Director, Queer Futures
Brit Fryer is a Brooklyn-based queer and trans filmmaker, originally from Chicago’s South Side. He has directed several films, including THE SCRIPT (co-directed with Noah Schamus), which premiered at 2023’s CPH:DOX, and CARO COMES OUT, which premiered on HBOMax after winning the Knight Made in MIA Award. His other films include ACROSS, BEYOND, AND OVER, and TRANS·IENCE. In addition to his work as a director, he produced Crystal Kayiza’s REST STOP, winner of the 2023 Short Film Jury Award for US Fiction at Sundance. He is grateful to have showcased work at Indie Grits, NewFest, BFI Flare, Inside Out, Blackstar, and more. Brit and his work have been supported by the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Creative Culture, GLAAD, and HBO / Gotham’s Documentary Development Initiative.
Director, Maggots and Men
Cary Cronenwett’s films transport viewers into dreamlike realms where utopian visions converge with speculative history. Often orchestrated with trans and gender non-conforming actors and crew, these collaborations investigate tropes of masculinity and homoerotic iconography. His narrative and documentary work has screened at numerous festivals including Miami International, Outfest Los Angeles, Frameline, NewFest New York, Queer Lisboa/ Lisbon, Identities Vienna, Montreal Image + Nation, London Flare, and Toronto Inside Out. Cronenwett holds an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts Program in Film and Video and a BA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Originally from Oklahoma, he is currently based in Los Angeles.
Director, The Queen of my Dreams
Fawzia Mirza is a queer, South Asian Muslim she & they writer and director. They co-wrote and starred in (opposite Indian film legend Shabana Azmi) the feature Signature Move, which world premiered at SXSW, screened 150+ film festivals, won 15 awards and listed in “25 of the Best Lesbian Films of All Time” by Harper’s Bazaar. She wrote on CBS series The Red Line, from Greg Berlanti & Ava DuVernay; her episode marked the first queer, Muslim romance on network TV. She is a White House Champion of Change in Asian American Art & Storytelling, an alum of the Tribeca Film Institute All-Access Program and the Canadian Academy Directors Program for Women, a Half-Initiative mentee, a ‘Yes, And Laughter Lab’ Winner, an Islamic Scholarship Fund Winner, has been nominated for The Iris Prize, and her feature script Heirloom was named to the 2022 Muslim List, published by The Black List. She wrote and directed the award-winning Noor & Layla (Outfest, BlackStar, Bentonville, Bend, Frameline, 50+ festivals worldwide) and directed the rom-com short The Syed Family Xmas Eve Game Night (world-premiered TIFF 2021) named one of Canada’s Top 10 and one of Harper’s Bazaar’s “16 Best Christmas Movies of 2021.” Her short Auntie executive produced by Paul Feig and Powderkeg world premiered at Aspen Shortsfest, received Special Mention as Best Short Short and is available to stream on The New Yorker. Fawzia co-founded Baby Daal Productions with wife Andria Wilson Mirza; their feature slate includes Sandra Itäinen’s upcoming queer Muslim documentary Coming Around and Drew Denny’s Gifted, which centers survivors of intimate partner violence with an all-survivor crew and creative team. Fawzia is in post-production on her directorial feature debut The Queen of My Dreams, shot in Canada and Pakistan, which she adapted from her short film of the same name. The Queen of My Dreams was in TIFF’s 2020 Writer Studio and Filmmaker Lab and stars Amrit Kaur (Sex Lives of College Girls), Nimra Bucha (Ms. Marvel & Polite Society), Hamza Haq (Transplant), and Ayana Manji (the upcoming Mustache).
