Academy Members 2025
Over a dozen members of Film Fatales have been invited to join The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year, whose overall membership is approaching 35% women and 22% members of underrepresented communities. The Directors branch is particularly pale and male but we hope that incremental steps can lead to systemic change. Please join us in celebrating the newest Academy members…
Abby Ginzberg
Documentary
Abby Ginzberg, a Peabody Award-Winning Director and Winner of the 2022 NAACP Image Award for Best Documentary, has been making films about the struggle for justice, racial and economic equality and women’s empowerment for over 30 years. She is helping to support and mentor the next generation of filmmakers through her work as President of the Berkeley Film Foundation.
“I have always been interested in issues of race, inclusion and getting to greater equality.”
Asmae El Moudir
Documentary
Asmae El Moudir is a Moroccan film director, screenwriter and producer. She studied at La Fémis in Paris, the Superior Institute of Information and Communication in Rabat, the Abdelmalek Essaâdi University in Tetouan, and Moroccan Film Academy. Asmae has directed documentaries for SNRT, Al Jazeera Documentary, BBC and Al Araby TV, and her films have been screened and won awards worldwide.
“I like to deal with real facts, to tell stories where the emphasis is generally on the human element. I need to be inspired by a real event/fact to be able to imagine any story afterwards.”
Channing Godfrey Peoples
Writer
Channing Godfrey Peoples is a filmmaker from Fort Worth, Texas, who spent her childhood in community theater and fell in love with storytelling. She is an MFA graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and one of Filmmaker magazine’s 2018 “25 new faces of independent film.” She wrote two episodes for season 3 of Queen Sugar. Miss Juneteenth is her feature film debut.
“I say that my early cinematic journey didn’t start with cinema, it started with literature. I would read the greats like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor and people like that and I literally could see the pictures in my head.”
Christine Chen
Short Film
Christine Chen is a film producer, director and writer. She fell in love with capturing images and telling stories through film the first time she got her hands on an early addition VHS camcorder in 1993. Christine has a B.A. from Rice University as well as a MBA from the University of Texas McCombs. Christine’s favorite thing to do is being on set behind the camera, but when she is not filming, she also enjoys watching movies, eating, and empowering other female entrepreneuers.
“…Art can often be a great neutralizing medium. Depending on how a story is told, people are inclined to see art as entertainment and thus let their outer walls down, in order to absorb the material. Before they know it, they may be even falling in love with a story that is very contradictory to what they know to be their beliefs. That is the power of art.”
Danielle Deadwyler
Actor
Danielle Deadwyler is an interdisciplinary artist, mother, and native of Atlanta, GA. As a filmmaker and producer, Deadwyler’s work has been screened in numerous festivals. The multimedia project MuhfuckaNeva(Luvd)Uhs: Real Live Girl film was the Jury award winner of the WonderRoot Film Night. She also starred in and co-produced the American Black Film Festival 2014 HBO Shorts Official Selection Ir/Reconcilable. Her short film, SuPerHeRoInUh, screened amongst ten finalists as a part of the Airport Shorts 3.0 program, and the Atlanta Film Festival 40th anniversary. The Devil to Pay starred Deadwyler as lead (and as a producer), has been awarded numerous festival prizes and critical acclaim. Recently, Chor[e]s received the jury award experimental short at the New Orleans Film Festival.
“I think our humanity is asking us to break it up—to introduce something new to ourselves so that we can begin to engage it with a different clarity of mind. Hence, my practice of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary work.”
Elizabeth Lo
Documentary
Elizabeth Lo is an award-winning filmmaker. Elizabeth’s work has played at over 100 film festivals and has won numerous awards. Elizabeth was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine in 2015 and was featured in the 2015 Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase at Cannes Lion. She was selected for the New York Film Festival Artist Academy in 2018 and the Locarno Film Festival Filmmakers Academy in 2019. In 2017, her collected shorts were released by Video Project as a DVD, The Short Films of Elizabeth Lo, for distribution to educational institutions and libraries around the world. Elizabeth was born and raised in Hong Kong and holds a B.F.A. from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an M.F.A. from Stanford University.
“As a filmmaker, I’m very interested in telling stories that challenge Eurocentric ways of seeing the world.”
