Continents of Drifting Clouds
June 25–July 1, 2022

Programmed by Almudena Escobar López & Sky Hopinka

A collective myth isn’t a reality, neither is a national one. Collectivity and myth are in the stories we tell ourselves, to ourselves, that make witnesses out of audiences and participants out of witnesses, as we sail like clouds between archipelagos of thought and identity.

Errancy is adrift and the boundaries and borders of what we’ve been taught to understand as proper or traditional no longer hold meaning. What we’ve been told is only an extraction, a sequential story by those who wrote history with their own tools. The colonies are being questioned and in their stead, nebulous definitions of place, space and power have been set and proffered by filmmakers and artists using their mediums to examine imagined and incidental narratives that are unbalanced, obsolete, and dangerous in their reach beyond their geographical limits.

This 67th Flaherty Film Seminar invites filmmakers whose works reflect the multiple realities and intrinsic relationships between the local and the global. In times of responsive acts to settler colonial action and imperialism worldwide, our program offers a shift of the discussion from ways of seeing to changing the ways we know; promoting nuance and gesture of space over paternalistic attitudes of classification and domination, and maybe even welcoming the passive voice.

– Almudena Escobar López & Sky Hopinka, February 2022

Almudena Escobar López & Sky Hopinka

2022 Flaherty Fellows

The Flaherty received a very high number of outstanding applications for our fellowship program, this was an extremely competitive application pool and we are very pleased to announce our 2022 Flaherty Seminar Fellows.

Fellowships are made possible thanks to the generous support of Black Public Media, California College of the Arts, Duke University, The Film Study Center at Harvard University (FSC), Firelight Media, Kin Theory, Kate Cashel Fund of The Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region, LEF Foundation New England, University of California San Diego, University of Colorado, Oolite Arts, and Waterman II fund of the Philadelphia Foundation. Thank you to the Nia Tero Foundation for underwriting five Professional Development Fellowships.

Black Public Media

J. Bird Lathon 

As a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker J Bird is interested in a cinema of artists, outcasts, eccentrics and iconoclasts that’s aesthetically irreverent, innovative, and informative. His shorts have screened at The Nashville Film Festival and The Black International Film Festival of Berlin. In 2019, his script PRESSER was a Semifinalist in the Pan African Film Festival embrace L.A. John Singleton Short Film Competition. His latest IMPALED & INHALED (2020) uses his photographs and poetry to tell his story of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. He is a Black Public Media 360+ Pitch Black Incubator fellow and Jacob Burns Film Center Creative Culture Resident as a director of the animated oral history, THE RIDE.

Aja Evans*

Aja Quinn Evans is a producer who specializes in immersive and nonfiction projects. She has worked with Black Public Media, American Documentary, Skylight, the National Film Board of Canada, and numerous independent creators. Currently, Aja is supervising producer for an upcoming virtual reality incubator and a producer for Black Public Media’s emerging media program, BPMplus. Previously, she worked for POV’s interactive department, POV Spark. While there, she helped to launch OTHERLY, which was the first Instagram Stories documentary series and was co-produced by the NFB and POV. OTHERLY was nominated for a Webby Award in 2022 and was recognized as part of Columbia University’s 2022 Digital Dozen. Aja believes experiences created at the intersection of art, tech, and storytelling have the power to tap into untold narratives and build new systems in real-time.

California College of the Arts

Michael Anthony

Michael D. Anthony (he/they) is a producer and multimedia written, visual and sound artist currently studying at California College of the Arts in the MFA Film Program. Their stories are driven by deep emotional dives into both the mundanity of everyday life and the most horrifying realities, using juxtaposition to fuel his creations and spark engagement from his audiences. Michael blurs the lines between fact and feeling, engaging darkness as a tool to simultaneously absorb and alienate. He is a queer, anti-capitalist artist, and as a producer, Michael advocates for, and enacts, the hiring and adequate compensation of marginalized people.

