Past
Grantees

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.

Diego Andres Murillo is a filmmaker born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. Diego graduated from Audiovisual Arts at the Andrés Bello Catholic University and The Roberto Mata School of Photography. He left his constantly turmoiled native country in 2016 and unexpectedly settled in NYC, his current home. While adapting, he continues his DIY methods to create movies, which has led him, until this date, to the completion of 5 short films and one upcoming feature. The shorts have screened/won awards at international festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival, SITGES Film Festival, Brussels Film Festival, Cinélatino de Toulouse, Uruguay Int. Film Festival, Curtas Cinema Río de Janeiro, Brooklyn FF, Tacoma FF, Beijing Int. SFF, and many more. He’s been part of programs such as the Locarno Spring Academy, Cine Qua Non-Lab, and others. He is the co-founder of Maldito Fantasma (Damn Phantom), a production company spread between Caracas, Buenos Aires and NYC.

El Sonido Es El Cuerpo (Sound Is The Body) follows the wanderings of a laborless priest in a decaying Venezuelan town where animals and people just leave or disappear, and a few remaining authorities hoard over the remnants that occupy half-empty neon-lit bars. As he suffers from a somnambulist-noise condition that makes him stray naked, bleed, and forget certain events, he now faces the possible seizing of his only precious possession, a meek cow. As he tries to safekeep the animal, his sleepwalking encounters get louder and more alien-like, and a re-encounter with an old friend who is interested in helping him brings to the surface repressed desires. The film creates a moving space, shifting between dreams, memories, and the quotidian to explore an intimate crisis of faith, one that can perhaps serve as a radiography of a territory in constant distress.