Mediamaker Fellows

Nyjia July has dedicated her career to telling the stories of the people who otherwise would go unheard. She has worked on Through a Lens Darkly, Freedom Riders and Brick City. As a producer, her credits include BET, WeTV, TLC, and the Center for Asian American Media. She has been a Corporation for Public Broadcast diversity fellow and her second feature, Listen to My Heartbeat, has been awarded development support through ITVS's Diversity Development Fund. The SOURCE Magazine listed her as one of their "25 women to watch" in 2014. Part rock doc, part political thriller, Listen to My Heartbeat examines the gentrification of Washington, D.C., the people who [...]

Laura Green is a Bay Area-based documentary director and editor, whose short documentaries have played numerous film festivals across the country. She is also a lecturer at Stanford University, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and California College of the Arts. Human Conditions is her first feature-length film. The doctor shortage in rural America has reached its crisis point. But at El Centro Family Health, a rural community clinic in New Mexico, healthcare providers offer care to all who walk through the doors, regardless of ability to pay. Human Conditions takes a character-driven, verite look at the journeys of three primary healthcare [...]

Kristina Motwani is a San Francisco-based editor whose work includes the feature documentaries First Friday, After Tiller and An Honest Liar as well as documentary shorts and media for nonprofits. She has also worked on ITVS's Independent Lens and for Discovery, and is currently editing a six part series of short docs on guns in America for AJ+. What Happened to Amos? is a feature length documentary film that marries interviews, vertié scenes, and animation to tell a story of a journalist and a missing man and how their intertwined stories could help each of them reach peace.

Isabel Alcántara is a Mexican documentary filmmaker with a background in photojournalism from the Newhouse School of Public Communications. She has produced award-winning content that has screened at SXSW and major television networks such as A&E and History Channel. She has also shot photographic and multimedia content for Paper Magazine and The New York Times, and is a staff writer for the GLAAD Award-winning queer website, Autostraddle. The Age of Water tells the story of Nely Baez, a young woman spearheading a grassroots effort to investigate the frequent death of little girls in her Mexican town. Nely soon discovers that the water in her [...]

Emelie Mahdavian is a filmmaker, dancer, musician, and Fulbright scholar whose work frequently deals with gender, media, and global politics. Previously, she was Director of the Davis Feminist Film Festival, Panels Coordinator for the Mill Valley Film Festival, and Assistant Director of Ballet Afsaneh. Her documentary After the Curtain premiered at Lincoln Center as part of Dance on Camera 2016 and her experimental motion-capture short film Intangible Body is currently installed at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum and the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art. Emelie studied filmmaking at London Film School and has Ph.D. in Performance Studies with an emphasis in [...]

Amidst attention grabbing headlines of IPOs, Apps, and extreme wealth, Home is a Hotel is a different San Francisco story: a day spent following the lives of four working-class residents of San Francisco’s residential hotels. Kevin D. Wong is a Bay Area-based director, editor, and producer. After a stint at Lucasfilm's ILM he ventured out into the world of freelance filmmaking where he writes, directs, edits and otherwise renders both fiction and nonfiction films. His narrative films include Forgetting, an adaptation of a Radiolab episode about a man who can't remember faces, and Be My Baby, a family drama that was featured on Comcast's Pinoy [...]

Alcee H. Walker, an acclaimed filmmaker and founder of a film production company, Chasing My Dreams Film Group. He is known for his thought-provoking films and is committed to empowering young talents in both the film and music spheres. Holding an MFA in Social Documentary and a MPS in Directing from the School of Visual Arts, Walker has garnered recognition for his compelling work, including his award-winning documentary "Pain of Love," honored by the Directors Guild of America. His films "Inferno" and "Child Support" have also earned accolades from the DGA. Through his unfiltered storytelling, Walker tackles diverse social issues, [...]

Jethro Patalinghug is a filmmaker based in San Francisco, California.  His film My Revolutionary Mother was cited as the best documentary film in the Philippines for 2015 by a coalition of film critics at pinyorebyu.com. It also won Best Short Documentary Film at the Boston Asian American Film Festival, Singkwento International Film Festival, and Unofficial Google Film Festival 2013 among others. Patalinghug is also an experienced television and corporate video producer and has produced content for Google, MTV Philippines, Studio23 MYX, GMA7, QTV11 and ABC5. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Film and Video Production at the Art Institute of California [...]

The F Word is a docu-comedy web series that will chronicle the journey of Nico and Kristan, a queer Bay Area couple who plan to become fost-adopt parents and are committed to learning everything they can about the troubled institution on which they are staking their dreams of parenthood. Determined to dispel the pervasive idea that the kids adopted from foster care are "damaged goods", they seek out a range of people working to change the system - from social workers, therapists, judges and advocates to the true experts, former foster youth themselves, some who were eventually adopted, others who [...]