Anaiis Cisco is a filmmaker and assistant professor whose work is situated at the intersections of Black queer feminist filmmaking traditions, Black film studies and cinema production, Black girlhood studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She develops media that explores the emotional and internal journeys of Black and queer characters navigating nuanced story worlds. Her debut feature film, Drip Like Coffee, is a drama centering on Black women and queer desire. The film made its World Premiere at the American Black Film Festival in June 2024 and is currently on the festival circuit. Cisco's previous film work has screened at numerous festivals and has won various awards including a 2021-22 Mellon Faculty of Color Working Group fellowship, a 2018 Princess Grace Award, a 2021 Finalist in Film for the Mass Cultural Council, and a 2021 Drama League Award nominee.
Contessa Gayles is an award-winning film director, writer, DP, editor and an Emmy-nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, socio-political movement, healing, Black liberation and the radical imagination. Contessa’s feature-length documentary visual album, Songs from the Hole, premiered at SXSW 2024, winning the Audience Award in the Visions category. She premiered The Debutantes at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival in documentary competition. Her documentary short, Founder Girls, premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on BET. Contessa’s work has been supported by Impact Partners, Field of Vision, Artemis Rising Foundation, the International Documentary Association, Sundance Institute, and more. Previously, she was on staff at CNN, where she directed, produced, shot, and edited award-winning non-fiction, including the feature documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y.
Faren Humes is a Florida-based artist and filmmaker whose work engages duration and vérité to explore and invoke continuation. She is currently furthering a body of work concerning the continuation and interconnectedness of Black Miami.
Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” she has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Film Independent Amplifier Fellowship, Sundance Ignite Fellowship, and Creative Culture Woman Filmmaker Fellowship. Her recent film, Rest Stop, won the Jury Prize for Best US Short Film at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Crystal also received the 2022 Documentary Development Initiative grant in partnership with HBO Documentary Films and The Gotham. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Her film Edgecombe was distributed by POV. She is currently working on her first feature film, which received the 2021 Creative Capital Award.
Loira Limbal is a filmmaker and DJ interested in the creation of art that is nuanced and revelatory for communities of color. Limbal’s recent film, THROUGH THE NIGHT, is a feature documentary about a 24-hour daycare center. THROUGH THE NIGHT garnered a duPont-Columbia award, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick, premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, and aired on PBS' POV series in May 2021. Her first film, ESTILO HIP HOP, was a co-production of ITVS and aired on PBS in 2009. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, a NAACP Image Award nominee, and a 2024 Creative Capital Award grantee. Limbal received a B.A. in History from Brown University and is a proud graduate of the Third World Newsreel's Film and Video Production Training Program. She lives in Puerto Rico with her two children.
Michelle Marrion is a Haitian-American visual artist who works in documentary and narrative spaces as a cinematographer, writer, director, and photographer. She’s interested in interrogating the ways these mediums examine existence and in confronting subjects that thwart freedom. She served as a camera operator and 2nd unit cinematographer on Nanny, the Sundance 2022 Grand Jury prize winner, and on the Emmy Award-winning series When They See Us. She has also lensed films and photo projects for the UN and numerous humanitarian organizations. Studying how light, movement, and story shape what is transmitted on screen, she aims to ensure there is self and collective love in both her oeuvre and its creation. She's currently incubating a documentary and a narrative feature.
Stefani Saintonge is a Haitian-American filmmaker, educator and editor who won the juried and audience award at BlackStar Film Festival for her short film, FUCKED LIKE A STAR. Her work has screened at several festivals and institutions internationally including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hammer Museum and the Smithsonian African American Museum. Her work as an editor has screened at Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Guggenheim Museum and PBS. As a member of New Negress Film Society, she co-created their annual Black Women’s Film Conference. She has received support from SFFILM, Jerome Foundation and Bronx Arts Council and served as an artist in residence with Haiti Cultural Exchange.
Yvonne Michelle Shirley is a director and producer of narrative and documentary films. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Graduate Film Program, and is inspired by filmmaking in the social realist tradition. Her short film, Flowers, won Best Short Film in the HBO Short Film Competition at the 2016 American Black Film Festival. Her documentary short, Miasia: The Nature of Experience premiered at the 2017 BlackStar Film Festival. She produced the award winning documentary short, Black 14, directed by Darius Clark Monroe, which most recently screened at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Currently, Yvonne is producing and directing the web series, Frame by Frame, for the audio/visual magazine, Topic.com, and is producing a feature length documentary on the artist, Gil Scott-Heron, directed by celebrated documentarian, Orlando Bagwell (Eyes on the Prize, Malcolm X: Make It Plain). She resides in the city of her birth, Newark, NJ, where she is collaborating with local artists to develop The Newarkive, a multimedia artistic archive, centering imagery of and by Newark’s African American communities.