Meet Our 2024 Fellows
Daniel Mattes
Anti-Archive
Daniel Mattes is an American-born producer and partner at the Cambodian production company Anti-Archive. He first joined as a co-writer and associate producer for White Building, director Kavich Neang’s first narrative feature film which later won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. He also produced Kavich Neang’s documentary Last Night I Saw You Smiling (2019), Nontawat Numbenchapol’s debut feature film, Doi Boy (2023), and several short films from Kavich Neang, Danech San, Sreylin Meas, Polen Ly, Boren Chhith, and Chheangkea. He also manages Anti-Archive's distribution and communications, and he supports the company's other initiatives, including the Southeast Asia cinema magazine MARG1N, the Kampung Film Festival, and Karre Mouy, a lab for new Cambodian producers.
Boya Zhang
California College of the Arts
Boya Zhang is a graduate film student and a fresh dancing artist, based between China and San Francisco. She has participated in producing 20+ student films in different roles and is preparing for her annual experimental self-portrait film. Boya completed a BA in English Literature at Zhejiang University where she studied feminism and engaged that into her expressions and artworks. Her upcoming work Daisy (2024) examines cross-cultural living experiences and reveals the insecurity of females who reside alone. She also engages with moving image installations while studying at the California College of the Arts. Her work Fresh (2023) explores the fracture of internet communication in a particular country and Vision Clothes (2024) presents self-exploration under the subjective understanding of human beings.
Utkarsh
California Institute of the Arts (Online)
Utkarsh is a filmmaker and writer from Delhi, India.
Rugun Sirait
Centre for Research and Education
in Arts and Media (CREAM)
Rugun Sirait is a freelance researcher and a public program maker – who recently finished a full-time master's in Digital Anthropology at University College London. She contributed to seven editions of Festival Film Dokumenter (2017-2023) in the competition program. Beginning her cultural endeavors in Yogyakarta as an anthropology student at Universitas Gadjah Mada, she now resides mostly in her hometown Jakarta. She is currently exploring collaborative short documentary production with fellow artist and filmmaker, Arief Budiman. Rugun has a strong interest in various forms of media, such as the internet (and its culture), documentary films, photography, music, and sound. She firmly believes that media cannot escape its context and the issues surrounding it. Rugun is happily working in between digital ethnography, film programming, and what not.
Ángela Jiménez Cano
Corrientes (Online)
Ángela Jiménez Cano is an interdisciplinary artist, a creative and impact producer of independent audiovisual projects, curator, and educator. Their work explores human rights, racial and climate justice, transfeminisms, and decolonial thinking. They integrate narrative methodologies of collective creation through creative research. They have developed curatorial projects in audiovisual exhibitions and facilitated workshops in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and the United States, and have served as Juror of the first version of the transfeminist film festival Al borde in 2021 and as a juror in the 7th FICWALLMAPU International Festival of Film and indigenous arts in Wallmapu (Chile) 2022.
Nicky Ni
Flaherty Curatorial (Online)
Nicky Ni is a Chinese expat living and working between Chicago and Beijing. She writes and curates exhibitions and screenings. She is currently an Assistant Editor at Newcity, a Contributing Editor at Sixty Inches From Center, and Festival Programmer for the Onion City Experimental Film Festival (a production of Chicago Filmmakers). She is on the Selection Committee of the London Short Film Festival. Nicky is a regular contributor to Portable Gray, Chicago Reader, and Cine-File, and has completed projects at Conversations at the Edge, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Mana Contemporary, Arts Club of Chicago, and Lit & Luz Festival (Chicago/Mexico City).
Maxime Cavajani
LEF New England
Maxime Cavajani is a multimedia artist working across experimental video, photography, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time that is in between queer bodies, questioning the “seen” and the “legible”. Thinking through mnemonic functions, their work uses the slippages in between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, performance and gesture, sound, and noise to challenge modes of address. Rather than locating what is in motion, their work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces, and reflections. In doing so, the artist asks the public to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss, and love.
bree gant
Northwestern University
bree gant is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. They work across and between disciplines, rooted in ritual and intimacy and a legacy of Black queer performance. bree studied film at Howard University and is currently pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts in Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. They spend a significant amount of time binging science fiction and fantasy, waiting for the bus, and elbow-leaning in windows.
Ibrahim Handal
Palestine Ministry of Culture (Online)
Ibrahim Handal is a cinematographer and filmmaker who graduated in Cinematography from Dar Al-Kalima University in 2019.