Bahar Gözmener*

Bahar Gözmener is a filmmaker and visual artist from Berlin. Growing up as a child with a Turkish migration background in a conservative village in southern Germany influenced her to become curious about cultural differences and preconceptions. By combining traditional and digital media forms, she strives to challenge stereotypical beliefs and raise empathy through her artwork. She is particularly interested in creating an immersive experience that questions the nature and perception of our reality. Her work is influenced by contemporary art, multimedia/ hybrid aesthetics and surrealism. 

Colin Tianyang Zhang

Colin Zhang is a graduate film student at CCA. He graduated from UCSB with a degree in Film and Media Study. And now, he is a filmmaker seeking his own way of filmmaking. Believing in the power of montage, he experiments with forms of narrative, various combinations of images and sounds, etc., so as to recreate a unique space for the film. The connection to life is another focus of his film. It could be political. It could be socio-culturally related. But, most importantly, it should be emotional or personal because film, for him, is a language, an attitude, the way to communicate, a type of thinking, and the meaning of being.

California Institute of the Arts

Udval Altangerel*

Udval Altangerel is a Mongolian filmmaker based in Ulaanbaatar and Los Angeles. In her work she explores the themes of personal and national histories, language, and (home)land. Her work has screened at Locarno Film Festival, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, and Tacoma Film Festival, where she received Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Short Film. She recently received her MFA in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts. 

Ali Vanderkruyk*

Ali Vanderkruyk is a Canadian filmmaker and researcher currently based out of Los Angeles. Her work engages with queer methods and shifting notions of the self and other in relation to documentary ethics. Recently, she has considered scopic regimes and how they inform socio-spatial relationships. Specifically, how they feature in representations of prisons and jails within micro and macrocosmic views of incarceration. Her projects have also addressed: theories of haptics, gendered dynamics, critical historiography, and the canon of analogue film. She is the recipient of the Lillian Disney Scholarship and the Alison Doerner award at California Institute of the Arts where she is currently pursuing her MFA. 

Nehal Vyas

Nehal Vyas is a filmmaker and video artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the idea of national identity through memory, personal history and inheritance. She is currently a Film/Video MFA candidate at California Institute of the Arts. She is the co-founder of Artists In Revolution Collective, which focuses on developing a nuanced understanding of socio-political conditions across the globe through screenings and discussions in collaboration with fellow artists and filmmakers.

Duke University

Simone Barros

Simone Barros currently studies research and experimentation in 16 mm, digital cinema and audio at Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. Simone directs audiobooks working with authors Charlie Kaufman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ken Follett, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, Amitava Kumar, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru and Ibram X. Kendi. The Third Coast International Audio Festival featured Simone’s soundscape, "A Wind Blows from the South," in their 2020 Third Place Audio Festival Experimental Listening Workshop and the On Air Festival featured her audio drama, "Don’t Dream" in the On Air Festival 2021 Official Selects. Simone’s short films have screened at the Cleveland International Film Festival and the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival and she received New York University’s Tisch Martin Scorsese Filmmaker Grant and Dean Craft Award and worked for filmmakers Judith Helfand, Ric Burns, Sam Pollard and Spike Lee. Simone has taught filmmaking at Cleveland Institute of Art, Pratt Institute and the Cuyahoga Community College.

Juan Velázquez

Born in Mexico City, 1981, Juan L. Velazquez holds a BA in Communication Sciences and a degree in Photography. Because of his family ties, education and work background he grew up “neither here nor there”, in a liminal state in between the contexts of urban/rural-communities, capital/border-cities, core/periphery-nations. For over a decade JL worked with the moving image through a multifaceted experience within the film community in Mexico. In the field of film & cultural management he contributed to the transformation of digital exhibition models inside film festivals. In a complementary course as a camera operator he specialized in electronic stabilization and motion control equipment. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke. With his artistic practice he pursues to question the mechanism of perception and representation operated in the tradition of visual documentation by exploring the transient human relationship with the natural world.

