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Year-round Program Offers Pivotal Artist Support to Early Career Latine Artists
PARK CITY, UTAH, October 10, 2024 — The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the storytellers selected for the 2024 Latine Fellowship and Collab Scholarship. Now in its third year, the program aims to expand Latine representation in independent media meaningfully by providing artist development through fellowships and mentorships to10 early career Latine artists. This year’s cohort will receive an intentional immersion in a community of like-minded creatives where both professional and creative growth is nurtured through professional and creative development support, networking opportunities, access to Sundance Collab and ELEVATE.
“This year's Latine Fellowship and Scholarship recipients come from diverse disciplines, all united by their shared goals of growth and increasing representation for a wide range of Latine voices,” said Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs, Director of Sundance Institute's Artist Accelerator and Women at Sundance. “We are thrilled to welcome them into this Program and look forward to seeing how creative and financial support will help them advance these goals.”
The Sundance Institute Latine Fellowship will uplift five early career Latine artists working in film or television with a yearlong fellowship experience. Each fellow will receive a $10,000 unrestricted grant, bespoke artist development support, creative and tactical support on their projects, and regular opportunities for community engagement and networking. The fellows were chosen from Sundance Institute artist support programs across fiction and nonfiction.
The Sundance Institute Latine Collab Scholarship will award five emerging Latine artists, new to the Sundance Institute Artist community, a yearlong mentorship with a Sundance Artist Alumni focused on craft and career development. Alongside the mentorship, artists will regularly meet with Sundance staff and industry professionals and participate in artist development sessions designed to lay the foundation for their career goals.
The fellows selected for the 2024 Sundance Institute Latine Fellowship are:
Karla Claudio (producer) with Matininó: A multi-generational family of Puerto Rican women transform their experience with gender violence into a fantasy film where they search for an island inhabited exclusively by women warriors.
Karla Claudio is a filmmaker, visual artist, and educator born and based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They produce and direct experimental documentaries on Caribbean and Latin American ethnobotany, craft, mythology, and land based practices in support of material and food sovereignty.
Alan Dominguez (director-producer) with The House of Our Memory: Approaching his 80th birthday, a Vietnam veteran/artist ruminates in his childhood home in northern New Mexico with his son as they both face the trauma that has afflicted them.
Alan Dominguez, a Chicanx border crosser since birth, is Denver-based with Nuevo Mexicano roots. His films have addressed many subjects in his gravitational point of the unique cultural fabric and social landscapes of the Southwestern United States.
Andrés Lira (writer-director) with Entre Sombras: After failing to secure a babysitter, a farmworker is forced to bring his two kids to work.
Andrés Lira is a Mexican-American filmmaker and artist of Indigenous Purépecha descent. His work focuses on amplifying the underrepresented stories of Latino and Indigenous communities through the exploration of identity, culture, and social justice.
Diana Peralta (writer-director) with No Love Lost: When a troubled young woman brings her new husband home to meet the family, her devoted but insular sisters reveal the extremes they will go to protect one another.
Diana Peralta is a Dominican American writer, director, and producer from New York City. Her debut feature, De Lo Mio (Criterion/Janus Films, HBO), premiered at BAMcinemaFest in 2019. She is a 2024 Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Lab Fellow and was featured in Filmmaker magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film."
Michelle Salcedo (writer-director) with Cinnamon Skin: Socialite Veronica has a forbidden interracial romance at the height of the Cuban Revolution. She must choose to leave for America to save her father’s life or stay behind to raise her new baby. Years later, she returns to confront her grown daughter.
Michelle Salcedo's directorial debut, Piel Canela, won eight festival jury prizes. She directed the action-packed, female-driven feature Switch & Bait. Her films blend a commitment to authentic representation with a visually stunning cinematic style.
The artists selected for the 2024 Sundance Institute Latine Collab Scholarship are:
Ricardo Betancourt (writer-director, producer) with Repartidores: Repartidores is a feature about Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. transforming the food delivery industry, highlighting their journey through mass migration, persecution, and exile, and reshaping a key service.
Venezuelan-born, New Orleans–raised director Ricardo Betancourt began his career producing music videos, commercials, and short films, earning awards and festival recognition. He’s currently a full-time commercial and music video director. Now, he is finalizing a documentary and writing his first feature film.
