2018 National MediaMaker Fellows

Susannah Smith is a documentary filmmaker with a focus on stories about the importance of placemaking for often-marginalized urban communities. Her films have been featured at festivals nationally and online, including SFFILM, Q-films Long Beach, SF Streetsblog, and by the UC Critical Sustainabilities Group. She is an Associate Producer of the SF Urban Film Fest, and has worked as a Creative Producer at Bay Area agencies for 10+ years. She earned her MA in Social Documentation from U.C. Santa Cruz. We Belong tells the story of the Lexington Club, the only women-centered queer bar in the gay mecca of San [...]

Raúl is a Mexican-Immigrant filmmaker and multimedia creator.  His work melds contemporary art, political documentary and visual ethnography to explore themes of belonging and alienation in immigrant communities. His films have screened worldwide including at the MoMI, Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK and at the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris France. He is a Princess Grace Foundation Award winner, an Art Matters/Jerome Foundation Cassis France Arts Fellow and a 2017 Tribeca Film Institute All Access grant recipient. Under intense U.S. pressure, Mexico established a new border control program that has cracked down on the migrant routes north and deported thousands of [...]

Sara Lafleur-Vetter is an Oakland-based filmmaker and a photojournalist with a passion for telling stories of the underdog and the underbelly of society. She holds a Master’s in Journalism specializing in Documentary Film from the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Her video work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Center for Investigative Reporting, Fusion, and AJ+. She believes in the power of film to unearth hard truths, break stigmas and stereotypes, and heal trauma. The Sacred & The Snake follows four indigenous women through their transformative experience at Standing Rock. As the resistance camps are forcefully [...]

Gabriella Garcia-Pardo is a documentary cinematographer, editor, and visual journalist in Washington, D.C. Focused on conservation, women's voices, and artists, she produced award-winning short-form documentaries on staff at National Geographic, filmed over 150 musicians on NPR’s music team, and designed a summer film program for high school students held at Yale. Gabriella is a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design and is the director of the DC chapter of the Video Consortium where she coordinates monthly gatherings. Gunpowder Women follows the story of Amal Ahamri, the boundary-breaking leader of an all-woman horseback team in Morocco as she balances [...]

Elizabeth Lo is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker from Hong Kong. She was named one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film" by Filmmaker Magazine in 2015 and was featured in the 2015 New Directors Showcase at Cannes Lion. Her work has been showcased around the world, including at Sundance, Tribeca, New York Times Op-Docs, Field of Vision, True/False, Hot Docs, PBS’ POV, and BAMCinemafest. Elizabeth graduated from Tisch NYU and Stanford University. Stray enters the world of street dogs. Ancient Greek philosophers thought stray dogs – marginalized and dispossessed – were the most honest observers of humanity. Stray brings [...]

Daniel Chein is recipient of the Princess Grace Award in Film. His most recent film Basha Man, about a rural mountain community in China facing rapid development, won the AT&T Film Award at CAAMFest2017. Daniel is an Associate Producer for Walking Iris Media and a board member of the Global Lives Project. He received a BA in Anthropology and is completing his MFA in Cinema at San Francisco State University. As a German-Turk, Çağdaş Ermis struggled to find an identity that fit. Abandoned by his father, Çağdaş was raised by his mother and grew up dreaming of dancing for Tanztheater [...]

Bryan Gibel is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Oakland, California. Originally from New Mexico, he earned a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism documentary film program in 2012, where he was awarded the Mark Felt Fellowship for Investigative Reporting. At Berkeley, he directed, shot and edited Chicago Confessional, a 26-minute documentary film about wrongful convictions and an inmate’s fight for a new trial after 30 years in prison. He speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese. Betty Reid Soskin is America’s oldest park ranger, famous for tirelessly shedding light on the forgotten history of Jim Crow segregation [...]

Ashley O'Shay is a freelance director of photography and documentarian based in Chicago. She has worked with a variety of brands, including Blavity, Ford Motor Company, Boost Mobile, and STATE Bags. She also recently served as the director of photography for Pangaea, a short independent film depicting the life of a young girl eight days after Hurricane Katrina, shot on location in New Orleans. As a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Mills preps and presents independent film to an annual audience of 80,000 people. After two Black Chicagoans are murdered by the police, young Black citizens begin challenging [...]

Keith Wilson is a filmmaker and visual artist based in San Francisco. He has produced and directed award-winning films that have screened at Sundance, the Berlinale, South by Southwest and the United States National Gallery of Art. His films are distributed by Strand Releasing, Frameline Distribution, Juno Films and New Day Films, a cooperative distributor of social issue films where he is a member-owner. Originally from suburban Atlanta, Keith has an MFA in film production from the University of Texas, Austin. Deep Inside the Shaman’s Den is a feature length documentary film about the life, work and influence of Frank [...]

Chelsea Hernandez is a Mexican-American filmmaker based in Austin, Texas, recently named as one of Texas Monthly’s “10 Filmmakers on the Rise.” She is an 8-time Emmy winning director, producer and editor in the Texas region. Chelsea has directed and produced various short documentaries including the 2012 Austin Film Festival Best Short Documentary Winner, See the Dirt. Building the American Dream is her feature directorial debut. In the shadow of a lucrative building boom in Texas, a modern slavery has encompassed the construction industry, leading immigrant workers on a downward spiral to poverty, illness, and death. Building the American Dream [...]