Flaherty, Curatorial

Ha’aheo Auwae-Dekker*

Ha’aheo Auwae-Dekker is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) artist and filmmaker residing in unceded Duwamish land, who works as an apprentice at Remove the Gap Productions at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. They are an intentional creator with an emphasis on Indigenous experience, creating films that reflect a world connected to indigeneity. In 2020, they created a short documentary, Malihini, which explores homesickness and Kanaka Maoli diaspora through a conversation with their mother. Malihini has screened at festivals including the Hawai’i International Film Festival, Seattle Asian American Film Festival, the Oceanside International Film Festival, and the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, where it was nominated for Jury Competition in the Best Student Documentary category. Ha’aheo also facilitates workshops on topics including generational trauma and healing, settler colonialism, media literacy, and training youth in filmmaking. In their free time, Ha’aheo watches movies, researches their indigenous familial and cultural history, and painting.

Viridiana Martínez Marín

Viridiana is a student in a PhD program in Humanities with a focus in the theory of cinema. Her research is about the liminal cinema in experimental and documentary films. She is a teacher in culture, arts, and sociology at the university in Oaxaca City in Mexico. She lives between Oaxaca City and Mexico City. She is very interested in curatorial practices. She wants to create curatorial programs in her community with local,national and international artists for thinking around the cinema and the problems in her community such as environmental crisis, extractivism actions, and indigenous identity and resistances. 

Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué

Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué (They, Them, Theirs) is a researching artist-curator from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Their current curatorial research project, titled Caribbean-yet-to-come, centers on exploring the relations between performance, materialism, and territory by focusing on Caribbean islanders' experimental moving image practices enacted in a geo-historical moment marked by settler colonialism, debt, and climate change. 

Isabel Rojas*

Cinema programmer and curator. Lives and works in Tlacochahuaya, Oaxaca, a Zapotec community in the South of México. She is dedicated to research, docent, cultural management and production of cultural projects for audience formation. Currently, she works as the Artistic Director of the El Público del Future Seminar at the Festival Internacional de Cine de la UNAM (FICUNAM). She is founding director of OaxacaCine (2011-2022), where she has developed hundreds of projections of Mexican and global cinema; educational activities as master conferences, workshops, editorial presentations, seminars, the 1st Diploma of Mexican Cinema History and 1st International Encounter of Audio-visual Archivists. She has been part of the jury, selection committee and a tutor in initiatives of the Mexican Film Institute, Morelia International Film Festival and Ambulante Festival. As a programmer and curator she supports film and artistic proposals based on personal narrative, author driven, non-hegemonic, in which experimentation and diversity prevails.

Iván Reina Ortiz

Iván Reina Ortiz (Bogotá, 1991). Filmmaker, film programmer and arts manager. Director and producer of “The Squatters of The Devil’s House” (Colombia, 86’, 2015) and “autoethnography” (Colombia, 15’, 2021). In 2020 they co-curated and produced “Más Allá del Trabajo - Beyond Work, Labour Film Festival” for the Cinematheque of Bogota. They were invited as guest curator for OutFest's The OutMuseum with the short film programme "Queer Workers of the World, Unite!". They currently work at Cinematheque of Bogotá as programming coordinator.

Toby Wu

Toby Wu is an incoming PhD Student in Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He graduated from the Masters in Humanities (Art History/Media Studies) Program at the University of Chicago in 2022. He researches elemental media theory and the emergence of time based media practices in the Global Contemporary, specifically through Transpacific exchanges between Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States of America. Toby was an inaugural Asia Art Archive in America & PoNJA GenKon Fellow (2021). He has previously worked in curatorial and research positions at the Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), KADIST Art Foundation (San Francisco), National Gallery Singapore and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila).

Flaherty, Professional Development

Che Applewhaite*

Che Applewhaite is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who facilitates critical engagement with ongoing histories. “A New England Document” (Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020), his debut short film, is streaming on The Criterion Channel. It won the Best Emerging Artist jury award at Mimesis Documentary Festival and screened at over 20 venues including international film festivals, galleries, and conferences. His video artwork, “I AM THE WORLD,” premiered at transmediale 2022. He has published writing with Millennium Film Journal, Open City Documentary Festival, and Harvard Magazine, and received a 2021 International Film Festival Oberhausen Seminar Fellowship. He co-founded the Just Inquiry Initiative at the Harvard-Mindich Centre of Engaged Scholarship, and previously assisted artists Christopher Harris and Ja’Tovia

Gary during their time as Harvard-Radcliffe fellows. He received a B.A. with honors from Harvard University.

