Rockwood is proud to announce the 2019 cohort of the Rockwood JustFilms Fellowship!
This fellowship brings together 12 leaders working at the intersection of storytelling, film, and social change to learn powerful skills that will shift their capacity for leadership and collaboration. This cohort represents a wide range of established leaders in the film and digital storytelling sectors including: organizational leaders, media impact producers, filmmakers, thought leaders, curators, archivists, and critics. Through two residential retreats, peer coaching sessions, and additional leadership support, they will develop stronger working partnerships with each other, and with leaders of other social movements.
Join us in congratulating our 2019 fellows:
Assia Boundaoui | Independent Filmmaker/Journalist, The Feeling of Being Watched
Assia is an Algerian-American filmmaker and journalist. She has reported for PRI, BBC, AlJazeera, VICE, and CNN, among others. Her debut short film about hijabi hair salons for HBO Documentary Films premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning directorial debut The Feeling Of being Watched, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia’s Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s 2018 “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” and is currently a New America National Fellow and a fellow with the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she is iterating the machine-learning fueled sequel to her film The Inverse Surveillance Project. She has an MA in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers-born, Arabic-speaking, Chicago-native, currently based in southern California.
Bhawin is an educator and filmmaker born in Dares Salaam, Tanzania and now based in Albany, NY. In 2008, he co-founded Youth FX, a media arts organization focused on empowering young people of color in the city of Albany and around the world by teaching them creative and technical skills in film and digital media while supporting communities of young artists. Bhawin is the co-founder and co-director of NeXt Doc, a year-round fellowship program that exists to amplify the voices of documentary filmmakers of color between the ages of 20-24 years old. Bhawin is currently in production on Outta The Muck, a feature-length documentary supported by Sundance Institute, ITVS, and Southern Documentary Fund. He previously directed the award-winning documentary, The Throwaways (2014).
Carrie is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. She is currently director of the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary and Pare Lorentz funds. In addition, she is a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches in its acclaimed documentary film program. Previously, she led the Bay Area Video Coalition’s National MediaMaker Fellowship; was the senior producer of the Emmy and Peabody award-winning series Fault Lines; and was executive producer of Al Jazeera America’s documentary strand. Among other work, she produced the Academy Award nominee The Weather Underground, the live cinema piece Utopia In Four Movements and produced, directed and edited the Teddy Award nominee Reporter Zero. She is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her recent film, The Ballad of Fred Hersch is in its third year of screenings and will broadcast in Europe in 2019.
Edwin is a Bronx-born filmmaker whose work explores the intersection between people and macro social structures. His work has screened theatrically and on major television, news and streaming outlets. Edwin’s award-winning first feature documentary To Be Heard was named a New York Times critics pick and “one of the best documentaries of the year.” His most recent film, IFP Lab supported, Personal Statement, premiered as the opening night film of 2018 AFI Docs and broadcast on America ReFramed. He has also worked as a producer, editor or cinematographer on many feature documentaries including El Efecto Clemente (ESPN), Las Marthas (PBS), Rachel Is (PBS), City of Trees (PBS), and Webby award-winning mini-series The Messy Truth. Edwin is a Concordia Studio Artist in Residence and Firelight Media Lab Fellow. He earned a master’s degree in education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a Gates Millennium Scholar. He is an assistant professor of film in the SUNY Purchase Film Conservatory and making a film set in post-hurricane Maria Puerto Rico.
Gina is a programmer, arts administrator, and producer. As the associate vice President of film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), she is responsible for providing strategic and artistic direction for BAM’s legendary film program. Gina also serves as the film lab curator for SPACE on Ryder Farm, a working organic farm that offers self-determined residencies to artists and activists. Prior to joining BAM, Gina programmed film series and special events for the Jacob Burns Film Center. As a producer, Gina’s credits include Titus Kaphar’s short film, “The Jerome Project” (2017) and Ja’tovia Gary’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen (in production).
Grace won a Peabody Award for American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs about the legendary civil rights activist/philosopher and writer which The Hollywood Reporter called ”an entertainingly revealing portrait of the power of a single individual to enact change.” The film won multiple festival audience awards before its broadcast on the PBS documentary series POV. Other directing credits include the Emmy-nominated MAKERS: Women in Politics for PBS; the interactive online documentary K-Town ‘92 about the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Off the Menu: Asian America (PBS). She is currently in post-production on And She Could be Next, about women of color transforming U.S. politics by running for office in 2018. She is also the co-founder of the Asian American Documentary Network, a filmmaker-led collective which uplifts and supports Asian Americans in the non-fiction field.
