Category: Artist Spotlight

It felt so strange leaving the airport in Salt Lake City and leaving the bubble I’d been caught up in for almost a week. I am sure the latitude and jetlag was behind some of it, but not all of it. I tried to grasp the feelings from what I had experienced and it was just too surreal and overwhelming to even know where I should begin.

When I was 9, I took a computer coding class. We all worked on monochromatic monitors – the instructor explained that computers would someday show us more colors. He was describing monitors with a more robust color profile, but I naively thought he meant that computers would allow us to see more colors than are in our current rainbow.

If you followed pop
culture in the late ’90s, the name JT LeRoy was inescapable and in many ways
inscrutable. Thought to be a 15 year-old, drug-abusing transgender prostitute
from rural West Virginia, LeRoy’s byline began to appear in magazines. Soon,
two novels,
Sarah and The
Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
, were published to great acclaim and
even greater fanfare.

“As an activist, do you think you can be objective?” they asked.I was
quiet. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this question, but the stakes seemed
higher now.

In recognition of the crucial role of editors in the art of storytelling, the Feature Film Program has created a series of initiatives to focus on the craft. The Rough Cut Screening series is a year round initiative that supports approximately 20 feature films in post production, providing feedback to projects that are alumni of the Feature Film Program. Two other initiatives – the Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship and the Editing Intensive – took place just this past month in conjunction with our annual Directors Lab.

The Asian American Fellowship recently selected Eliza Lee as its third-annual fellow. With support from the A3 Foundation, the fellowship aims to further the presence of Asian American voices in independent film by supporting a writer or writer/director on the development of their feature screenplay.
Lee, whose most recent credit includes the screenplay for A Beautiful Lie about crime novelist Patricia Highsmith, recently attended the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive and spoke with us about her creative origins, inspiration culled from the Hong Kong New Wave, and how she hopes to balance the scales when it comes to women on screen.

It’s been a few years since filmmaker Jeff Orlowski premiered his viscerally jarring climate change documentary Chasing Ice, which tracks photographer James Balog’s ambitious efforts to gather visual evidence of the earth’s melting glaciers. Balog, originally a skeptic of climate change, deploys customized cameras across the Arctic to provide the first-ever depiction and most palpable example of mankind’s indelible carbon footprint.
Earlier this year, Orlowski was awarded with the first-ever Sundance Institute | Discovery Impact Fellowship for his work in elevating awareness around environmental protection.

Earlier this month, the Theatre Program-supported show Fun Home collaborated with Spotify to record the very first Broadway “Spotify Session.” The show did a live performance of a re-invention of six of its songs at Spotify’s NYC Headquarters and released them as an exclusive album on Friday, March 4th. More recently, Samantha Power, U.

For all the incessant parsing of cinema’s very real diversity problem, few voices have confronted the issues in earnest. The coverage has been pervasive, and has – if only superficially – begun to effect change. Last week on the heels of Black History Month, we gathered a pair of vibrant and urgent creative voices for a wide-ranging and pleasantly meandering conversation.

At age 6, Brie Larson told her mother she wanted to be an actress. Twenty years later, Larson gleams in the Hollywood spotlight for her critically acclaimed performance in the gripping drama Room, which has earned her an Oscar Best Actress nomination. Early in her career—long before this award-buzzy role in which Larson plays a resilient mother held prisoner in a tiny shed with her son—the actress learned to say no to roles that did not personally speak to her.

An alumnus of Sundance Institute’s artist labs and a two-time Festival participant, Matthew Heineman has been making nonfiction cinema for a decade. Now, alongside fellow Sundance Documentary Film Program-supported filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer (The Look of Silence), Heineman is in the running for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. His film Cartel Land, which has been honored with a DGA Award and the prestigious Polk Journalism Award, is a deeply disturbing and wildly entertaining vérité film about the international drug war, set at the U.

Sundance Institute annually selects up to four artists from the eight Knight resident communities to attend the Sundance Film Festival. These artists reflect Sundance Institute and the Knight Foundation’s commitment to developing and nurturing the next generation of creative voices. Knight Fellows are afforded a five-day residency at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where they participate in a specially curated program.