Anaís Córdova-Páez

Anaís Córdova-Páez is engaged with thinking on how politics, ecology, gender and moving images dialog together on the age of the internet. Her work puts care on the center as a way of challenging the creativity processes on the film production and exhibition. She has collaborated with artists and collectives from the global south. She is director of Lubricas shortfilm (2016) and Amazonia+Covid series (2020). Currently she is doing a masters in curatorial studies on Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola. She is programmer of Equis Festival de Cine Feminista- Ecuador. Her projects as a creator, curator and producer speak of gender, ecology, autonomy and pleasure as political visions that exist to touch the sensitive and interact with reason, in this order of importance.

Felipe Contreras*

Felipe is a Boriqua and Salvadorian photographer, filmmaker, and storyteller born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. His background in media production, environmental studies, and cultural anthropology has fueled his passion for creating and amplifying stories that push us to analyze the interconnectivity between humans and the natural world. As an artist, they are passionate about improving activism, awareness, and narrative shifts around social justice, gender equality, and climate change. They have a BA in Anthropology from the University of Washington and are a graduate of the Environmental Visual Communication program at The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Iván Delgado*

Iván Delgado, a proud representative of the Indigenous LatinX community, is an up-and-coming independent filmmaker from the South Side of Chicago. With experience assisting productions such as Showtime’s Emmy-winning series Shameless, directing music videos in collaboration with local artists, and much more, Iván often finds the necessary stories to tell through his own experiences from within his vibrant communities. Be it through writing and directing original stories or finding fellow creators to collaborate on stylized films, Iván always discovers a new creative avenue to explore, allowing himself to refine both his voice and his unique way of telling stories.

Angeline Gragasin*

Angeline Gragasin is a writer, filmmaker, organizer, and educator whose work is heavily informed by her experience as a multiracial “third culture” woman raised in the American midwest. She holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at CUNY Brooklyn College, a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from The University of Chicago, and currently teaches at The New School. She is also the Founder & Director of Happy Family Night Market, an artist-run cooperative whose mission is to celebrate the Asian diaspora and deepen cross-cultural exchange through food, art, and education. She is currently in development with Myself When I am Real, a feature film that explores otherness, identity, and assimilation from the contrasting perspectives of childhood and adulthood.

Miciana Hutcherson*

Miciana Alise interned with Jesse Collins Ent. during the 2013 BET Awards and served as 1st AD under Director Randy Reinholz at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. Her first feature length script (Nancy’s Girls) lead to her selection as a 2019 Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Fellow. Fancy Dance, a feature script she co-wrote with Erica Tremblay, was included on the inaugural Indigenous List hosted by The Black List, received the 2021 SFFilm Rainin Grant and most recently was named on the Wscripted Cannes Screenplay List. She was also a 2021 Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Indigenous Program Fellow. 

Anuj Malhotra

Anuj Malhotra is a critic, curator, and filmmaker based out of New Delhi, India. In 2012, he founded Lightcube, an acclaimed film collective, regularly touted as one of the leading resources for pioneering research and presentation of image-forms in the country. He also helped conceive the theoretical model for The Dhenuki Cinema Project, a multifaceted and versatile project that mobilizes populations in rural and semi-urban areas of the country through the medium of film.
Mayadweep, a documentary on the politics of water in the desert state of Rajasthan, which he edited and directed, played at various festivals across the country. Furthermore, his films, Gaurav Chale Gaya (2021) and Yeh Woh (2020) played at festivals in Europe. He recently finished Tales from Building No. 37 (2021), a film funded under Project 560, an initiative supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). Anuj has been invited to present talks or installations at such prestigious forums as Sheffield Doc/Fest (Sheffield, UK), Eyemyth Festival (India), Five Million Incidents (New Delhi, India), Woche Der Kritik (Berlin, Germany), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, Germany) and Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, India).