He has worked as a cinematographer on several short films including Bethlehem 2001 (2020, officially selected in Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand, Busan), Ambience by Wissam Al Jafari (2019, Cannes Cinéfondation winner), The Deer’s Tooth by Saif Hammash (2024, officially selected in Cannes LA CINEF), and A Short Film About Kids (2023, officially selected in Clermont-Ferrand, POFF shorts, Tampere, Short Shorts).
He has contributed to several feature film productions in Palestine in the camera and lighting departments. Ibrahim is currently developing his first feature film.
Edward Aroldo De Ybarra Murguia
Seminario El Público del Futuro (Online)
Edward is a member of the Bulla Cultural Association and director of the projects Corriente: Latin American Non-Fiction Film Encounters; Serpentina: Film Festival for Diverse Childhoods and Youth; and José Antonio Portugal Film Archive. He is on staff at the Southern Peruvian Film Archives Network.
Since 2014, he has programmed exhibitions presented at various institutions including the Ministry of Culture of Peru, National Film Archive of Chile, Digital Culture Center of Mexico, Faro Aragón (Mexico), Frontera Sur Festival (Chile), Cámara Lúcida Festival (Ecuador), Latin American Film Festival of La Plata (Argentina), Equinoxio Festival (Colombia), and Bicentennial House (Argentina).
Emma Piper-Burket
University of Colorado Boulder
Emma Piper-Burket is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer using fiction, non-fiction, and collected media to investigate interactions between nature, society, and the human spirit. Her work is process-based and research driven, incorporating social trends, ancient history, science, politics, ephemera, and the natural world into her creative practice. Emma has received support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Ebert Foundation, Sundance Institute, Light Cone, Visual Studies Workshop, Marble House Project, and Middlebury Script Lab, among others for her creative works; her writing has appeared in publications such as Reverse Shot, RogerEbert.com and Mubi Notebook. She holds a MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU in Prague, a BA in Arabic and Classical Studies from Georgetown University, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Critical Media Practice at The University of Colorado Boulder.
Ireashia Bennett
Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation
Ireashia M. Bennett is a Philadelphia-based Black, queer, and disabled filmmaker, writer, and photographer. They have a BA in Journalism and are pursuing a MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Their work takes the form of new media, short and experimental films, and written and multimedia essays. They view filmmaking as a medium with the power of visibility and memory. They wield this medium intending to celebrate and amplify stories and lived experiences that have been omitted or silenced. Their artistic roots are in Chicago, where their creative work has been exhibited in art spaces including the Sullivan Galleries, Arts Incubator, Stony Island Arts Bank, and the Chicago Art Department in Chicago. They are a recipient of the two-year 2020-2022 RaD Lab + Outside the Walls fellowship at Threewalls and the 2022 SPARK Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Elham Sadeghian
Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation (Online)
Elham (Ellie) Sadeghian’s journey is a mix of academia and art. In 2021, she ventured to the U.S. for a fresh start in liberal arts. With a lifelong passion for media, especially cinema, she took the plunge into film and media arts. She sees storytelling through film as a potent tool to express her views on life and immigration, amplifying diverse perspectives. Ellie explores ideas and expresses them creatively in her work. She is committed to uncovering insights and bridging the realms of academia, art, and societal critique, with passion and purpose.
Kavich Neang
Anti-Archive
Kavich Neang studied music and dance at a young age at Cambodian Living Arts before graduating in professional design from Limkokwing University of Creative Technology in 2013. In 2010, he directed his first short film, A Scale Boy, as part of a documentary film workshop led by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. He joined Cannes Cinéfondation's Residency in 2017-18. His debut feature film, White Building, won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. He is now developing his next film.
Trisha Bhattacharya
California Institute of the Arts
Trisha Bhattacharya is a film and video artist from India, based in Los Angeles. She is deeply invested in domestic archives, inherited oral storytelling traditions and the politics of sound. She stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Sophia Rhee
Center For Asian American Media (CAAM)
Sophia Rhee is a writer and producer based in Chicago. Trained as a visual artist and ethnographer, Sophia has worked on non-fiction films and contemporary moving image artworks that have been presented at the Berlin International Film Festival, Metro Pictures Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She is committed to building a career in Chicago and developing resources and equitable pathways for film professionals in the Midwest.
Yi Cui
Colgate University
Yi Cui is a filmmaker and educator from China. She now lives and works between her home country and North America. Her film work embraces a process-driven approach and explores the boundaries among diverse cinematic forms. A series of her works were created under the theme Migrating Cinema, exploring the links between traveling film projection, Indigenous cinema, auto-ethnography, and ancient screen art such as shadow theatre. In recent years, Yi has been working in communities of Eastern Tibet to facilitate herdsmen, monk, and young student film-making. This experience has grown into her new film essay To Alexandra.
