Over the past eight years, Sundance Institute’s New Frontier program has been building a community of brilliant creative minds from a broad range of artistic, scientific, and technology backgrounds, who are “geeked” about playing together in the story innovation sandbox. 
Last month, the New Frontier Story Lab brought a fraction of that community to the ancient mountains of Utah to share what they’ve learned from their experiments and to help develop the visionary projects of our 2013 Fellows. 
Before the Lab, my Sundance colleagues and I felt like we were constructing some kind of convergence experiment, asking ourselves questions like 
“What if the Academy Award-nominated writer who conceived the ingenious twist to Cape Fear that iconic talents Scorsese, Nolte and DeNiro used to rivet audiences; was in the room with a former Disney Imagineer, whose transmedia campaigns brought millions of fanboy/fangirl fantasies to life? And, we added the digital artist who (from a lighthouse in Iceland) studied the inner workings of Bjork’s mind to created fluid iPad interfaces that allowed millions of her adherents to explore and interact with her imagination?” 
What would happen?

“What if the Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who used rare footage to depict the power of rhetoric, from its darkest manifestations (i.

The official online store of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival is now open to the public and stocked with a range of apparel, Sundance collectibles, and exclusive Artist Editions from seven hand-picked Sundance alumni (check them out on Pinterest). Below, designer Todd Oldham talks about the inspiration behind some of this year’s designs for the 30th Anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival. Click here to visit the store and get a head start on your shopping.

New York, NY — Sundance Institute today announced the artists and projects selected for its first Theatre Lab on Zanzibar, which concluded yesterday. The two-week exchange and development program (November 10-24) is part of the Sundance Institute East Africa initiative, now in its eleventh year, which is the only professional program on the continent that creates peer to peer mentorship and exposure opportunities between theatre artists in East Africa and the U.S.

Ticket Packages on Sale 10am GMT Wednesday 27 November online.
The O2, London, 25 November 2013 — Sundance Institute and AEG Europe today announced that the 2014 edition of the Sundance London film and music festival will take place from 25-27 April at The O2. Hosting the same number of films and events as previous years, next year’s festival will feature an expanded filmmaker development programme, including the return of the Sundance London Short Film Competition and a Shorts Workshop.

“It has to be safer over there,” says a young boy in Juarez, Mexico, known as the murder capital of the world, looking through a fence toward El Paso, Texas, just 50 yards away and consistently ranked as one of the safest cities in the U.S. It’s the first of countless haunting, often brutal, harrowing images that fill Narco Cultura, a blistering examination of a culture that has made narcotics traffickers into iconic outlaws and the new models of fame and success.

Beginning Wednesday, December 4, we’ll be unveiling the program for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival right here on sundance.org. Films will be announced in four stages, leading off with the U.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Sundance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Program announced an open call for applications for its 2014 Native Lab Fellowship, a two-stage artist development program that begins with a filmmakers lab in May 2014. Four projects are selected each year for the Fellowship program, which is open to Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native film artists.

LOS ANGELES, CA — The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced the appointment of Tabitha Jackson to the position of Director, Documentary Film Program. In this role, Jackson will be a member of the Institute’s senior leadership team and supervise a staff of eight.  Relocating to Los Angeles, she will begin December 6, 2013, reporting directly to Executive Director Keri Putnam.

Jos Duncan is a filmmaker, storyteller, and educator who participated in the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive in Philadelphia with her project “Wanaki,” the story of a 12-year-old girl torn between changing worlds. 
The Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive in Philadelphia was a soul-opening experience that left me feeling as if I had taken trail-runs through my fears, danced on kitchen tables, and inhaled the stinky things in my life, with the characters in my script. We wrote for nine hours.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced that it will present actress and arts advocate Glenn Close with its Vanguard Leadership Award in recognition of her distinguished career in entertainment and advocacy of independent film. The award presentation will take place at the fourth annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit, chaired by Institute Trustees Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Pat Mitchell, on June 4, 2014 in New York.
Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony Award winner and six-time Academy Award acting nominee Glenn Close has had a distinguished career in film, with prominent roles in The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons.

New York, NY — Sundance Institute today announced the seven artists selected for its 2014 Playwrights Retreat at Ucross Foundation. The 15th annual writing colony at the 20,000-acre working cattle ranch outside of Sheridan, WY takes place February 3-21. Under the supervision of Artistic Director Philip Himberg and Producing Director Christopher Hibma, the Playwrights Retreat is made possible through the generosity of Ucross Foundation.

Back at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, director Michael Polish and actress Kate Bosworth—who also happens to be Polish’s wife—seized control of the @sundancefest Twitter account for the day of their Big Sur premiere. In the same vein, Mariel Hemingway, the subject of Barbara Kopple’s urgent and challenging doc on mental illness, did the same on the day of the premiere of Running From Crazy. As both films make their theatrical releases, we take a look back at their respective opening nights at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.