Director, Transparent
Jules Rosskam is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and educator. Through the use of autoethnography and hybrid forms, Rosskam’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the means by which we construct individual and collective histories and identities. Born in Chicago and raised in Philadelphia, Rosskam received a BA in Visual Arts from Bennington College in 2001. He then moved to New York City, where he developed a successful editing and production career working for MTV, The History Channel, Curious Pictures, and a wide variety of independent artists. While in New York, Rosskam joined the non-profit media arts organization Dyke TV, which produced an award-winning cable access television show for the queer community. Rosskam rose through the ranks to Executive Producer, and became one of the key organizers of the show and organization. In 2005 Rosskam premiered his first feature film, transparent, which was released to critical acclaim and awards both internationally and stateside. Frameline Distribution acquired the film in 2006, and it continues to be one of their most popular films. The film has screened in over 50 film festivals and had its broadcast premiere on PBS in June 2008. He is currently assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Director, Tahara
Olivia Peace is a student Academy Award winning director and visual artist from Detroit, Michigan living in Los Angeles. Their work is heavily informed by artistic experimentation, dreamspaces, and a deep reverence for the ecosystems that made them. Olivia attended film school at Northwestern University where they studied animation and interactive art. Their senior film Pangaea was created with a research grant aimed at studying the effects of ecological displacement on young children specifically from New Orleans. The final piece utilized a mixture of live action and animation and went on to win a Fellowship with The Sundance Institute as a part of the year long intensive Sundance Ignite x Adobe 1324 Fellowship. Their thesis project, Against Reality, is a roomscale interactive experience built using AI neural networks. Against Reality premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the 2022 Student Academy Award.
Director, Hexed
Rain Valdez just received her first Primetime Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series” for her lead role in RAZOR TONGUE, which she created, crowdfunded and produced. Rain is the 2nd transgender actress to ever be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in an acting category and the FIRST Filipina American transgender actress to be nominated.
Rain is also the founder of ActNOW, the first and only acting class in Los Angeles prioritizing a safe space for LGBTQIA actors and teaches beyond the binary. Rain got her start playing ‘Coco’ in season 2 of TV Land’s Lopez and doubling in Amazon’s Transparent as Miss Van Nuys on screen and a producer behind the scenes. Valdez’s rom-com short Ryans, which she stars in, screened in over 15 film festivals worldwide after premiering at Outfest, winning the Jury Award for Best North American Short at the NCGLFF. Rain’s short film Hexed was nominated for Best Director, Best Comedy and Best Actress at the Madrid International Film Festival. Rain has been named one of Outfest LA’s Next Generation of Filmmakers and is Inside Out Pitch Please! Contest 2019 winner. She recently starred in a Paul Feig directed, half-hour comedy pilot for Freeform TV, guest stars in Amazon’s Sneaky Pete and can also be seen in the CBS All Access new show Why Women Kill.
Her 7-part web series Razor Tongue, which she wrote and stars in, had its international premiere in Toronto at InsideOut Film Festival, its US premiere in San Francisco at Frameline Film Festival of June 2019, as well as, premiering in LA at the Outfest Film Festival.
Director, Disclosure
Sam Feder is a Peabody Award-nominated film director and writer. Sam created The Netflix Original Documentary, DISCLOSURE (Sundance, 2020), and is currently developing the scripted TV series, WEIMAR with Executive Producers Lilly Wachowski and Bruce Cohen, about trans life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Sam is also writing and directing an episode for The Netflix Original animation series, Calling All Superheroes. Sam’s films explore the intersection of visibility and politics along the lines of race, class, and gender and their filmmaking practice models inclusion and equity in the industry. 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. Sam’s work has been supported by Ford/JustFilms, Fork Films, California Humanities, The Jerome Foundation, Perspective Fund, Threshold, IFP Film Week, Good Pitch USA/Doc Society, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo artist residency.
Director, unseen
Set Hernandez is a filmmaker and community organizer whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. As a queer, undocumented immigrant, they dedicate their filmmaking to expand the portrayal of their community on screen. Their feature documentary debut, unseen, had its World Premiere at Hot Docs 2023. Set’s past documentary work includes the award-winning short COVER/AGE (2019) and impact producing for Call Her Ganda (Tribeca, 2018). An alumnus of the Disruptors Fellowship, Set is also developing both a TV comedy pilot and a feature-length screenplay. Since 2010, Set has been organizing around migrant justice issues, from deportation defense to healthcare access. They co-founded the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. Set’s work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, NBCUniversal, FordFoundation, Open Society Foundations, among others. In their past life, Set was a published linguistics researcher, focusing in the area of bilingualism. Above all, Set is the fruit of their family’s love and their community’s generosity.
Director, The People’s Joker
Emmy-nominated editor Vera Drew has lent her diverse expertise as an editor, director and writer to numerous film and television projects over the last decade. Her background as a director and writer influence her editing style as she focuses on story structure and character development in her edits. She’s been described as “an editor that thinks like a writer,” and has expertly edited dozens of improv based comedies.