Lindiwe Matshikiza

Lindiwe Matshikiza is a Johannesburg-based multidirectional artist with a background and training in theatre-making, and a special focus on performance, writing and directing. Her projects are largely intuitive, process-driven, collaborative, and often take on more than one form over an extended period of time. She is co-founder and co-director of Motherbox, an artist-led non-profit organisation facilitating, researching and documenting process-driven creative work. Her first film as a director, One Take Grace, was a creative documentary made in collaboration with the film's protagonist, Mothiba Grace Bapela, over ten years, for which they won the Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in the Envision Competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2021. Lindiwe is also a trained ecdysiast.

Violeta Mora

Violeta Mora is a filmmaker and visual artist. She graduated in Documentary Directing from the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in Cuba and in Communication from the Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana in Honduras. Currently she is a DocNomads candidate, an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Documentary Filmmaking. Her short film Solastalgia (2022) had its world premiere at Visions du Reél and other of her films have been exhibited in different film festivals, museums and spaces in Central America and the Caribbean, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, United States, Spain, England and Southeast Asia. Her work is part of the Artistas Latinas cultural and educational heritage and through the Araña Lunática project she explores the possibilities between film and embroidery.

Natalie Romero-Marx

Natalie Romero-Marx was born and raised in Barranquilla, Colombia. She is a media and performance artist, filmmaker, cultural producer and educator working and living between New York City and New Jersey. She has collaborated in multiple interdisciplinary projects in Latin America, the United States and Europe. She started her career producing films that addressed the humanitarian crisis and displacement caused by paramilitary violence in Colombia. In 2008, she immigrated to the U.S where she has worked in experimental film, contemporary dance, avant-garde theatre and performance art. Exploring themes such as memory and identity of the African diaspora and Indigenous histories and spirituality across the Americas she reconnects with her ancestral roots. Ecofeminism, immigration and decolonization are also topics that underline her artistic, professional and educational practice.

Colleen Thurston*

Colleen Thurston is an award-winning filmmaker, educator and programmer from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Colleen has worked for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Channel and has produced and crewed documentaries for museums, public television stations and federal and tribal organizations. Her work has been supported by ITVS, Vision Maker Media, Firelight Media, Nia Tero, Sundance Institute and the Redford Center. Colleen also curates film and storytelling events, emphasizing Indigenous and decolonial programming. Currently, she is a programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, teaching documentary studies and film production. Colleen is a Firelight Media Documentary Lab alum, a 2022 Sundance Indigenous Film Fellow and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.

Raven Two Feathers*

Raven Two Feathers (Cherokee, Seneca, Cayuga, Comanche) (he/they) is a Two Spirit, Emmy award winning creator based in Seattle, WA. Originally from New Mexico, they spent their childhood moving and exploring Indigenous cultures across the continent and Pacific. They returned to New Mexico to attend Santa Fe University of Art & Design, graduating magna cum laude with a BFA in Film Production. They recently premiered at ImagineNATIVE with “A Drive to Top Surgery,” a 360 video slice of life experience. They grow their practice through the people they meet, and the stories that guide them.

Harvard Film Study Center*

Max Bowens

Max is a filmmaker and PhD Candidate in Harvard's Film and Visual Studies program. His research interrogates the nature of film-time, property rights, and ethnographicness. Max’s current film, “Clovis” centers on the audiovisual correspondences between a mother and son through autism, time, and the screen. His last film, “Sanctuary” premiered at the Maryland Film Festival (2020). His theoretical work has been published in Film-Philosophy, The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, and Film Criticism. Max is a current fellow at Harvard’s Film Study Center, and holds a M.St. from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University.

Salmaan Mirza

Salmaan Mirza is a graduate student and artist currently based at Harvard University. He writes about merchants, law and the economy in late Ottoman Syria and thinks about what it means to visualize its (and sometimes his own) archives. 

