Christine Yuan
In Limbo, 2017
Born in Los Angeles, CA Christine Yuan is an Emmy-award winning Taiwanese-American director. Known for her bold and playful style, and with an instinct for authentic performances that depict organic facets of youth culture and the female experience, she creates worlds that capture the imaginative quality of the human experience.
Yuan, previously a Creative Director for 88rising, has created visuals for Joji, Rich Brian, Summer Walker, GoldLink, to name a few. Her feature documentaries have won Best Culture/History Documentary at the 2018 LA Area Emmy, Best Documentary at the 2018 Golden Mike Awards, and Best Feature Documentary at the 2017 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards. Her commercial work has been shortlisted for D&AD’s Next Director Award, 1.4 Awards Show, Young Guns 15 Awards, and Shoot’s Director’s Showcase. Commercial credits include Prada, Apple, Mercedes-Benz, Reebok, Zara, and Tiffany & Co, and more.
Everlane Moraes
Aurora, 2018
Born in Bahia, Brazil and raised in Sergipe, Brazil, Everlane Moraes is a producer, director and documentary film-maker. She makes films that move between fiction and documentary, investigating socio-cultural issues of the Black diaspora, in the search to portray the identities and subjectivities of her characters, combining different formats and genres from video art to cine-essay.
Moraes' films have been exhibited at the 20th Sundance Film Festival 2020, the 2019 Rotterdam Film Festival, 2019 Documenta Madri, 2014 Bresil en Mouvements, Prise and the 2019 BFI London Film Festival among many other in Brazil and Internationally. She was awarded the William Graves Fiml Fund on Firelight Media this year. Everlane is a graduate of the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV/Cuba)
Ja’Tovia M. Gary
An Ecstatic Experience, 2015
Born in Dallas, Texas, Ja’Tovia Gary is an American artist and filmmaker whose work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed, while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, she charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality and violence. The artist earned her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
In 2017 Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking. Her award-winning films, An Ecstatic Experience and Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) have screened at festivals, cinemas, and institutions worldwide including Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Atlanta Film Festival, the Schomburg Center, MoMa PS1, MoCA Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and elsewhere. She has received generous support from Sundance Documentary fund, the Jerome Foundation, Doc Society, among others.
In 2016 Gary participated in the Terra Foundation Summer Residency program in Giverny, France. She was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Gary is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and a Field of Vision Fellow.
Kilo Kish
Blessed Assurance: a dream that i had, 2019
Born in Orlando, FL, Kilo Kish is an American multidisciplinary artist, songwriter, and singer who has recorded with the Gorillaz, The Internet, Vince Staples, Childish Gambino, and Chet Faker among others. Her work focuses on personal identity, communication, technology, and the internet.Starting as a student of design at Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, she has been heralded for her cross-medium approach as an artist.
Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Vogue, W, Fader, and The Village Voice. Kish has also exhibited films, installation work, performance art, and music technology projects. She is currently working on her sophomore LP in Los Angeles.
Kya Lou
Eulogy, 2020
Born in San Diego, Kya Lou is an artist, editor and color grading specialist based in Los Angeles. Her work is at the intersection of ancestral memory, community, landscape and identity. She currently dedicates her time to running COLOURED ONLY, a color grading studio focused on conjuring colors that exceed the frame and trouble the truth.
Lou’s work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood, among others. She is a graduate of the School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Rémie Akl
I Am Arab, 2019
A Human, An Animal or A Thing, 2020
Hi, I know you missed me, 2020
Born in Beirut, Lebanon. Rémie is a rising and unapologetic storyteller, she conceptualises, acts, and directs her own works. Her work is a call to action, especially against the corrupt government structures of Lebanon. Her videos capture the political unrest and explain further the reasons for the current revolution in Lebanon. She speaks out against the patriarchy and the diminishing rights of womxn in the middle east. Through her work she brings awareness to the global propaganda against the Arab identity and boldly claims the same identity that has been a reason of shame to so many for so long.
Her work has been featured on Nowness and ArabAd and has garnered a large following on social media. In her own words “I’m Not a Professional dancer, not a professional actress, nor a professional singer, and i’m definitely not an influencer. I’m only a Human. Who works on being more Human everyday.”
Rikkí Wright
A Song About Love, 2019
Born in Tuscaloosa, AL. Rikkí Wright Is a Photographer and Filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores notions of community, family, and sisterhood, especially among black women, and looks at the way a community can mold or expand our ideas of strength, and beauty. Wright grew up with two older sisters who were her best friends and her source of support through life’s trials and tribulations, beginning with the loss of Wright’s mother at the age of two. Her sisters taught her the power of having women by her side who she could be real with and depend on, and her work seeks to capture this sense of power.
Her work has been featured in the NYTimes, i-D, LALA, Refinery 29 and many other publications. Her film has been shown at black star fest and her clients include girlgaze, Outdoor Voices, Warby Parker and No Sesso.
Sylvie Weber
The Prophetess, 2018
Born in Southern Germany, of German-Dominican descent, Sylvie Weber’s confrontation with belonging and identity is often reflected in her storytelling, alongside a consistent desire to unveil the character within and engage more deeply with the greater representation and empowerment of womxn through film. Weber’s career has seen her explore various formats of the medium, shorts, music videos, documentaries and advertising.
Weber has embarked on a journey with the NGO, Journalists for Human Rights, to teach aspiring journalists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to cover human rights stories objectively and effectively, bringing awareness to the problems they face within and without their country.
Her work has been featured in Vogue, Fader, Rolling Stone and Hypebeast among other notable publications. Her clients include Nike, Nowness, Dazed, ID and many others. The Prophetess has won best documentary short at the Athens Film Festival.