Vera honed her editing skills at Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s production company Abso Lutely Productions. In 2019, Vera’s talent was recognized by the Television Academy with an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Picture Editing For Variety Programming for her work editing Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime comedy series Who Is America? (2018). She is further known for her work on An Emmy for Megan (2018) and also helped launch the Adult Swim streaming network, Channel 5 for which she wrote and directed four comedy series: I Love David, Tim and Eric Quiz, Scum, and Our Bodies.
Director, The Stroll
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, filmmaker, and cultural producer. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including The Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMa PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy nominated producer for the docuseries This Is Me, and was a producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Amazon show Transparent. The Lady and The Dale, her directorial debut for television, premiered on HBO in 2021. Her follow-up project with HBO, The Stroll, won a Special Jury Award: Clarity of Vision, at Sundance 2023. Her standalone directorial feature Queenmaker was released on Hulu in May.
Actor, Genera+ion
Nava Mau is an award-winning filmmaker, actress, and cultural worker. Nava wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Waking Hour, a short film that screened in festivals around the world. She was selected as a Production Fellow for the Netflix documentary Disclosure, and worked as a producer on the short film Work, which premiered at Sundance. She appeared next as a series regular in the HBO Max series Generation. Nava received her BA in Linguistics & Cognitive Science from Pomona College, after studying in Paris and conducting research in Guadalajara, Mexico. For 8 years, Nava worked in the fields of healing justice and culture change with community-based service providers, student organizations, and survivors of violence. She has been awarded the NewFest Audience Award and the YoSoy Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation.
Coordinator
Born and raised in New Jersey, Sheryl has been working at film festivals for over 15 years. After obtaining a degree in Communication Studies at New York University, she started her career working in artist hospitality for some of New York City’s most prestigious film festivals: Tribeca Film Fetival, New Directors/ New Films, and the New York Film Festival. She continued with various logistical, operational, and curatorial positions at other festivals across the US, including the Philadelphia Film Festival, the Montclair Film Festival in NJ, and the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. Most recently, she worked as the Senior Programming Manager at Outfest, growing its festival offerings and programs for eight years. Currently, she is the Associate Director of Programming at Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans and the Director of Filmmaker/Industry Relations & Accessibility at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas.
Intern
Elze is a fourth year student from Vilnius, Lithuania, concentrating in Neuroscience and Science, Technology, Society Studies at Brown University. Elze has been a part of Brown’s student-organised Ivy Film Festival Programming Team for 3 years, sings soprano in the university’s chorus and is involved with the international student community.
Intern
Cash is a third year student from Essex, England, concentrating in Computer Science and Linguistics at Brown. Outside of classwork, Cash works at the Brown Arts Institute to produce the multimedia narrative project Eternal September, as well as providing audiovisual tech support at Media Services and web development at the Office of University Communications.
Seyi Adebanjo (Undocumented Filmmakers Collective)
Aubree Bernier-Clarke (Filmmaker)
Neelu Bhuman (Filmmaker)
Clint Bowie (New Orleans Film Festival)
Samantha Curley (Level Ground)
D’Lo (Writer/Actor)
Anna Daliza (Writer)
Ava Davis (Studio Vosges)
Drew Denny (Allies In Arts)
Zackary Drucker (Filmmaker)
Félix Endara (Filmmaker)
Amber Espinosa-Jones (Sundance)
Grace Evangelista (Filmmaker)
Brit Fryer (Filmmaker)
Claudette Godfrey (SXSW)
Rowan Haber (Filmmaker)
Jude Harris (Filmmaker)
Set Hernandez Rongkilyo (Undocumented Filmmakers Collective)
Carmen LoBue (Filmmaker)
Allegra Madsen (Frameline)
Sepi Mashiahof (Filmmaker)
Kieran Medina (Outfest)
Lucy Mukerjee (Firelight Media)
Sav Rodgers (Transgender Film Center)
Favianna Rodriguez (Center for Cultural Power)
Ryan Rox (Femme Frontera)
Julio Salgado (Disruptors Fellowship)
Moi Santos (Sundance Institute)
Kristal Sotomayor (Philadelphia Latino Film Festival)
Mars Verrone (Filmmaker)
Shawna Virago (SF Trans Film Festival)
Andria Wilson Mirza (ReFrame)
August Winter (Spindle Films)
Kortney Ryan Ziegler (Filmmaker)