Zaina Bseiso
Flaherty Curatorial
Zaina Bseiso is a filmmaker and curator interested in diasporic relations to land, mysticism, and hope. Her work has screened at DOK Leipzig, Curtas Vila do Conde, Images, and RIDM, among others. Her film A Desert Dreams in Red, commissioned by the Academy Museum is currently on view as part of the Academy’s exhibition Shifting Perspectives: Vertical Cinema. Bseiso is a programmer at the Points North Institute and cofounder of Bahia Colectiva – a community of filmmakers that collaborate in process, practice, and curation. She serves as a programming board member at the LA Filmforum. She was born to Palestinian parents, raised in Cairo, and is currently based in Los Angeles.
Sophia Haid
Flaherty Professional Development (Online)
Sophia Haid is an artist and archivist from Dallas, Texas whose work explores the social life of vernacular image-making and archiving. She holds a BA in Film & Media Studies from Yale University and recently received a MA in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam. Her thesis, Itinerant Film Exhibition and the Promise of a Fugitive Cinema Practice, reflects on Sentient.Art.Film’s traveling screening series at the U.S./Mexico border and imagines the space of cinema exhibition as a means to “protect social life amidst social death.”
Sophia is currently attending the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon, Portugal.
Pauline Shongov
LEF New England
Pauline Shongov is a filmmaker whose work explores oral, historical, affective, and haptic senses of place as well as local and diasporic forms of community belonging, particularly in the Balkans. Her latest film Couple More Shovels for a Few More Levs (2023) premiered at the German International Ethnographic Film Festival and was selected for the Visions du Reel Film Market and Ji.hlava New Visions Market. Her practice-based work has been supported by the Harvard Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Cornell Council of the Arts. She is a PhD candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University, where she is a Presidential Scholar. She is also the co-founder of the curatorial research initiative Off-site. Currently, she is co-directing/co-producing Borá: a film that follows foragers, treasure hunters, foresters, and clairvoyants on their journeys through a mountain that unearth a cryptic landscape ripe with fables, legends, and apparitions.
Xiaolu Wang
Northwestern University
Xiaolu Wang documents, curates, translates, maps interiority, mixes video, poetry, memory, and translations through a decolonial lens. They seek, feel, get lost, and fly kites. Suspended in between places and metaphorical landscapes, they search for a way of being that embodies vagueness and precision simultaneously.
Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez
Seminario El Público del Futuro (Online)
Fernando Vílchez Rodríguez’s films are the result of his inquiries into Peruvian society. They have screened at festivals worldwide, including Berlinale, Karlovy Vary, Mar del Plata, and Jeonju. His short films, I Can Only Show You The Color (2014) and The Calm (2011), had their world premiere in the Official Selection of the Berlinale Short Films. His production company, Bergman Was Right Films, supports independent documentary filmmakers in Peru. In 2015 he created the Filmadrid International Film Festival (Spain) and then, in 2021, he was the cofounder of Los Trabajos y Las Noches, a film festival in La Rioja, Spain.
Chayanin Tiangpitayagorn
Thai Film Archive
Chayanin Tiangpitayagorn is a Bangkok-based cinephile and an independent film and theatre critic. He started out working for film magazines Starpics and Bioscope, and then expanded to other journals, online media publications, and festivals. He’s serving on the jury for Starpics Thai Film Awards-Bangkok Critics Assembly Award, where he also leads the selection committee for its short film branch, and IATC-Thailand Dance and Theatre Awards. Since 2013 he co-curates Wildtype and Wildtype Middleclass, annual film screening programmes focusing on overlooked Thai independent films, and recently joined the selection committee of Thai Short Film and Video Festival.
Nandi Pointer
University of Colorado Boulder
Nandi Pointer is a PhD student in Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her multimodal research focuses on Black American male identity formation and its re-articulation in Black expats. She holds a MJ from the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and has produced content for Netflix, MTV, Fox, and TV One. Her writing has been published both in academic journals like Jump Cut and in news magazines like The San Francisco Chronicle, Essence, and Upscale. She was recently featured on 9News-Colorado as part of Women's History Month to discuss her innovative research trajectory and the importance of Black female filmmakers in the media space.
