Queer Cinema

Daresha Kyi writes, produces, and directs film and TV in Spanish and English. A natural born storyteller, she graduated with a degree in Film & TV from NYU. In 1991 her short drama Land Where My Fathers Died, which she wrote, produced, directed, and co-starred in with Isaiah Washington in his screen debut, landed her a directing fellowship in the conservatory at AFI. Most recently Daresha won 2 Webbys for Trans in America: Texas Strong, the short doc she directed for the ACLU series on transgender rights. In 2017 she co-directed and co-produced her first feature-length documentary, Chavela. which celebrates the wild, rollercoaster life of badass singer Chavela Vargas and was nominated for the Teddy award and won the 2nd place Panorama Audience Award at the 2017 Berlinale, and Audience Awards at the San Francisco Int’l LGBTQ Film Festival, amongst numerous others. Daresha also co-produced Dispatches from Cleveland for Aubin Pictures in 2017. In 2011 Daresha was Executive Producer of Emmy winning writer Kevin Avery’s short comedy Thugs The Musical. She also produced a short satirical take off on The Wiz called The Whizz, starring an all white cast and the web series Kristina Wong’s How Not To Pick Up Asian Women. Daresha has produced television for FX, WE, AMC, Oxygen, E!, Telemundo, Bravo, and FUSE, among others. She is a former fellow in the Firelight Media Doc Lab and a current member of the Wyncote, Creative Capital and Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator cohorts.

Dawn Valadez is a queer, Xicana, filmmaker, social worker, artist, youth development specialist, resource wrangler, and impact strategist. Raised by her Mexican American single mother, she never planned on being a filmmaker. Her award-winning, ITVS funded, feature documentary (with Kristy Guevara-Flanagan), Going on 13, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Co-director and producer with Katie Galloway, Dawn is spearheading The Pushouts impact campaign. The Pushouts engages audiences through a character driven story of Victor Rios, “dropout,” 3-time felon, and now nationally recognized expert on the “school-to-prison” pipeline and beloved professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Dawn’s media work focuses on race, class, education and coming of age in the 21st Century U.S. Dawn’s work is supported by the Ford Foundation/Just Films, Sundance Documentary Fund, Tribeca All Access, The California Humanities Council, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, CPB, Latino Public Broadcasting, The San Francisco Foundation, Fledgling Fund, the Jon Logan Foundation and others. She’s been awarded numerous awards and honors, including most recently the Al Bendich Berkeley Film Foundation Award (2017), a Chicago Media Project Impact Prize (2018) and the Imagen Awards’ Best Documentary Award (2018). Formerly on the board of the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), Dawn advises on documentary films and public engagement campaigns and acts as a review panelist for a range of public documentary and other media funders. In production on a queer episodic program, Dawn is a recipient of the See It, Be It Filmmaker Fellowship from the Geena Davis Bentonville Film Foundation. Past residencies and fellows programs have included the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Producer’s Academy, The Sundance Lab / Skoll Foundation’s STORIES OF CHANGE Initiative; the BAVC Media Makers Fellowship; NALIP’s Latino Producers Academy and Media Market and the Women of Color Filmmakers’ Artist Residency Center. A proud graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, Dawn has over 25 years of experience as a social worker, non-profit service, and as a development professional. Her boutique consulting business supports the fundraising efforts of non-profit organizations. She has a strong track record in developing fundraising plans, cultivating donors and sponsors, researching grants and securing foundation funds, and winning successful contracts with government entities—for capital, programmatic, & operational campaigns. Dawn is a bold advocate for underserved populations especially children and youth, students, low-income people, LGBTQi communities, and people of color. She has raised over $50 million in government grants, private foundation, and donor funds. She lives and works in Oakland, California.

Florencia Manóvil is a queer Latina writer-director based in Oakland, California. Born in Argentina, Manóvil moved to the US at age 18. She was voted “Best Filmmaker of the East Bay” in 2015, after the release of her web series Dyke Central , which has been lauded by press and fans alike for groundbreaking diversity in its representation of LGBTQ characters. Other credits include feature debut Fiona’s Script (2009, 89m) and Encuentro (2017, 16m). Manóvil’s current feature-in-development, Star-Crossed, is a sprawling love story that follows two passionate women over more than a decade, as their divergent life paths intersect and pit them against each other as policewoman and protester. Additionally, Manóvil is crafting a trilogy of shorts which explore the elements — water, air, earth, and fire — as expressed through four very different women. Of these, she recently completed Solstice (36m), which tackles issues of parenting as well as trauma, feminist community, and safe spaces.

Born in 1988, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli works as a film director, editor, colourist and critic living in New York. She has directed two feature films, So Pretty, (2019, Berlinale) a literary translation/transposition focusing on gender and the utopian imagination, and Empathy (2016, FID Marseille), a performative documentary following a heroin-addicted escort across the USA. So Pretty is a radical act of meta-adaptation that transposes a novel by gay German writer Ronald M. Schernikau from 1980s West Berlin to 2018 New York.

Dr. Kami Chisholm is a queer, disabled, activist filmmaker and arts curator whose work focuses on dismantling white supremacy, ending settler colonialism, and the quest for justice for those commonly denied access to the means to live and thrive. Chisholm has been making films for more than 20 years, since beginning their BA in Film Production and English from Loyola Marymount University. They also hold a PhD in History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Film Production from York University. Their most recently completed documentary, Pride Denied (released in 2016 and distributed by Media Education Foundation and Vtape), explores topics such as homonationalism, corporatization, and pinkwashing in the context of the 2014 World Pride festival in Toronto. They are currently working on the mid-length documentary Citizen – a documentary about citizenship, borders, colonization, and migrant justice, funded in part by the Osgoode Law School Artist Residency – as well as the feature documentary, A Brief History of Whiteness.