SWSW Meetup 2025

An award-winning documentary filmmaker and instructor,  Anayansi Prado was born in Panama and moved to the United States as a teenager. She directed and produced the award-winning documentaries Maid in America (2004) about Latina domestic workers in LA; Children in No Man’s Land (2008) about unaccompanied minors crossing the US/Mexico border; and Paraiso for Sale (2011) about American retirees moving to Panama — all which were broadcast nationally on PBS. Her latest documentary, The Unafraid (2018), which tells the story of undocumented students in Georgia, premiered at the Full Frame Film festival where it was awarded the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Human Rights Award. The Unafraid will broadcast nationally on PBS Fall 2019. Anayansi is a Rockefeller Media Fellow and a Creative Capital Artist and has received support for her work from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation – Just Films, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, ITVS and other funders. Since 2009, Anayansi has served as a Film Expert for the State Department’s Film Diplomacy Program the American Film Showcase by screening her work and teaching film workshops around the world, including countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe and South America. She attended Boston University where she received a B.A. in Film.

Originally from a horse ranch in Colorado, Chelsea Christer began her filmmaking career in San Francisco. Her feature-length directorial debut, the award-winning music documentary BLEEDING AUDIO, screened at nearly twenty festivals including Slamdance. BLEEDING AUDIO released in May 2022 to critical acclaim. As both a fiction and non-fiction writer/director, Chelsea focuses on character-driven narratives often exploring themes of identity, ambition, and human connection. Her recent narrative short HOLDING ON FOREVER is currently on the film festival circuit, while her upcoming unscripted comedy TV series NOBODY ASKED will premiere on Dropout in 2024. Her latest short, the extremely dark comedy OUT FOR DELIVERY, will premiere at festivals in 2025. Chelsea has produced and directed brand documentaries and commercials for tech giants like Google and Adobe, spanning from the US to Japan, Europe, Australia, and rural India. Chelsea is an engaged member of the film community, having volunteered 15 years at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as contributing as a programmer and juror for Slamdance, Cinequest, and more.

Geeta Gandbhir has been nominated for three Emmy Awards and has won two. As editor, films have been nominated twice for the Academy Award, winning once, and have also won three Peabody Awards. Most recently, a feature documentary she produced with Perri Peltz and directed with Academy Award Winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “A Journey of A Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers” premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. She is currently co-directing and co-producing a “Conversation” series on race with The New York Times Op-Docs, and she co-directed and edited the film, “Remembering the Artist, Robert De Niro, Sr.” with Perri Peltz for HBO. Additional notable works as an editor include, “Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown,” “Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley” for HBO, which was nominated for an Emmy, “When the Levees Broke,” “By the People: The Election of Barack Obama,” “Music By Prudence,” “Budrus,” “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise,” and “God is the Bigger Elvis” which was nominated for the 2012 Academy Awards. Her film, “Which Way is the Front Line From Here?” with author and Academy Award nominated director Sebastian Junger was nominated for the 2014 News and Doc Emmys.

Giselle Bailey is a filmmaker based between Los Angeles & New York City that creates work across the platforms of Film, TV, Art and Branded content. As an immigrant coming from a Jamaican family of artists and activists that pioneered the Rastafarian movement her work has a global perspective and explores the creation of sub-cultures as a catalyst for social revolution. Her work bends the genres of documentary film, narrative and contemporary art to create content that is explosively visual and metaphorical.

Grace Lee directed and produced the Peabody Award-winning AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS about the legendary civil rights activist which The Hollywood Reporter called “an entertainingly revealing portrait of the power of a single individual to effect change.” The film won multiple festival audience awards and was broadcast on the PBS documentary series POV. Other directing credits include the Emmy-nominated MAKERS: WOMEN IN POLITICS for PBS; the interactive online documentary K-TOWN ‘92 about the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, OFF THE MENU: ASIAN AMERICA; and the feature film JANEANE FROM DES MOINES, set during the 2012 presidential campaign, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. She has been a Sundance Institute Fellow, a 2017 Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Award winner, an envoy of the American Film Showcase and is co-founder of the Asian American Documentary Network. She recently directed and produced two episodes of PBS’ five-part series ASIAN AMERICANS which broadcasts nationally in May 2020.

Jessica Earnshaw is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores themes of criminal justice, and familial relationships. Her photography has appeared in National Geographic, The Marshall Project, Mother Jones Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, amongst others. Jessica is a graduate of the International Center of Photography’s photojournalism program (New York). She later worked as a junior photo editor at TIME Magazine. In 2015, she received the prestigious Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation Fellowship & Grant to photograph aging in American prisons. In 2016, her Aging in Prison was published in National Geographic, Huffington Post and PDN Magazine and named one of the most interesting photo essays of the week by Buzzfeed. In 2017, the next chapter of her aging in prison work, centering on re-entry after a life sentence, was published in Mother Jones and The Marshall Project. Jessica’s first feature film, JACINTA, won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival 2020. Jessica was selected for Doc NYC’s 40 under 40 list.

Julie Wyman is a filmmaker and performer whose work aims to challenge and expand our culture’s narrow range of represented bodies. Her documentary films engage issues of embodiment, body image, gender, and the politics, possibilities, and problematics of media spectatorship. Her 2012 documentary STRONG! about Cheryl Haworth premiered at AFI Silverdocs, screened in theaters nationally, and was broadcast nationally as the closing film of the 10th season of PBS’s Emmy award winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been awarded support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Independent Television Service and the Creative Capital Foundation. Her participatory workshops, which have been featured events at universities, academic conferences, art galleries, and at community centers nationally, draw on her experience as professor, writer, and performer. Her films, including Buoyant (2005) and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited at New York’s MoMA, London’s National Film Theater, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Wexner Art Center, the Walker Art Center, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Wyman is currently an Associate Professor in the Cinema and Digital Media Program at UC Davis.

TT The Artist is a multihyphenate filmmaker whose work is an intersection of music, art, fashion, and film. Her bold and colorful visual storytelling is influenced by her love for black cinema and narratives that expand the representation of women of color and lgbtq stories on screen. TT The Artist’s musical success in the television and the film sync world has secured her placements on Chiraq, Twenties, Netflix’s originals Nappily Ever After, HBO’s hit series Insecure, and more. Stepping out of the recording studio and into the director’s chair, TT The Artist was selected as a shadow director for Insecure’s highly anticipated season 4. Her film Dark City Beneath The Beat, a musical documentary about the rising Baltimore club music and dance culture, is being noted as a love letter to Baltimore that uplifts the narrative of a city overshadowed by drugs, trauma, and crime. With her eyes set on new heights, she was accepted into Paul Feing’s Powerdkeg Women Focused Director’s Incubator Lab 2020. TT The Artist joins a unique roster of emerging directors and writers under Color Creative, a media platform for women and minority filmmakers founded by Issa Rae and Deniese Davis.

Winnie Cheung is a Hong Kong born, New York filmmaker at the cross section of documentary and horror. She mixes fictionalized tales with half-truths for unsettling cinematic experiences. In 2019, Winnie’s morbid animated short Albatross Soup premiered at Sundance Hong Kong, won Vimeo Animation of the Year and Short of the Week’s “Short of the Year”. In 2021, Winnie produced, sound designed and edited Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Kier-La Janisse’s epic feature length documentary on the history of folk horror which went on to win SXSW’s Midnighters Audience Award and Best Documentary at Fantasia International Film Festival. Residency Winnie’s feature film debuted at Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2023. Winnie is a proud Posse Scholar, a Jerome Foundation Video & Film Fellow and an artist in residence at Meerkat Media, a New York based cooperatively-owned media company.