Micah Magee
Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation
A child of contemporary dancers, Micah Magee’s first education in world cinema was as programming and managing director of Cinematexas International Short Film Festival in Austin, Texas. She took a Fulbright award from Austin to Berlin, where she studied directing at the DFFB. There she made a number of short films, winning fx the doc award in Oberhausen for Krankenhaus and the German Academy Award for Heimkommen. Her first fiction feature Petting Zoo premiered at the Berlinale Panorama and picked up accolades at international festivals before being exhibited in movie theatres and acquired by Netflix. Micah teaches directing at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Chun Wang
Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation
Chun Wang is an emerging artist working with documentary, video installation, performance, and painting. His inquiry explores how art and artmaking structure the ways in which migrants move and mobilize across geopolitical contexts. Grounded in ethnographic methods learned from his medical anthropology training at Swarthmore College, he values creative agency from liminal subjects like queers and youths, whose insights are further buried within the migrant and diasporic community. He was named Philadelphia Student Mediamaker, 35th SBIFF Film Studies Scholar, and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow for his engagement with art and community-building.
Shannon Owen
University of Melbourne
Shannon Owen is a documentary filmmaker and practitioner researcher at the University of Melbourne. Her work has been broadcast nationally and internationally, screened at festivals in Asia, Europe, and North America, and exhibited in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery. Her recent documentary credits include Left Write Hook (2023), Guy Bourdin Image Maker (2021), and Thomas Banks Quest for Love (2019). An alumni of the VCA Film & Television, Shannon returned to VCA to teach documentary and currently co-ordinates the Masters Filmmaking Program. Her research interests center around relational ethics, social impact filmmaking, and the intersections between documentary making and futures discourse.
Savunthara Seng
Anti-Archive
Savunthara Seng is a writer and filmmaker. He is a production assistant at Anti-Archive, a Cambodian production company. Savunthara is also the editor-in-chief of MARG1N, a Southeast Asian film magazine based in Phnom Penh.
Linda Wei
California Institute of the Arts
Linda Wei is a storyteller who weaves narratives traversing multicultural landscapes, emotional depths, and speculative realms. As a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant adopted into a Black and mixed-race family, they found solace and expression in the visual arts amid the clash of cultures. Drawing on their foundation in International Affairs from Georgetown University and currently pursuing an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Linda crafts films infused with personal observation and sociopolitical resonance. Beyond the screen, they advocate for underrepresented voices, mentoring teen writers at WriteGirl LA and serving as a Sundance Collab Community Leader. Their short film, Malatang, will premiere at the 2024 LA Shorts International Film Festival, while their upcoming project, Chimera, is a finalist for the Carole Dorothy Joyce Grant.
Juanita Onzaga
Centre for Research and Education
in Arts and Media (CREAM)
Juanita Onzaga is a Colombian filmmaker and visual artist currently based between Bogotá and Brussels. In her films, Juanita combines fiction and non-fiction elements, touching the importance of memory, death, and imagination, creating poetic tales that reflect different ways of perceiving reality within strong political contexts.
Her work explores intimate and emotional landscapes, the crossroads between mysticism, ancestral futurism, transformation of trauma from violent conflict, the dreamworlds, and the poetics of nature by decolonizing time and perception of the real through ancestral technologies. Her works have been presented at the Cannes Directors Fortnight, Berlinale, Venice Film Festival, IFFR, the MoMA of New York, the Museum of Modern Art of Paris.
Laura Dávila Argoty
Corrientes (Online)
Laura Dávila Argoty is a filmmaker, researcher, and programmer from Colombia. She holds a Master's degree in Film & Audiovisual Studies from Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 University. Her research interests are focused on contemporary Latin American women filmmakers, delving into the intersections of their work with colonization and ecological issues through the lens of experimental cinema. Her filmmaking practice is situated around experimental ethnography and involves the use of analog devices and found footage. She also directs Ermitañas, an exhibition of experimental cinema made by women.
Paola Buontempo
Flaherty Curatorial (Online)
Paola has a degree in Audiovisual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. She studied Art History (FDA-UNLP) and Cinematography. She was part of the UTDT Film Lab, coordinated by Martín Rejtman and Andrés Di Tella. She was selected for Berlinale Talents (2022) and Talents Buenos Aires (2012). She has been a member of the programming team of Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina) since 2018. She currently teaches at the Universidad del Cine (FUC).
Her short films Las instancias del vértigo (2010), Los animales (2012) and Las fuerzas (2018) were screened at Cinéma du Réel, Film at Lincoln Center, FICUNAM, BAFICI, Ruhrtriennale, Images, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, among others.