Kate Cashel Fund, George Stoney Fellowship*

Alexandra Kumala

Alexandra Kumala is a Jakarta-born artist and filmmaker normally based in New York City, but currently on a long-term research trip across Latin America. She is a recipient of the 2022 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music & Theater for her most recent film, The Prayer. She is one half of the team behind Sugar Nutmeg, the long-form podcast focusing on Southeast Asia, named after the spices whose trade route shaped our world today. She has also contributed chapters to several anthology books about Southeast Asia, including "A History of Photography in Indonesia," edited by Brian Arnold (MacDowell Fellow '17, '20). Previously, she worked in theater and translation, both of which influence her filmmaking. She spent roughly half her life in Jakarta and half her life in New York City, with stints in Seattle, Singapore, Lima, London and Bellevue in between. Being a minority in both (and all) places she calls home deeply shapes her work as an artist. Today, she makes films and writes essays about untranslatability and the constant shifting of borders, identities, and power dynamics.

LEF New England*

Emily Abi-Kheirs

Emily Abi-Kheirs is a documentary film industry professional with experience in programming, production, broadcast, and educational/semi-theatrical distribution. She is currently the Marketing & Engagement Manager for Women Make Movies, where she promotes the work of women and female-identifying filmmakers. Prior to WMM, she worked at WORLD Channel in a variety of capacities, including digital content strategy and programming for their award-winning documentary series. As a board member of Women in Film and Video New England, she strives to build community and provide educational opportunities for members in the region. Emily currently serves as the Chairwoman of the IDA Documentary Awards’ Best Curated Series jury and has served on the programming committees for film festivals such as Salem FF, DOC NYC, Woods Hole, Hot Springs, amongst others.

Milton Guillén

Milton Guillén is a filmmaker, editor, and the senior programmer for the Points North Institute in Maine, USA. His work explores the cinematic intersections of radical collaborative non-fictions and political dreamscapes. Milton’s films have screened globally at CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, DOK Leipzig, Rooftop Films, DMZ, Camden, and more. In 2017, his debut feature, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure film, The Maribor Uprisings, received the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Best Feature Award. Milton has been a fellow at the Bay Area Video Coalition, Kartemquin, Points North Institute, the Tribeca Film Institute and is the current Harris Fellow at the University of Vermont. 

Bea Hesselbart

Bea Hesselbart is a filmmaker and media artist based in Portland, Maine. She is drawn to reflexive films, personal narratives, and experimental nonfiction. Her experiences working for media organizations as well as in the food service industry have shaped her interest in exploring producer-consumer relationships in her creative work. She is currently the 2022 Documentary Storytelling Fellow at The Nature Conservancy in Maine and a member of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc). Bea is in development for her first feature, a personal doc that draws on her experiences as a transracial adoptee. She has a Graduate Certificate in film from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and a BA from Smith College. 

Leigh Morfoot

Leigh Morfoot started out at Maysles Films before moving on to produce and manage the documentary division at the American Museum of Natural history for about a decade. Deeply influenced by these experiences, her work reimagines Direct Cinema with an ethnographic eye toward finding a form of communication that asks the audience to interpret independently and participate in the meaning making process. Leigh co-directed and produced Capital: Impressions of Early Empire (2004, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin exhibition), Citizen 3.0 (2008, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, distributed by Filmakers Library), and In-between Worlds (2014 San Francisco International Film Festival). She is currently in post-production on School District, a feature documentary that chronicles Connecticut’s Stamford Public working in the shadow of COVID-19.

NBC Original Voices

Damon Davis

Damon Davis is a post-disciplinary artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. His work spans across a spectrum of creative mediums to tell stories exploring how identity is informed by power and mythology. He is well known for his body of work, Darker Gods, which explores Afro-surrealist manifestations of Black culture. Davis is a Firelight Media, Sundance Labs, TED, and Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. He is represented by Ummah Chroma Creative Partners for commercials and music videos, and his work is featured in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Set Hernandez Rongkilyo

Set Hernandez Rongkilyo is a filmmaker and community organizer whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. Set directed/produced the award-winning short documentary “COVER/AGE” (2019) about healthcare expansion for undocumented adults. An alumnus of the Disruptors Fellowship, Set is also developing a TV comedy pilot and a feature-length screenplay. Set served as Impact Producer for projects such as "In Plain Sight" (2020) by Cassils and rafa esparza, and the award-winning "Call Her Ganda" (Tribeca, 2018) by PJ Raval. Their work-in-progress documentary, "unseen," has been supported by the Sundance Institute, NBCUniversal, Field of Vision, among others.  Since 2010, Set has been organizing around migrant justice issues from education equity to deportation defense. They have received numerous recognitions such as the 2021 DOC NYC Documentary New Leaders award, and are a co-founder of the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. 

