controversial 1980s case of Elizabeth Bouvia, who sued for the right to die because she was disabled and won—before assisted suicide was even legal for terminally ill patients. The film will uncover Bouvia’s life after she receded from public consciousness, up until she died in 2014. That same year, Jerika Bolen publicly planned to end her life with the help of her family because she was disabled. She was 14. In 2020, a doctor decided that Michael Hickson, who was being hospitalized with COVID-19, had “no quality of life” as a quadriplegic with brain damage, and removed Michael from a ventilator against his wife’s wishes. Claims of medical coercion and discrimination were dismissed in court. Life After will piece together the different ways that the legal and medical systems continue to aid and abet each other in making disabled death palpable.

Pilar Garcia-Fernandezsesma is a short film director and animator from and based out of New York. Her body of work largely deals with the interplay of digital and traditional mediums and textures, while exploring themes of femininity, familial dynamics, and our relationships to the natural world. Much of her film work falls under the genre of Folk Horror, with an emphasis on rural settings and the isolation and beauty within them. Pilar is a Student Academy Award Gold medalist for her film Ciervo and a Glas Animation Grant recipient for her film Colony. Her films have been shown in Oscar-qualifying festivals such as Slamdance, Cinanima, RIIFF, Annecy, Animafest Zagreb, Animest, and the Brooklyn Film Festival. She has also worked on a variety of projects that have gone on to premiere at Tribeca, win Emmys, and be shown at other prominent festivals like SXSW and the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Pajarito is an animated short film set in Spain in the late 1980s, around the time Spain became officially part of the European Union and abortion became legal. It’s an experimental narrative utilizing a mixture of soft and dreamy guache-painted animation and digital techniques, and explores two sisters as their family dynamics change when one of them has a baby. Pajarito uses the metaphor of Cuckoo birds invading other birds' nests juxtaposed with the main storyline to explore the lines between mother and mothered and family dynamics concerning neglect and the inability to bond with your own family. Like baby birds, eventually, we must fend for our own survival.

Ash Goh Hua is a New York-based, Singapore-born and raised filmmaker. They tell political stories personally through experimental leaning documentaries, challenging dominant ideologies in order to imagine possibilities of other worlds. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2022, Ash has been supported by programs and fellowships from institutions like Sundance, ITVS, Jacob Burns Creative Culture, Jerome Foundation, and NYFA. Ash is an active member of the Asian American Documentary Network, Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. Their 2020 film I’m Free Now, You Are Free (distributed by PBS POV Shorts) screened and won awards at film festivals internationally, including Sheffield DocFest, BlackStar Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Ash's 2022 film is the Oscar®-qualifying The Feeling of Being Close to You (distributed by The New Yorker), which won Best Documentary Short Award at the New Orleans Film Festival and screened at Palm Springs International Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and True/False, among others.

Full Month is a short narrative film about Jing, the black sheep of her family, who returns home to Singapore following the birth of her nephew after almost a decade away. At the baby's full month celebration, she is forced to confront her contentious relationship with her estranged mother and a traditional family politic—the causes of her departure a decade prior.

Caitlyn Greene is a filmmaker from the American South who splits her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans. She received a Primetime Emmy and an ACE Eddie Award for her editing on “The Jinx,” HBO’s Peabody Award-winning documentary series. Her recent documentary short The Diamond was acquired by The New Yorker after premiering at the Camden International Film Festival, where it won CIFF’s Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Her previous short films have screened at festivals around the world and taken home several jury awards along with a Vimeo Staff Picks' Best of the Year. Other editing projects include the vérité documentary feature When Lambs Become Lions, for which Caitlyn was awarded Best Editing at the Tribeca Festival and nominated for an IDA Documentary Award, as well as FX’s documentary series "A Wilderness of Error", from Marc Smerling (“The Jinx”) and Errol Morris.

The River (working title), Caitlyn’s feature directorial debut, is a character-driven documentary feature in Louisiana about the Mississippi River and the control of nature.

ManSee Kong creates films and videos inspired by communities organizing for social change. Her work has screened at Museum of Modern Art, Museum of the City of NY, Glasgow Women’s Library, film festivals, universities, and community spaces, with support from the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRICarts, Camargo Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Spike Lee Production Fund, and Asian Women Giving Circle. She co-founded Chinatown Art Brigade with Tomie Arai and Betty Yu, a cultural collective that uses art to support community-led campaigns for social justice. ManSee is a Third World Newsreel Production Workshop alum with an MFA in Film from NYU.

When a 19-year-old American soldier is found dead in a U.S. Army base in Afghanistan after relentless racist hazing by his supervisors, community leaders in New York’s Chinatown mobilize and embark on a multiyear journey to demand justice for Private Danny Chen and his family. What Happened to Danny is a feature-length documentary about a family’s strength, the legacy of discrimination in the U.S. and its military, and the healing potential of grassroots community organizing.