Introducing the 2026 MediaMaker Fellows

Samantha Berlanga

Samantha Berlanga is a Puerto Rican–Ecuadorian American writer, director, and cinematographer from Queens, New York. She is currently based in San Francisco, where she is a second-year SFFILM Artist in Residence, youth mentor and BAVC Media Maker Fellow. She is currently developing her debut feature documentary, Pleasure Seekers, an intergenerational portrait of women reclaiming pleasure, agency, and connection in defiance of cultural repression. Her artistic practice centers on building bridges across Latine, queer, and BIPOC diasporas through moving images, mutual aid and art-based fundraisers.

Project: Pleasure Seekers

Logline: In Brooklyn, two lifelong best friends and a first-generation mother confront their desires, fears, and longings around love, intimacy, and autonomy. As their lives intertwine, they discover unexpected parallels.

 

Roni Jo Draper, Ph.D.

Roni Jo Draper, PhD, is a member of the Yurok tribe, from the village of Weitchpec on the Klamath River. Her experience as a queer Yurok woman has influenced her work as a teacher, scholar, and artist. Roni’s storytelling practices include poetry, watercolor, and film. Her films include SCENES FROM THE GLITTERING WORLD and FIRE TENDER.

Project: We Arrive With Fire | Ne-kah Nuee’m Mehl Mech

Logline: Since time immemorial, Yurok people have placed fire on the land to maintain a balanced ecosystem. In the past century, settlers banned fire and the environment and people have suffered. Now, Yurok people are returning fire medicine to heal the land.

 

Daryl Jones

Daryl Jones‘s filmography includes Tender (2019), a short that centers Black trans women managing the housing crisis in San Francisco. He also wrote, “Know Your Ethical Guidelines for Documentary Filmmaking,” for New Day Films. His oral history project and documentary, The New Roxy Theater (2024) is archived at Jackson State University. He holds an MFA in social documentation from UC Santa Cruz.

Project: Allensworth: The Town That Refuses to Die

Logline: Residents of a rural community in California’s Central Valley confront infrastructure challenges, drought, and flood as they work to sustain themselves and thrive at this historic site of Black and Latino migration.

 

Elisa Leiva Anderson

Elisa Leiva Anderson (b. 1991) is a filmmaker and editor from Santiago, Chile. Rooted in a family history of political struggle, her work often engages with legacies of resistance, the poetics of exile, and the unstable boundaries of nonfiction. She is drawn to discarded images and sounds, fragmented narratives, and cinema as a collective experience. She is the editor of Towards the Sun, Far from the Center (Berlinale Shorts, 2024) and the director of VISTAS (FicValdivia, 2015). She has an MFA in Documentary Film/Video from Stanford University (2023–25) and is a 2026 SFFILM Resident, where she is developing her first feature film.

Project: Meant to Be Maddie

Logline: A woman inherits an unfinished film about her grandmother, a Chilean human rights lawyer. Reassembling the Hi‑8 archive, she confronts a legacy of public resistance and private loss, revealing how history is both recorded and reimagined.

Jason Rhee

Jason Rhee is a Korean American filmmaker and writer with a passion for telling stories centered around underrepresented communities and his childhood. Jason was selected as a CONAN script intern and writer’s PA, as well as The Onion’s intern, contributor, and writer’s assistant. He also served on The Onion Union’s Diversity Committee, helping to expand the publication’s writer pool and provide more resources to its diverse writers. With a background in screenwriting and comedy, he helped produce three one-woman shows with comedian Kellye Howard, including directing a sold-out run at the Steppenwolf Theater as part of its LookOut series. Jason’s current documentary feature has been supported by the Kartemquin, CNN/Film Independent, Center for Asian American Media, Catapult Film Fund, Southern Documentary Fund, Gotham Project Week, Gold House/TIFF, LEF/CIFF, DOC NYC, Hot Springs Doc Festival, Indie Media Arts South, True/False Film Festival, Minnesota Film Festival, Chicago Media Project DOC10, Asian Women Giving Circle, and Chicago DCASE.

Project: Untitled EJ Lee Documentary

Logline: EJ Lee, a Louisiana legend nicknamed by Sports Illustrated as the “Korean Magic Johnson of NCAA women’s basketball,” has been overlooked her entire career. But finally, at the age of 60, EJ receives her first opportunity to become a college head coach and lead an underdog team of young women in West Texas.

 

Amada Torruella

Amada Torruella is a Salvadoran filmmaker, producer and film curator working between El Salvador and the United States. Rooted in collaborative storytelling, Amada’s work explores the relationship between people and home, grief and cultural dissonance. She cares deeply about memory work, as well as centering the experiences of women, Queer people and diasporic communities. Amada’s work has been supported by Chicken & Egg Films, Firelight Media and Sundance Institute. Her short documentary LA ISLA was acquired by the New Yorker and her films have screened at BlackStar, New Orleans Film Festival and Femme Frontera. Amada’s cultural work leading community storytelling labs and site-specific public artworks has received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Surdna Foundation and NALAC. Since 2014, Amada has worked as a film festival programmer for international and academy-qualifying festivals; their programming and exhibition work is at the intersection of community dialogue, media literacy and artistic discovery.

Project: Vena Acuática

Logline: A tender mosaic of El Salvador, Vena Acuática flows through the joys and perils of lives deeply bonded with water and land, shaped by the kinship among women protecting a landscape haunted by environmental negligence and forced migration.

Sara Yang

Sara Yang is an independent researcher, design strategist, and documentarian whose work is rooted in storytelling as a healing and liberatory practice. Her work explores how intergenerational and ancestral storytelling can serve as a medium for healing — and therefore, as a foundation for systems change, justice, and wellbeing at small scale and at large. She is currently cultivating Seeing Our Stories, an ancestral storytelling collective dedicated to knowing where we’ve come from, and how we fit together. In partnership with impact organizations and movements, she produces projects at the intersections of design research, visual storytelling, and systems change. She has been awarded support and recognition as a Positive Deviants Fellow with the Wolf Willow Institute, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) Workshop Alumnus, Rooted & Written Fellow, MIT Feminist Futures Fellow, and Shaping Social Work Futures Delegate.

Project: KUNIMORI

Logline: Masami Kuni was a pioneering modern dancer across Japan, Germany, Denmark, the United States, and Brazil; and father to five children around the world. He died with a secret: he was Korean, not Japanese. Previously unknown to each other, his descendants and kin begin to unearth the traces he left behind.

 

The MediaMaker Fellowship is devoted to supporting documentary filmmakers using bold cinematic language and innovative impact strategies to grapple with critical issues of our time. Our cohort is a collaborative, community-driven space that places diversity, representation, and ethical relationships with storytelling at the forefront of our practice.

Learn more about the MediaMaker Fellowship here.