Heather Courtney
Documentary
Heather Courtney is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, and a Guggenheim, Sundance, and Fulbright fellow. Her film Where Soldiers Come From, which was broadcast nationally on the PBS series POV, won an Emmy, an Independent Spirit Award, and a SXSW Jury Award. It made several Top 10 films lists, including Salon’s Best Non-fiction, and was supported by many grants and fellowships. Prior to receiving her MFA in Film, Heather spent eight years writing and photographing for the United Nations and several refugee and immigrant rights organizations, including in the Rwandan refugee camps after the Rwandan genocide.
“I always really try and focus on the human story and not the issues. The issues are always there in the background, but I feel like each audience member takes from the film their own thing.”
Jane Schoenbrun
Director
Jane Schoenbrun is a non-binary American filmmaker, writer, and curator committed to making and supporting personal, art-driven cinema. Jane is the co-creator of the ongoing touring variety series The Eyeslicer, a collaboration with hundreds of filmmakers including David Lowery, Ari Aster, Shaka King, and many more. The Eyeslicer has screened in hundreds of venues across the world including MoMA, the Tribeca Film Festival, and Kansas City’s oldest porn theater. In 2018, Jane created the Radical Film Fair, a film flea market and mentorship event that drew thousands of attendees. Jane sometimes publishes a column for Filmmaker Magazine.
“I’m a lover of genre and pop culture, and I think [my] films are a strange fusion of all these influences. I want to make work that I would have loved at 16, but I think equally the works are suspicious of the concept of peer or commercial entertainment.”
Judith Ehrlich
Documentary
Judith Ehrlich is a renowned documentary filmmaker known for her poignant storytelling and commitment to social justice issues. Ehrlich earned her Bachelor’s degree in History from UC Berkeley, where her passion for storytelling was ignited. She later pursued a career in documentary filmmaking, motivated by a desire to create films that inform, inspire, and provoke thought. Ehrlich has carved out a niche for herself in the documentary film industry, using her platform to shed light on underrepresented voices and critical historical narratives. Her work spans several decades and encompasses a wide range of topics, including civil rights, environmental issues, and the complexities of human relationships.
“Whistleblowers rivet the attention of our interconnected world.”
Rose Troche
Director
Rose Troche is an award-winning writer, director, and producer of film and television. Born in Chicago and raised in a large Puerto Rican family, her first feature, Go Fish was released to wide acclaim and became a seminal film in the history of queer cinema. Go Fish premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Independent Sprit Award, and won awards internationally. Troche’s work continues to garner international favor.
“Sometimes you make something and it’s alchemy. We had lost a lot of people to the AIDS pandemic, and there was a joyfulness in the film and an unapologetic nature to it that a lot of people wanted to feel. There’s a sense of friendship and community in [Go Fish] that I think still resonates.”
Sam Feder
Documentary
Sam Feder is a Peabody Award-nominated film director and writer. Sam created and directed Heightened Scrutiny (Sundance 2025), Disclosure, the widely acclaimed Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, and Boy I Am. Sam’s films explore the intersection of media and politics along the lines of race, class, and gender. Sam’s films have been programmed by Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, CPH:DOX, MOMA PS-1, The British Film Institute, The Hammer Museum, and in hundreds of film festivals around the world, and more.
“I am always interested in centering trans voices and giving them complete agency and allow them to be the experts of their own lives, and not positioning them in a place where they have to defend themselves.”
Smriti Mundhra
Documentary
Smriti Mundhra is an Academy Award-nominated director/producer and one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 Filmmakers to Watch. Her latest film, St. Louis Superman, has been nominated for a 2020 Academy Award in the short documentary category. Her debut feature, the documentary A Suitable Girl, world premiered in competition at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival to rave reviews and was awarded the Albert Maysles Best Documentary Director prize. She created and executive produced multiple Netflix docuseries. She has written, directed and produced both short- and long-form documentary content for BET, Al Jazeera English and other platforms. Her work has been supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, Film Independent, Women In Film, ITVS, Doc Society, and more.
“What are our values as a society and do we actually believe in the ideas of forgiveness and redemption, or don’t we?”
Soudade Kaadan
Director
Soudade Kaadan is an award winning Syrian director born in France and raised in Damascus. She gained international recognition with her debut feature film, The Day I Lost My Shadow, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2018 and won the esteemed Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Film. Her next short fiction film Aziza won the Sundance grand jury prize in 2019. And her second feature film Nezouh won the audience award at the Venice Festival in 2022, making her the only Arab female director to win twice in Venice.
“Every time I see a film that represents us falsely, even if it’s a masterpiece, I immediately get furious. I immediately want to say, this is urgent now more than ever to make my film, because I want to say something different. I want to change the narrative.”
