Twelve diverse independent artists will receive support from the 2016 Sundance Institute | Time Warner Foundation Fellowship Program. These Fellowships and accompanying grants mark their 10th anniversary this year and are part of the Institute’s year-round efforts to discover and support independent artists from diverse backgrounds in getting their work made and seen.
The program includes support for Fellows working in new media, documentary and narrative film, theatre and film music as well as from the Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Program. Fellows receive continued support from the Institute ranging from attendance at an annual Lab, mentoring, strategic granting, attendance at the Sundance Film Festival and participation in screenplay readings, work-in-progress screenings and related programs and events.
Since 2007, the program has supported more than 58 artists, including Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station), Sydney Freeland (Diné) (Drunktown’s Finest), Aurora Guerrero (Mosquita y Mari), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate) and Yung Jake (I Don’t Remember).
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Over the past 10 years, our program with the Time Warner Foundation has supported an exceptionally talented, gifted and diverse group of artists. We look forward to working with this year’s class of Time Warner Fellows as they develop their craft and make a lasting impact in both their field and the artistic community as a whole.”
“We are very proud of our groundbreaking partnership with the Sundance Institute,” said Lisa Garcia Quiroz, President, Time Warner Foundation. “Together, we are ensuring that the next generation of talented storytellers resonates deeply with our diverse global audiences, and in doing so we have redefined storytelling.”
The 2016 Sundance Institute | Time Warner Foundation Fellows are:
Frances Bodomo (Feature Film Program) – Ghanian writer/director Frances Bodomo grew up in Ghana, Norway and Hong Kong, before moving to New York City to study film at Columbia University (B.A.) and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (M.F.A.). Her short films Boneshaker and Afronauts both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and went on to play various festivals including the Berlinale, Telluride and New Directors/New Films. She recently directed the short segment “Everybody Dies!” for the omnibus feature Collective:Unconscious, which premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival. Bodomo is also a Sundance Institute | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow.
Adrienne Maree Brown (New Frontier Program) – Adrienne Maree Brown is the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements; a writer, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit. She has been awarded two Knight Arts Challenge Awards, the 2013 Kresge Award, and was a participant in Clarion’s 2015 Sci Fi Short Story Writing Workshop and the inaugural Speculative Fiction Workshop at Voices of Our Nation in 2014.
Kirsten Childs (Theatre Program) – Kirsten Childs is the writer of The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Miracle Brothers, Fly (with Rajiv Joseph and Bill Sherman), Funked Up Fairy Tales, and Bella: An American Tall Tale. Kirsten’s awards include Obie, Kleban, Larson, Richard Rodgers, Audelco and Gilman/Gonzalez-Falla awards. Nominations include Lortel and Drama Desk. Kirsten has written for Disney Theatricals, the American Songbook series at Lincoln Center, the New Electric Company, City Center Encores!, Works and Process @ Guggenheim Museum and Premieres/Inner Voices.
Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. (Native American and Indigenous Program, Time Warner Foundation Native Producer Fellow) – Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1989. He is an enrolled citizen of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe in Wisconsin. After living in many towns and reservations throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin, he settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied English at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and presided over the university’s largest film club. He has written and directed 10 short films and written two feature-length screenplays. Additionally, Lyle has written several short films which were produced by other directors in the Minneapolis area. He is currently working on two short films, a feature-length screenplay and a web series.
Amie Doherty (Film Music Program) – Originally from Ireland and now based in Los Angeles, Amie Doherty works as a composer and orchestrator on a wide variety of film and television projects. Her most recent credits include drama-thriller Feast Of Varanasi (composer), HBO’s The Night Of and FX/Marvel’s Legion (orchestrator), Freeform’s Shadowhunters and CBS’ Extant (additional music). Amie holds a master’s degree in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games from Berklee College of Music.
Kahlil Hudson (Documentary Film Program) – Alaska Native Kahlil Hudson (Tlingit) is currently a professor of film at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His first feature documentary Low & Clear premiered at SXSW where it won the Audience Award. The film went on to screen at numerous festivals including True/False, HotDocs, and IDFA. Kahlil is the co-founder of Finback, a creative content agency that brings documentary-style storytelling to brands and has handled large campaigns for Filson, Ram Trucks and others.
Alex Jablonski (Documentary Film Program) – In 2010 Alex Jablonski created the new media documentary project Sparrow Songs which developed a worldwide following and for which he was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s list of The 25 New Faces of Independent Film. The work was spotlighted at Sundance, nominated for a World Press Photo award and screened at SXSW and IDFA. He has cut eight feature films as an editor including Low & Clear (SXSW) and California Solo (Sundance). Currently he runs a creative content agency with Co-Director Kahlil Hudson.
Yung Jake (New Frontier Program) – Yung Jake mixes wildly immersive digital art with rap. Via the paint-with-emojis site emoji.ink, he created celebrity portraits featured by MTV, People and Time that inspired a Pepsi ad. Yung Jake took home a Webby for Netart, and e.m-bed.de/d, his browser-bending hip hop video project with Vince McKelvie, was shown at Sundance’s New Frontier exhibition in 2013 with his augmented reality app AugMented Real. Yung Jake has had three solo shows with Steve Turner, Art Berlin Contemporary and Art Brussels, and has performed everywhere from SXSW and Webster Hall to Hammer Museum, Redcat, MOCA and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Holly Nordlum (Native American and Indigenous Program, Time Warner Foundation Native Producer Fellow) – Holly Nordlum is an Iñupiaq visual artist and filmmaker from the village of Kotzebue, a small hub of 11 other Alaska Native villages. She received a bachelor of fine art degree in Graphic Design and Photography from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Holly has received the Rasmuson Individual Artist Award and was also named to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Artist Leadership Program. Over the years, she has also taught Native students art through many programs and was recently awarded an Anchorage Museum Polar Lab Project which will focus on the revitalization of traditional Inuit tattooing techniques.
Blake Pickens (Native American and Indigenous Program) – With a degree from the University of Oklahoma, Blake (Chickasaw Nation) began his career in comedy, writing online content for National Lampoon. He eventually graduated from the prestigious Peter Stark Producing Program at USC where he and his producing partner, Stephen Love, formed their company BS Pictures. IFC Films released their first film, The Land, in July. Pickens was also selected for the Sundance Feature Film Creative Producing Fellowship for Bexar County, which is set to shoot in September. He is developing projects across platforms, film, television, digital and new media. His goal is to empower Native and minority storytellers, while creating content that showcases voices that would otherwise be unheard.
Annie Silverstein (Feature Film Program) – Annie Silverstein is an award-winning filmmaker and youth worker based in Austin, Texas. Her fiction and documentary films have screened at international festivals including Cannes, SXSW, Silverdocs and on PBS Independent Lens. Most recently she wrote and directed Skunk, which won the jury award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival–Cinéfondation. Silverstein is a recipient of the San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Grant for developing her first fiction feature.
Rose Troche (New Frontier Program) – Rose Troche is an award winning writer, director and producer of film, television and new media. Her work includes: Go Fish, The Safety of Objects, The L Word, Concussion Perspective – Chapter 1, The Party and Chapter 2, The Misdemeanor and Sugar. The Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellowship Program Grant will support her VR series LGBTQIA. She is working on an additional VR project, as well as her fourth feature film, This Is Not Me, to be released in 2017.
Resources: www.sundance.org