Ana Bovino (writer-director, co-producer) with The Nights: Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, 'The Nights' reimagines Sherezade's quest to free women from violence through storytelling. In a nocturnal Buenos Aires, three women narrate their unrestrained and irreverent tales, with a touch of magic.
Ana Bovino is an Argentine director, writer, and producer based in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. She has directed two short films, participated in several documentary and multidisciplinary independent projects, and is currently in mid-production on her first feature film, The Nights.
Sabrina Ehlert (writer-director) with Connie & Lola: Lola Sanchez, desperate to fit into her own culture, and her mother Connie, a proudly assimilated immigrant, find themselves on a chaotic road trip south of the border where they are forced to confront their cultural shame and find self-acceptance.
Sabrina Ehlert is a Mexican American filmmaker with an MFA from USC, whose work has been supported by Google, The Producers Guild of America, and The Sloan Foundation. Her film, Launch Fever, was nominated for an Imagen Award. She writes and directs stories that explore themes of identity and belonging.
Joie Estrella Horwitz (writer-director) with Dreamland: : A love story blooms during the night shift in a slaughterhouse, where phantoms of the future sit with ghosts of the past.
Joie Estrella Horwitz is a filmmaker from the Southwest borderlands, whose work navigates the impact of militarization and xenophobia on the region's inhabitants. Blending research-based fieldwork with fiction, her films examine the intersection of physical and psychological borders.
Eddie Mujica (writer-director) with Loco: At his first therapy session, Rafael Reyes relives the anxious thoughts and overbearing family that boiled over on the night of his 25th birthday. Loco is a surreal, dark comedy about mental health and its stigma in the Latine community.
Eddie Mujica is a Cuban-American writer, director, and Emmy-winning producer from Hialeah, Florida. His short Dreamer was an Imagen Award finalist, while Uno Por Uno: The Cuban Missile Crisis won awards at HBO's New York Latino Film Festival and Cine Sony’s New Voices. Loco is a Shore Scripts Short Film Fund Grand Prize Winner.
The 2024 Latine Fellowship & Collab Scholarships were developed with leadership funding support from Adobe, Lyn Lear, and Cindy Horn, and additional support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Sundance Institute
As a champion and curator of independent stories, the nonprofit Sundance Institute provides and preserves the space for artists across storytelling media to create and thrive. Founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, the Institute’s signature labs, granting, and mentorship programs, dedicated to developing new work, take place throughout the year in the U.S. and internationally. Sundance Collab, a digital community platform, brings a global cohort of working artists together to learn from Sundance advisors and connect with each other in a creative space, developing and sharing works in progress. The Sundance Film Festival and other public programs connect audiences and artists to ignite new ideas, discover original voices, and build a community dedicated to independent storytelling. Through the Sundance Institute artist programs, we have supported such projects as Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Big Sick, Bottle Rocket, Boys Don’t Cry, Boys State, Call Me by Your Name, Clemency, CODA, Drunktown’s Finest, The Farewell, Fire of Love, Flee, The Forty-Year-Old Version, Fruitvale Station, Get Out, Half Nelson, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hereditary, Honeyland, The Infiltrators, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Little Woods, Love & Basketball, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Mudbound, Nanny, Navalny, O.J.: Made in America, One Child Nation, Pariah, Raising Victor Vargas, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, RBG, Sin Nombre, Sorry to Bother You, The Souvenir, Strong Island, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Swiss Army Man, Sydney, A Thousand and One, Top of the Lake, Walking and Talking, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and Zola. Through year-round artist programs, the Institute also nurtured the early careers of such artists as Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Gregg Araki, Darren Aronofsky, Lisa Cholodenko, Ryan Coogler, Nia DaCosta, The Daniels, David Gordon Green, Miranda July, James Mangold, John Cameron Mitchell, Kimberly Peirce, Boots Riley, Ira Sachs, Quentin Tarantino, Taika Waititi, Lulu Wang, and Chloé Zhao. Support Sundance Institute in our commitment to uplifting bold artists and powerful storytelling globally by making a donation at sundance.org/donate. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.
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