Director Erica Tremblay on the set of “Little Chief’” during the 2018 Native Filmmakers Lab. Photo by Tytianna Harris for Sundance Institute
By Lucy Spicer
When writer-director Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga Nation) attended Sundance Institute’s Native Filmmakers Lab as a fellow in 2018, she couldn’t have predicted that she would be back as an advisor just two years later. “I certainly never in my wildest dreams thought that I would go from fellow to advisor,” says Tremblay in a Zoom interview from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the 2025 Native Lab is taking place. “I was just so focused on what I had learned from my incredible advisors and mentors and just trying to figure out how to take what I learned from the experience and apply it.”
That initial lab experience in 2018 would set in motion a series of life-changing events for Tremblay. Her project from the lab — the short film Little Chief — was selected to premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. “It changed my life,” explains Tremblay. “It was off of that short film that I got reps. I got staffed in my first writers room in TV. I started writing a feature with my co-writer Miciana Alise that I met through Sundance, and so it’s truly been kind of like a whirlwind since 2018 to this point.”
But it all could have gone differently. Tremblay had known about the Native Lab before 2018, but she was pursuing a different career at the time. “I was living in this apartment in Jersey City, and I was in my room feeling kind of frustrated in the industry that I worked in, and a hawk came and landed on this branch outside my window,” she recalls. “And in my culture, if a hawk has its back to you, if it doesn’t show its face, it means that Creator’s trying to say that there’s something in front of you that you’re not taking advantage of, like you’re missing an opportunity. And it just felt like a sign.” So Tremblay wrote a short film the next weekend, workshopped it with her partner, and submitted it to the lab. And if she needed any further confirmation that she’d made the right decision, she would get it after the lab once Little Chief’s production was underway in Oklahoma.
“We’re in this field shooting the final scene of the film, and this hawk comes over the field and just circles us for like two minutes,” Tremblay recounts. “And we kind of stopped shooting, and it was bearing its face at us. And it was just this moment where I was so glad that I had taken a chance. Because I hadn’t submitted [to the lab] previously because I just thought, ‘I’ll never get in. I’ll never get in.’ And I let that voice tell me no. And then it was this visit from Creator that was like, ‘No, you need to do this.’” That hawk’s flight over the film team affirmed Tremblay’s decision, and the rest is history.
Her debut feature, Fancy Dance — starring Lily Gladstone, whom Tremblay first met while casting Little Chief — would have its own journey through Sundance Institute artist programs — including the Directors and Screenwriters Labs, the Intensive for Indigenous Artists, the Feature Film Producing Lab, and more — before premiering at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. But even as Tremblay continued as a fellow with her own feature project, she also began acting as a creative advisor to new cohorts at the Institute’s Native Lab. She advised virtually in 2020 and 2022, but this year she advised at the lab in person in Santa Fe for the first time. “What a full-circle moment it is to be back here in this capacity, and, you know, learning from the fellows and trying to impart any knowledge that I may have to them,” says Tremblay.
Because the learning certainly doesn’t stop once a fellow becomes an advisor. “When you go through these labs as a fellow, it’s almost like you get disassembled and then rebuilt again, in the most caring and loving, constructive way possible,” explains Tremblay. Though fellows come to the lab with a specific project they’re working on, that sacred disassembly and rebuilding is integral to the labs’ focus on process — as opposed to an industry’s focus on product. And the creative advisors’ sincere dedication to mentorship (some have been advising at Sundance Institute labs for decades) means that pivotal relationships formed at the labs aren’t over once the lab finishes. Fellows find themselves with a community for life.
“I’m so grateful to these mentors that I still have relationships with,” says Tremblay, citing individuals like Scott Frank and Sterlin Harjo. “Sterlin was my advisor in the Native Lab on my short film, and then he became my showrunner on Reservation Dogs.” It was on Reservation Dogs that Tremblay had the opportunity to direct her first episode of television and learn how to produce scripts. “The connections that I’ve made and just the family that has been built around me and my work at Sundance — I can’t overstate it, truly.”
For marginalized groups such as Indigenous filmmakers, the path from lab fellow to creative advisor is one that has been essential to building community. “I was just sitting at a table with another advisor, and we were talking about one of the fellows,” says Tremblay of her ongoing experience at the 2025 Native Lab. “I was like, ‘If I had a room tomorrow, I would hire them and put them in that writers room.’” She continues, “It’s obviously different when you’re an advisor versus being a fellow, but I still think I’m walking out of this so inspired to go into my own projects. Sitting there and watching other artists solve problems in their own work makes me think of problems that I have in my own scripts that I need to go in and dig deeper.”
The Native Lab has been a vital part of Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program since 2004 and continues to have a marked presence within the larger Indigenous filmmaking community. For Tremblay, the lab’s influence has been undeniable. “When I look around at my peers, like in the writers room that I was just in, and when I look around at festivals, when I’m out and about, so many of us Natives that are working in Hollywood — we all touched Sundance at some point and went to some lab and workshopped our work,” she says. “This Native Lab specifically has transformed Hollywood in the sense of how many Natives are working in the industry, and that is incredibly special and it’s incredibly important and vital.
“At some point, somebody — and it’s not gonna be me — somebody is gonna make a documentary about the era that we are in right now in terms of Hollywood with Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds and all of the stuff that’s getting made,” continues Tremblay. “This was the era where it all started, and we’re all gonna sit there and and we’re gonna say, ‘It all started at the Native Lab.’”
