Equity, Impact, and Belonging
Equity, Impact, & Belonging
Inclusion is one of the core values driving Sundance Institute’s work. The Equity, Impact, & Belonging Program encompasses our initiatives across all programs within our organization to deepen engagement with and support of storytellers and audiences across ethnicities, genders, abilities, sexual orientations, and geographic regions. In doing so, we work to increase the diversity of projects submitted for consideration to all Institute programs—including labs, intensives, grants, and the Sundance Film Festival—and to inspire emerging artists to tell their stories.
Direct Artist Support
Momentum Fellowship
The Momentum Fellowship is a yearlong program of deep, customized creative and professional support that enables writers, directors, and producers from underrepresented communities working across fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, episodic content, and emerging media to achieve new creative and professional goals and build sustainable careers.
Direct Artist Support
Women at Sundance Institute
The Women at Sundance Institute program aims to discover, spotlight, and forge ways for women to succeed as storytellers who shape our cultural landscape. Together with Women In Film LA and USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, we launched the first analysis of gender composition among artists in independent film, raising awareness about the acute underrepresentation of women behind the camera.
Direct Artist Support
Indigenous Program
Each year, Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program supports the next generation of Native and Indigenous storytellers worldwide through the Merata MitaFellowship, and the Native Filmmakers Lab supports first-time directors in producing a fiction short film through a residential lab, grant, and mentorship.
Direct Artist Support
Inclusion Resource Map
In 2015, Women at Sundance Institute and Women In Film LA launched the Women’s Resource Map, a user-friendly online database compiling the programs, events, workshops, and services available to U.S.-based women filmmakers. In 2019, we updated the map to include resources for artists from a broader array of underrepresented communities, currently including artists who identify as women, people of color, LGBTQ+, trans and nonbinary, and artists with disabilities. Upon launch in 2015, the resource map attracted over 12,000 viewers to the site in one month, proving its necessity in the field; we hope the updated map will be just as useful to our newly supported communities.
Field-Wide Leadership
Research
Race & Gender Analysis of Sundance Submissions & Acceptances
Barriers and Opportunities for Women Filmmakers
Field-Wide Leadership
Press Inclusion Initiative
In 2018, Sundance Institute launched a first-of-its-kind Press Inclusion Initiative, designed to diversify the press corps at the Sundance Film Festival, which is critical to broadening the discourse around the Festival program and giving each film the best opportunity to find and grow its audience.
Cultivating Community
Sundance Institute’s Allied Organization Initiative aims to deepen our relationships and collaborations with like-minded arts organizations and companies that engage in the support and development of artists, especially emerging artists, from underrepresented communities.
Support
The Sundance Institute Equity, Impact, & Belonging Program is made possible by founding support from the Time Warner Foundation. Additional leadership support is provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Emerson Collective, Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, NBCUniversal, The Harnisch Foundation, Warner Bros. Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Adobe, Ford Foundation, Jason Delane Lee and Yvonne Huff Lee, Rene and Rena Cruz—Esperanza Arts Foundation, Netflix, SAGindie, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Philip Fung—A3 Foundation, Warner Media Group, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Open Society Foundations.