Iyabo founded Brown Girls Doc Mafia in 2016 – an initiative advocating for nearly 2,500 women and non-binary people of color in the documentary industry around the world. From 2015 to 2017, Iyabo founded and ran Feedback Loop, a documentary film consulting company. She’s also held positions at industry institutions First Look Media, Kickstarter, Good Pitch, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Film Institute, and IFP. As a filmmaker, Iyabo was a Sundance Creative Producers Fellow in 2016 with feature documentary For Ahkeem, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. She will premiere her second short fiction film, a feminist sex comedy called Me Time in April. She’s also a Sundance Screenwriting and Talent Forum Fellow for her first feature screenplay, Kayla & Eddie En Français, about an estranged black father and daughter reconnecting in Paris. Originally from Denver, Iyabo graduated from NYU’s Tisch Film School, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Jason is a Miami-based writer and filmmaker from Barbados whose work focuses on giving voice to the often-marginalized stories of the tropics. A former journalist, he has written for The Miami Herald and American Way. As a filmmaker, he wrote and produced the award-winning short film Papa Machete, which explores the esoteric martial art of Haitian machete fencing. The film world premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival and had its U.S. premiere at the 2015 Sundance FilmFestival. Jason is also co-executive director of the Caribbean filmmaking and arts collective Third Horizon. Its annual Third Horizon Film Festival celebrates and empowers the new creatives emerging from the region. He is also cinematic arts manager of Oolite Arts, one of Miami’s largest support organizations for visual artists.
Katina is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer living in North Carolina, who creates films for Samsung, NBC Digital, and Al Jazeera. Katina is a 2016–17 recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship and an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Katina is also a Rockwood JustFilms fellow and Black Public Media 360º Incubator Fellow. Katina is directing/producing/filming: A Love Supreme: Black, Queer, and Christian in The South; and Abolish ICE, documenting Southern Asian-American pushback against the targeted deportation of Black and Brown immigrants. Katina co-produced and filmed Ferguson: A Report From Occupied Territory (Fusion-ABC/Disney) and contributed to Whose Streets?, documenting Ferguson activists during the year after Mike Brown Jr. was killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Katina received her MFA in film production from the University of Southern California and her MA in speech communications from Wake Forest University.
Kelly is a documentary filmmaker whose work has been used widely in organizing and education. Her most recent films are UNSTUCK: An OCD Kids Movie and My Brooklyn. My Brooklyn, about the hidden forces driving gentrification, won an Audience Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS’ America ReFramed. Kelly also made Every Mother’s Son (with Tami Gold), about mothers whose children were killed by police officers and who became advocates for police reform, which won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, aired on POV, and was nominated for a national Emmy. Kelly’s other documentaries include Out At Work (with Tami Gold), which screened at Sundance, was on HBO and won the GLAAD Best Documentary Award. From 2015-17 she was the Co-Chair of the film distribution cooperative New Day Films. She currently chairs the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College (CUNY).
Leslie is an artist, producer, and arts administrator who advocates for authentic representations of people of color. Leslie began as an actor seeking roles where Black women were portrayed as complex human beings. Not finding much work, she started directing plays and musicals at City Lights Youth Theater. She commissioned 2 new works written for and performed by diverse youth. A fondness for film led her to NYU where she earned an MA in film studies. It was there Leslie discovered her desire to help filmmakers of color bring their stories to light. After 3 years of programming workshops and panels at AIVF, and learning the ropes of grantmaking at Creative Capital, Leslie has spent the last 17 years at BPM overseeing the dissemination of $8M+ for project production, producer development, and content distribution. Leslie lives in New York with her husband and three daughters.
Lucila is program director at Chicken & Egg Pictures where she oversees the development and implementation of the organization’s programs in support of women nonfiction filmmakers. Previously she was executive producing director at UnionDocs, Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn; manager of the Production Assistance Program at Women Make Movies; director of the Media Arts Fellowships for The Rockefeller Foundation; and founder and coordinator of the TFI Latin America Fund. Lucila is in the documentary selection committee of the Morelia International Film Festival, and sits on the executive board of Cine Qua Non Lab, in Mexico. She was vice-president of the Board of Trustees of The Flaherty. Her work as an associate producer has included the documentary series The New Americans for Kartemquin Films, and Shocking and Awful for Deep Dish TV, which was part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Lucila is originally from Mexico City.
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