Stephen Maing

Stephen Maing is a filmmaker based in New York City. His feature documentary, Crime + Punishment which he directed, filmed and edited over four years, won a Special Jury Award at Sundance, an Emmy Award and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His previous films, High Tech, Low Life, directed, filmed and edited over five years, and The Surrender, were released on POV and Field of Vision, respectively. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow and recipient of the International Documentary Association's Courage Under Fire Award. He is a member of the Academy, a frequent visiting artist and lives in Ridgewood, Queens with his partner and young daughter. 

Michael Premo

Michael Premo is a journalist and artist whose film, radio, theater, and photo-based work has been exhibited and broadcast in the United States and abroad. He has created original work with The Foundry Theater, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, The Civilians, and the Peabody Award winning StoryCorps. Recent projects include a new performance commissioned by the Working Theater, the multi-platform project 28th Amendment, the participatory documentary Sandy Storyline, award-winning short film and exhibit Water Warriors (POV), and Veterans Coming Home (PBS). He has participated in civic artist residencies with The Laundromat Project and the National Resource Defense Council. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, A Blade of Grass Artist Files Fellowship, and a NYSCA Individual Artist Award. 

Jillian Schlesinger

Jillian Schlesinger is an independent producer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Oolite Arts*

Greko Sklavounos

Greko Sklavounos is an American artist and filmmaker of Greek and Mexican descent. He received a BFA in film from Florida State University (2007) and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016).  His work engages with memory and mythology at the personal, cultural, and transgenerational levels. Sklavounos’ films have been screened internationally at festivals including the Athens International Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Miami Film Festival, where his short "In Beauty it is Unfinished" received a jury prize for the Knight Made in Miami Award. Greko is currently a Cinematic Arts resident at Oolite Arts in Miami, where he is developing his debut feature film.

Keisha Rae Witherspoon

Keisha Rae Witherspoon is a Miami-born documentary and narrative filmmaker of Jamaican-American descent. Her work navigates spirituality, science, history and imagined realities through Black aesthetics and sounds. Her 2019 short film T screened at BlackStar, Sundance Film Festival and Berlinale, where it won the 2020 Golden Bear for best short film. T, along with her short film 1968<2018>2068, currently stream on The Criterion Channel as part of an Afrofuturism ensemble. Keisha is one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film 2020". She is currently writing a sci-fi drama set in South Florida, which has received early development support from Cinereach, SFFilm/Westridge and Sundance. This will be her feature directorial debut.

UC San Diego

Kelechi Agwuncha

kelechi agwuncha (b.Chicago, IL) is an Igbo-American video artist, filmmaker, and sound artist who uses a surrealist approach to create a set of interventions and reconstructions upon sports & bodily movement that become rehearsals of play. Using techniques of expanded cinema and cinéma vérité they construct black imagery alongside live rhythms of theatrical and musical performances ; this is otherwise known as VJing or video jockeying. They are based in Chicago and San Diego. Their work has screened at spaces including OpenTV, MoMA PS1, Chicago Architecture Biennial, UCLA Biennial and Black International Cinema Berlin. They received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego and have studied under the Isaac Julien Lab, of University of California, Santa Cruz.

University of Colorado Boulder*

Bentley Brown

Bentley Brown began making films while growing up in Chad. Working frequently in Arabic and French on the subjects of international migration, third culture identity, and belonging, his past films include OUSTAZ (Berlinale 2016), FIRST FEATURE (IFFRotterdam 2019), and REVOLUTION FROM AFAR (PBS AfroPop 2022). Brown recently completed a PhD in Emergent Technologies and Media Art Practices at the University of Colorado-Boulder. 

