Meet our Summer 2018 Documentary Lab Fellows!

Alex Nevill

Alex is a cinematographer, filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He has photographed several independent feature films as well as short projects for Creative England, Channel 4, Film London and the British Film Institute. Alex directed a short documentary entitled Fishcakes & Cocaine which was nominated for the Scottish Short Film Award at Glasgow Film Festival in 2014 and is currently developing a feature documentary called Ferroequinology. He received first class honours for his undergraduate degree at the University of Gloucestershire in 2011 and then completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Scotland Screen Academy in 2014. He recently finished his practice-led PhD in the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE Bristol with a scholarship through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s 3d3 Centre for Doctoral Training. Alex is also an associate editor of Screenworks, a peer-reviewed online publication of practice-research in screen media.

Lin Alluna

Lin Alluna is a Danish film director, who expresses herself through character-driven documentaries, filmed all over the world. Her artistic focus evolves around intimacy and dissolving the limits of reality.

In 2017, Lin graduated as one of the six directors, admitted to the elite art academy program at the National Film School of Denmark, and was selected one of the new “Nordic Talents” same year. It was during her four years in this intense program she got to develop her personal, cinematic style, that evolves around emotional contradictions, the female gaze and a fight against injustice.

Lin is currently working on the hybrid film “Defenders of the Snow”, offering an intimate portrait of the courageous Inuit advocate, Aaju Peter, and her personal battle to reconcile with the violence of our colonial past.

Aida El-Kashef

Aida El-Kashef is an independent film director and producer based in Cairo. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Ganoub Film for production and distribution. As a director, her first short film, Rhapsody in Autumn, her graduation project from her alma mater the High Cinema Institute in Cairo, received the Dubai Muhr Silver Award. The film also received several other international awards. She has since then directed and produced A Tin Tale, a short fiction based on a true story of a young Egyptian sex-worker,that was premiered in the Dubai Film festival in 2011. She has also starred in the internationally Indian movie “Ship of Theseus”  where she has won the National award for “Best supporting Actress” and the Dubai Muhr award for “Best Actress” . El-Kashef has been active in several political campaigns during the Egyptian revolution, including Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault and No Military Trials of Civilians. She is also a co-founder of the Cairo-based, independent media collective Mosireen.

Madsen Minax

Madsen Minax works in documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance and media installation. Madsen was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2012-2014), a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2015), and a Berlinale DOC Station participant (2016). His projects have screened and exhibited at spaces including the European Media Art Festival (Germany), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), The British Film Institute (UK), Aurora Picture Show (Houston), REDCAT (Los Angeles), SOMArts (San Francisco), the Public Library of Amsterdam, Outfest, Newfest, Frameline, Reeling and dozens of LGBT Film festivals around the world from Osaka, Japan to Montevideo, Uruguay. Madsen’s first feature documentary “Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance” (2010) aired on PBS, CBC, and FreeSpeech TV. It is now a staple visual text in musicology, gender and performance studies. Madsen is currently a Samuel Edes Foundation fellow and a Queer|Art|Mentorship fellow as well as an Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont. He lives between Burlington, VT and Brooklyn, NY.

Nick Childers

Nick Childers is a freelance photojournalist and filmmaker based in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. He’s worked for places like VICE, Village Voice, Wall Street Journal and NBC News and is a graduate of Pratt Institute. His documentary work has covered topics like the conflict in east Ukraine, gang violence in Southern Mexico and steelworker activism around Pittsburgh. He’s a member of NPPA, The Video Consortium and Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in addition to being a recent graduate of the Missouri Photo Workshop and the Flight School Fellowship at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

Macià Florit Campins

Macià Florit Campins (Ciutadella de Menorca, 1990) graduated with a BA in Humanities and a MA in Documentary Cinema in Madrid, since 2012 he works as assistant director, camera operator and editor for Elsabeth, a production company from Barcelona. With them he has been engaged in the production of TV programs, music videos and documentary films. After directing three short films, Macià is now working on the production of his first feature documentary film.

Katie Mathews

Katie Mathews is a filmmaker and ethnographer based in New Orleans. She has experience in production management, directing, creative producing and editing. Most recently, Katie directed and produced POST COASTAL, a series of documentary shorts about coastal communities’ response to land loss in Louisiana.  She is currently producing MOSSVILLE, a documentary feature currently in post production, that explores the psychological trauma of community displacement at the hands of the petrochemical industry, and is developing ROLEPLAY, a feature documentary that follows a group of college students as they create an original theater piece about sexual violence in their campus community.  Her work has been funded by the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and Tulane University Center for the Gulf South. She was a 2018 Fellow in the inaugural Southern Producer’s Lab and an Artist in Residence at A Studio in the Woods for their Adaptations Residency.

Prior to her work in film, Katie worked as an anthropologist and ethnographer at global design firm IDEO, where she led qualitative research, using individual stories to inspire new systems in education and the public sector.  Katie holds a BA in Communications from Northwestern University and has completed continuing education work at the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Today she teaches Research Methods in Social Innovation at Tulane University.

Jasmín López

Jasmíne Mara López is a journalist and radio producer based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Born in Los Angeles with familial roots in México, her childhood was affected by issues experienced on both sides of the U.S.-México border. This instilled in her a strong passion for immigrant rights, youth empowerment, and social change.

Jasmin is also the founder and director of Project Luz, a program that brings audio and photo storytelling workshops to youth in marginalized communities. She recently received recognition for her documentary Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border, and is a proud recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award, and the 2017 New Orleans Film Society Emerging Voices Mentorship program.

Jasmin is currently working on Silent Beauty, a new media project about her family’s history with child sexual abuse and their culture of silence.

Martine Granby

Martine Granby is a documentary filmmaker. As a fellow with Kartemquin Film’s Diverse Voices in Docs program, she started production on The Mask That Grins And Lies, an intimate, meditative, feature-length documentary addressing the invisibility of black women’s mental illness, and the stigma that silences a community. Upon receiving her Masters from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, she worked as a story producer with the Chicago-based media company Kindling Group, and as a freelancer for Kartemquin Films, The New York Times and City Bureau. Additionally, she worked as a researcher on the Emmy-nominated feature-length documentary, Brave Miss World. She now calls Brooklyn home as a Producer for BRIC TV, where she has co-produced for their award-winning social justice documentary series #BHeard Town Halls, and directed several accompanying #BHeard documentaries.

Eric Jenkins-Sahlin

Eric Jenkins-Sahlin is a filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY, and strives promote important social causes with the evocative power of visual storytelling. Eric primarily makes documentaries about human rights, artists and non-profit organizations, and increasingly works in commercial advertising and narrative. He was a 2013-2014 Fulbright Scholar to China in the field of history, and previously worked as assistant to the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy’s Executive Director and Faculty Director. Eric was born in Sweden and lived in China for 2 years, and is fluent in Swedish and Mandarin Chinese.

Anna Keyes

Anna Keyes is a trans artist, activist, and documentary filmmaker. She works in the intersections of trans rights, documentary, animation, and personal storytelling. Her films have screened internationally at festivals and have been short-listed for the Student BAFTA. Anna‘s art aims to dismantle age-old stereotypes and fictions about trans & gender non-conforming people and replace them with honest depictions of subjective trans experience

Lisa Stevenson

Lisa Stevenson is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. Her book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) won the 2015 Victor Turner Book Prize. Her current ethnographic film project Into Unknown Parts, which screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2017) concerns the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern tuberculosis sanatorium. For the 2017-2018 academic year Stevenson is a Mellon New Directions Fellow, studying filmmaking in order to better use the power of film to capture the lived experience of violence.