Filmmaking On a Budget

Alana Barrett-Adkins is a director, actor, producer, and screenwriter. She is also the CEO/Artistic Director of Rock Alari Studios, LLC which has produced ongoing successful projects including the web series Women of Adonai Project, and her debut feature film Asunder, One Flesh Divided (Amazon Prime). Alana‘s recent film credits include: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always (HBOMax), The Box (Official Selection SXSW, Tribeca Film Festival), and The Foundation. Alana‘s mission and passion is to create, provoke, inspire, and empower through the arts specifically within the African diaspora. Alana currently teaches Acting and Film Production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the City University of New York.

Claudia Cifuentes is an American screenwriter, film director and producer of Guatemalan descent. She is the writer, director and producer of After the Wedding. After the Wedding screened at various high-profile film festivals including the Bahamas International Film Festival, the Big Apple Film Festival, and the Bushwick Film Festival. The film is now available on Amazon and iTunes. Her next feature film, Bariloche, was a recent finalist for the 2020 Sundance Writer’s Lab and 2020 Universal Writers Program. The film will begin filming in 2021, and is being produced by Pink Forest Films. She is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a member of the Film Fatales. She resides in leafy Boerum Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two young sons.

Patricia Vidal Delgado is the writer and director of short films Bué Sabi, Isa, Ico, 88, The Hood, and Caroline. Her work has screened at both national and international film festivals including the Raindance Film Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival, and the IndieLisboa International Film Festival. Delgado‘s films have garnered a total of 12 wins and 44 nominations. La Leyenda Negra, her feature film debut, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in the NEXT category and is currently streaming on HBO MAX. The film was a Top 20 Finalist for the Roy W. Dean Grant and was awarded the Frameline Completion Fund in February 2020. The 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards recently announced the film’s nomination for the John Cassavetes Award and the GLAAD Media Awards also nominated the film for Outstanding TV Movie. As of March 2020, Patricia is a Sundance Institute FilmTwo Fellow and is represented by the talent agency Luber Roklin.

Veronica McKenzie is a writer, director and budding historian, whose work includes Under Your Nose (2017) about UK black LGBTQ+ history, Finding Home about LGBTQ+ Asylum seekers, and Monica: Loose on a Cruise which was a BFI Flare 2019 selection. Veronica recently completed a National Lottery-funded BAME LGBTQ+ history project with the London Metropolitan Archives. Her debut feature Nine Nights won the Pan African Film Festival Narrative Feature Director Award 2019 and is released through Random Media. Currently, she’s developing a female centric historical TV series based on an award winning book.