Toma Peiu

Toma Peiu is a Romanian-born filmmaker, visual artist and media scholar with an anthropological practice, working with migrant imaginaries from Central Eurasia and Eastern Europe. He seeks ways to meaningfully combine the moving image, installation, oral history, sound and photography to create interdisciplinary research & art toolkits that may be closer attuned to the world. With his partner Luiza Parvu, Toma is now working on a 16mm-shot, oral history-inspired sensorial exploration of life with the Central Asian Korean diaspora of New York; as well as an installation on the temporalities coexisting around the desiccated Aral Sea region in Uzbekistan and Qazaqstan. He is a PhD Candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder, and holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School. 

Waterman II fund of the Philadelphia Foundation*

Amy Hicks

Amy Hicks is a Philadelphia-based artist, educator, and member of the art collective Grizzly Grizzly. She researches and develops projects that question belief systems and the impact they have on the individual and social body. Her videos and collaborative works have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and film festivals internationally from California to Croatia. Awards include grants from the San Francisco Art Commission and Film Arts Foundation and a Djerassi Artist in Residence. She co-edited Grizzly Grizzly’s first publication “In Retrospect: 10 Years, 10 Essays, 10 Exhibits” released in 2019 and supported by the Velocity Fund, a regranting initiative of the Andy Warhol Foundation. She received her MFA from Stanford University and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Delaware.

Arely Marisol Pena

Arely Marisol Peña is from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon and Houston, Texas. They hold a BFA from the University of Houston and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores and develops a theoretical framework of greyness as a proposal for liberation. She works primarily through sculpture, moving image, and language. Peña likes to inhabit the unfixed and in-between spaces through their practice. She has exhibited with Blaffer Museum, Lawndale Art Center, Rudolph Blume Gallery, Hardy & Nance Studios, Icebox Project Space, among others. Arely lives and works in Lenapehoking West Philadelphia with a cat named Sol, and is currently converting a cargo van to sew the US-Mexico border. 

Awra Tewolde-Berhan

Awra Tewolde-Berhan is a British-born Eritrean filmmaker based in Philadelphia and an MFA Candidate in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Her work is interested in opposing definitions of personhood and spatial orientation, through varied collaborations with non-professional actors. She is guided by visual pursuits to observe and partake in moving images that absorb the aesthetic ways people exist in loose and controlled spatial conditions. Her image-making practice searches for ways non-professional actors craft the terms of the image. Awra wants to interpret the impacts of war, forced migration and dictatorship on our social fabrics. She advocates for sentient and critical media and wishes for every syllable and frame of her work to facilitate a collaborative culture of collective authorship. While working, she finds those that are under-served or under the guise of illiteracy or even film and digital illiteracy.

As Awra develops her first feature Documentary piece, she is consistently being shaped and re-shaped. Shot in 2008, by her sister and her at age fifteen, she has been engaging within the editing process since 2015.

Yinan Wang

Yinan was born and raised in a one-child family in Beijing. The literal meaning of his name is “one boy.” After working on a number of ethnographic works in China he moved to the United States and spent a number of years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is an interdisciplinary non-fiction filmmaker, working at the intersection of Chinese and American cultures. His works always deals with the uncertainty and liquidity caused by his identity and ever-changing surroundings. He just completed an MFA degree at Temple University. His work has aired on PBS and played at various venues including United States, France, Austria, Slovenia, Spain, and China. He was awarded the Cream City Cinema Emerging Voices Award by HBO.

Tshay Williams

Tshay creates intimate portraits of her loved ones to insist on the humanity of Black people. Through film and photography she creates openings for the full range of our humanity to be expressed: grief, fear, delight, and sensuality exist in delicate harmony. Her work calls upon a rigorous practice of writing, sketching, playing and conversing to ignite her capacity to regard life for what it is: a strange and stunning miracle. 

* Attending in Hamilton, NY

Online Experience

The online experience was built on ohyay and made possible through their continuous support. A special thanks to Max Gale for his development of custom interactions within the virtual space.

in-person covid policy:

Proof of vaccination will be required. Please check The Flaherty’s current COVID Policy, which will be updated in line with local and federal recommendations. In addition, the in-person Seminar will follow any additional precautions required by Colgate University.

Thank you to our major Seminar funders!