BAVC’s MediaMaker Fellowship

Past MediaMaker Award Recipients: 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2005/2006 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002

Congratulations to BAVC's 2013 MediaMaker Fellows!

Andrew Bateman, All They Will Call You

All They Will Call You is a twenty to thirty-minute experimental documentary, landscape installation, and oral history project that investigates immigration, erasure, and Woody Guthrie.

Brittney Shepherd and Jessica Jones, Eye, Camera / Bionics Basecamp

Eye, Camera is a feature documentary that follows artist Tanya Vlach, who after losing her left eye in a car accident, sets out to build a camera inside her prosthetic eye. Bionics Basecamp will be a companion interactive database and one-stop-shop for current trends in biotechnology and human body enhancement.

Jan Krawitz, Perfect Strangers

Perfect Strangers is a 72-minute documentary that follows the 4-year journey undertaken by Ellie, a spirited and guileless woman who, at the age of 48, decides to donate her kidney to a perfect stranger.

Jennifer Huang and Erin Palmquist, Out in America

 
Out in America, a 60-minute documentary feature, follows an Iraqi refugee through his first tumultuous years in San Francisco.

Laurie Coyle and Albertina Zarazúa Padilla, Adios Amor / MiHistoria.net

Adios Amor is a one-hour documentary about Maria Moreno, a migrant mother who sacrificed everything but her 12 kids to organize California's farmworkers 50 years ago. The film is the anchor for MiHistoria.net, a transmedia storytelling initiative that engages Latina/Chicanas in building an inclusive history of their lives.

Leah Wolchok, Very Semi-Serious

Very Semi-Serious is an offbeat meditation on the transcendent power of humor, as seen through the iconic New Yorker cartoon.

Mo Morris, A New Color

A New Color tells the story of acclaimed artist, activist, and educator, 74-year-old Edythe Boone, as she creates murals with underserved teen and elder communities, using the paintbrush as a tool to inspire self-empowerment and community action.

Nyna Pais Caputi, Petals in the Dust

Petals In The Dust: The Endangered Indian Girls highlights how the preference for sons in India as well as the Indian Diaspora in North America is leading to intolerance for girls, manifesting itself in discrimination, sex-selection, violence and "femicide."

Read the press release >

“I was thrilled to be a 2011 MediaMaker Fellow.
it has meant exposure to cutting edge technologies,
collaboration with this amazing group of filmmakers,
and it forced me to make space in my life
to think about innovation and how I could make this work.”

- Samantha Grant, “A Fragile Trust”
2011 BAVC MediaMaker Fellow

About the Program

Since 1991, BAVC's MediaMaker Awards have provided in-kind training and post-production grants for independent artists with a particular focus on supporting emerging artists and underserved communities. The Awards were designed to give independent artists direct access to the latest digital media technologies and prepare them for broadcast on public television with focused digital and multiplatform strategies for community engagement. BAVC selects between six and eight fellows annually. We are extremely proud of our past MediaMaker award winners and are honored to have played a role in their development, completion, broadcast, distribution, and audience impact.

The 2013 BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship program is designed to engage local mediamakers in a year-long series of opportunities that will support project development, with professional mentorship in multiplatform and transmedia storytelling through emerging technologies, strategic social media, marketing, fundraising, and distribution. The BAVC MediaMaker Fellows program builds an engaged local community of creative media artists from diverse fields, increases their capacity for project completion and lasting impact, and inspires new partnerships and collaboration to support future work.

BAVC MediaMaker Fellows:

• Participate in approximately three day-long MediaMaker Workshops throughout the year, designed to provide special access to experts in emerging technologies, multiplatform storytelling, and content and audience engagement strategies.
• Participate in MediaMaker Fellows Labs to screen works-in-progress and receive feedback from fellow MediaMakers and invited industry experts.
• Receive BAVC facilities access for project development, focus groups, mentor meetings, professional production, postproduction, technical development, or beta-testing.
• Receive numerous exposure opportunities including serving as a guest blogger for the BAVC web site and newsletter, highlighting your project, your creative process, screenings, events, and community engagement plans.
• Are eligible for assistance from BAVC-trained media interns who will assist MediaMaker fellows in creating a short video documentary about the MediaMaker’s project to be used in presentations, funding proposals, and project promotion. (For samples of these see http://bavc.org/node/647954.) 
• Be included in the MediaMaker Showcase – a final presentation event for the BAVC MediaMaker Fellows to share their projects and results of their fellowship year to peers, local funders, broadcasters, project collaborators, and community organizations.
• Become a part of BAVC’s creative program alumni network, with access to numerous talented and seasoned creators.
• Receive a small cash stipend ($500) upon completion of program commitments to support your participation and commitment to meeting program deliverables.

Timeline

• 2013 Fellows announced: Wednesday, February 13, 2013
• Workshops, labs, and other in-kind support: March - December, 2013
• 2014 Call for entries: December 2013

Program Elibility & Criteria

Any Bay Area BAVC member working on a noncommercial project is eligible for the MediaMaker Fellows program. (Note that we have a low-income membership option.)  BAVC takes special interest in artists who are working on projects about community and social justice issues, but we encourage projects of any genre or subject matter to apply. The MediaMaker Fellows program is particularly interested in supporting a diverse cross-section of artists with multi-disciplinary backgrounds. The proposed project should have some existing produced content (sample media to show in some format), and should have a funding commitment from at least one additional source (besides BAVC). The project must also have a strong digital media component and potential for social impact, but it need not be a traditional documentary or narrative film. Projects can be web-based, linear, interactive, performance, installation, exhibition, or a hybrid of these.

• Propose a compelling, high-quality, noncommercial project to develop over the course of the year. Project must be digital media or centrally contain digital media components.
• Have demonstrated an expertise in one or more creative disciplines.
• Have demonstrated an ability to conceive, develop, and implement a high-quality creative project – at least one public performance, exhibition, or screening of an original work.
• Be able to write effectively about their creative process and vision for their project.
• Be willing to be an active participant in monthly labs and quarterly workshops, an annual exhibition, showcase, and ongoing online forum.

More information is available in our FAQs. See also a post from 2012 MediaMaker fellow Dawn Valadez about her experience in the fellowship.