Ivey-Camille Manybeads Tso
Kate Cashel Fund George Stoney
Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso is an award-winning queer Navajo filmmaker. She was a fellow with the Firelight Media Documentary Filmmaker Lab and the 4th World Indigenous Media Lab. She started making films at age 9. At 13, she made the award-winning fiction film In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman, based on the true story of her great-great-great grandmother Yellow Woman, who lived through the Navajo Long Walk of 1864-1868. The film screened in over 90 film festivals internationally and won 11 awards. At 19, she began work on Powerlands, her first feature. Powerlands has screened internationally and won several festival awards including the 2022 Rigoberta Menchú Grand Prize.
Ana Bravo Pérez
Fund for the Development of Cinema (FDC) Colombia
Born in Pasto in Abya Yala, Ana Bravo Pérez’s work draws on migration, memory and violence. She uses her own migratory and diasporic experiences as a starting point for her artistic projects, investigating suppressed narratives and collective histories. Her experiences have been crucial for building an artistic practice in which personal, decolonial and geopolitical questions merge. An important theme in her work is how to deal with violence visually without representing it, so it can heal colonial wounds instead of opening them. Bravo Pérez works with materials such as coal, celluloid and gold to investigate colonial legacies and continued exploitation in the present-day. Ana's work has been shown at EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Casco Art Institute, Utrecht; TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville; Museum of Contemporary Art, Bahía Blanca; Cinematheque, Bogotá; and at film festivals such as IDFA International Film Festival Amsterdam; Hot Docs Canadian Film Festival; Ji.hlava International Film Festival; Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Havana Film Festival; among others.
Ana is currently working as tutor at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem. She is also co-founder of the eco-village project I-tekoa in Tigre, Argentina and since 2017 she is an active member of Filmwerkplaats the only artists run film lab in The Netherlands.
Rana Abushkhaidem
Palestine Ministry of Culture (Online)
Rana Abushkhaidem is a Palestinian documentary film director, interested in visual arts, archives, and anthropology. She received her BA in Film Production, with a major in Directing, from Dar Al-Kalima University in 2021. She has two short documentaries: Cinema Al Amal (2020) and El-Halabiyeh (2021) which were selected and shown in many national and international film festivals and awarded the Audience award for the best film at the Davis Feminist Film Festival. She's a part of the founding team of the Palestinian Production Directory. She worked as the audiovisual content creator at the Palestinian Museum from 2022 to 2023. She’s part of the Oral History Project at the Cultural Symposium Club in Hebron.
Devika Girish
Patricia Zimmermann Memorial
Devika Girish is a New York City–based writer and curator whose work explores the entanglements of moving-image culture with race, labor, colonialism, and power. She is the Editor of Film Comment and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival.
Devika contributes regularly to the New York Times, and her work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice, and other publications. She has also served on selection committees for the Mumbai Film Festival and the Berlin Critics' Week. She is the recipient of a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Critics' Institute fellowship.
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn
Thai Film Archive
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn is a filmmaker and moving image artist whose work explores and interrogates the socio-political history of Thailand. He delves into questions on culture, political thought, identity and personal historical memory through the lens of semi-coloniality. Bridging the gap between fiction and documentary film, he investigates found footage, archival and declassified documents. Chaikitiporn's works have been shown in film festivals, screenings, exhibitions, internationally including Berlinale, Visions du Réel, Uppsala Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, É Tudo Verdade, Festival Film Dokumenter (FFD), ifva, Berlin Art Week, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. He is a member of ELSE, a moving image screening series based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Del Holton
Stanford University
Delaney Chieyen Holton is a curator and film programmer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University with interests in queer theory, decolonial thought, and disability. Their work appears in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Frontiers: A Journal of Womens Studies, X-TRA, and Elephant Magazine. They are currently writing on Chinese American material culture in the Mississippi Delta, sex worker organizing and archival practices, and histories of experimental video in Hong Kong.
Jun!yi Min
University of California San Diego (Online)
Jun!yi Min is a performance artist from Singapore living and working in San Diego. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Visual Arts at University of California San Diego. Jun!’s works ruminate on death, rebirth and belonging through the endurance practice, a practice of waiting. In an already violent world, Jun! offers a critical sustainable approach to difficult endurance performances that confront death by offering a space where death, pain, love, and intimacy can coexist. In doing so, Jun! reframes endurance as a practice of waiting for a better future, a future where we can wake to a body that we love.
Nick Moncy
Waterman II Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation (Online)
Nick Moncy is a multimedia artist who explores the fragmentation of self as a means of existence. Through video, performance, and animation, he investigates the departure of icons, symbols, and gestures from their original contexts, deconstructing nostalgia, heteronormativity, and tradition. He received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. These days he splits his time between Philadelphia and Miami.
