Offices in the Presidio
Offices in the Presidio
Offices in the Presidio
Offices in the Presidio
Offices in the Presidio
Offices in the Presidio

Team

Our Mission

Catapult Film Fund is dedicated to supporting nonfiction filmmakers with critical early-stage funding and mentorship to launch distinctive, story-driven, and cinematic films.

About Us

We believe in taking a chance on filmmakers who have ideas for artful and compelling nonfiction films that inspire us to think differently about the world. Catapult provides research and development funding to documentary filmmakers who have a meaningful story to tell, have secured access to their story, and are ready to create a visual sample to help unlock production support.

We embrace supporting filmmakers at a stage where funding for projects is hard to find and considered the riskiest. We seek filmmakers with authentic voices who tell stories with integrity, creativity, and genuinely represent their vision and perspective. Catapult supports a wide range of subject matter, stories, and storytelling approaches.

The Catapult team serves as advisors and advocates for our community of filmmakers. We amplify the impact of the grants by providing customized mentorship to filmmakers.

Since our founding in 2010, we have awarded over $5.4 million in direct grants to filmmakers.

Learn More Click to Download

The Team

Megan Gelstein

Co-Director and Chief Program Officer

Megan Gelstein is an Emmy® Award-winning producer and the Co-Director / Chief Program Officer of Catapult Film Fund. In that role, she supports and cultivates independent, cinematic non-fiction filmmakers globally and provides creative, strategic, and editorial advice to supported films and filmmakers through Catapult’s artist development programs. Recent films supported by Catapult Film Fund include Crip Camp, Storm Lake, The Territory and Pray Away.

Prior to joining Catapult, she worked as an independent producer where her work was supported by Sundance Documentary Fund and Chicken & Egg Pictures. Megan worked at PBS/WGBH-TV for over 15 years, where she produced and directed films for the flagship series American Experience and NOVA. She won a National Emmy® Award in the category of Research for her work on the PBS series “Africans in America”. In addition, she has produced award-winning documentaries that have been nationally broadcast on The History Channel, ITV Network of London, and The Discovery Channel.

Theresa Navarro

Co-Director and Chief Operations Officer

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Theresa is a Pinay cultural worker and working mama whose career in media arts spans two decades. Prior to Catapult, she served as vice president of external affairs at American Documentary, the New York-based nonprofit behind Emmy Award-winning series ‘POV’ on PBS. An Independent Spirit Award-nominated producer, her credits include Chinatown sports documentary 9-Man (director Ursula Liang), Peabody Award-winning anthology series ‘America Reframed’ on WORLD Channel (supervising producer Carmen L. Vicencio), and sci-fi feminist feature Advantageous (director Jennifer Phang, producers Robert Chang, Jacqueline Kim, Ken Jeong, Moon Molson), which won the Special Prize for Collaborative Vision at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

In addition to her work in film and media, Theresa contributes to public discourse on community, identity and power by and about marginalized folx as a writer, performer, and educator. She engages in field-wide conversations through community-based collectives including A-Doc, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and Color Congress, and has participated on panels, workshops and juries at the Australian International Documentary Conference, Allied Media Conference, Hawaii International Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and SXSW, among others. In 2011, Theresa was nationally recognized as one of 15 Asian Pacific American Women Leaders for her media arts work.

Miriam Garcia

Program Officer

Miriam García has over 15 years of experience in the creative industries, including film, music, and event production. In film, she has extensive experience in developing, curating, and producing a wider variety of artists’ programs and creative support initiatives. She was a Digital Producer for the Sundance Institute where she curated and produced a series of Masterclasses and courses with high-level industry experts to support emergent filmmakers. She is also a film programmer for different festivals including Tribeca, DOC NYC, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. Miriam is a consultant for the Video Consortium and collaborated in the marketing departments for Women Make Movies and IFP. In 2019, she was selected to participate in the prestigious Locarno Industry Academy. Besides her work in film, she is a frequent collaborator of the Kickstarter site The Creative Independent and produces events for the New Latin Wave, a media platform for Latinx artists. Originally from Mexico City, Miriam is currently based in Brooklyn and holds a Master’s Degree in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, and a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from Universidad de las Americas, Puebla.

Lisa Kleiner Chanoff

Founder and Chair of Board of Directors

Lisa Kleiner Chanoff is co-founder of Catapult Film Fund. In 2010 Lisa and Bonni Cohen founded Catapult Film Fund in order to enable important and moving documentary films to get off the ground and to fill a gap in the documentary funding landscape for development support.

Lisa has a decades-long commitment to helping projects get off the ground. Before her career in filmmaking, she practiced law in San Francisco and with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. After leaving law practice, Lisa received a master’s degree in Museum Studies and worked with museums in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working with artists at the museum showed her the importance of early funding for producing new work, and she gravitated toward documentary film as a way to combine her interest in policy and creative and artful storytelling. Lisa’s executive producer credits include documentaries Watchers of the Sky and Brimstone and Glory, as well as narrative features Burn Country, Fruitvale Station (Co-EP), Loves & Taxes, The Outside Story, and Western (Co-EP). She is president of the Board of SFFILM and serves as a board member of photojournalism nonprofit Catchlight, advisory board member of Close Up Initiative, and advisor for the Redford Center. Lisa is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Bonni Cohen

Founder and Board Secretary

Bonni Cohen co-founded the Catapult Film Fund with Lisa Chanoff in 2010 in order to support the development of important and moving documentary films. Together with Lisa, Bonni executive produced Art & Craft, When God Sleeps and the Academy Award-nominated shorts Extremis and Life Overtakes Me.

Bonni has produced and directed an array of award-winning films. Most recently, Bonni co-directed Athlete A which was scheduled for a Tribeca Film Festival premiere in 2020 and then went on to become a Netflix original. Bonni also co-directed with her partner, Jon Shenk, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power which was selected to be the opening night film of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Paramount in summer 2017. In 2016 Bonni co-directed the Peabody Award winning film Audrie & Daisy, which premiered in competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was picked up as a Netflix Original film.

In addition to her directing work, Bonni served as Producer on The Island President, winner of the 2011 Toronto International Best Documentary. Her work as producer and director on The Rape of Europa earned her a PGA and WGA nomination and was short-listed for the Oscars. In addition, Bonni produced Jon Else’s Sundance film, Wonders Are Many and together with Else co-directed Inside Guantanamo which was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2009. Bonni also Executive Produced 3.5 Minutes, in collaboration with Motto Pictures and Participant Media.

Caroline Von Kuhn

Board

Film industry veteran von Kuhn is the Executive Director of Oxbelly, out of Athens, Greece. Most recently served as Director of Industry & Catalyst at the Sundance Institute, where she expanded Sundance’s independent film financing from an annual three-day Forum into a year-round investor curriculum for both seasoned and new funders alike.

Before Sundance, she was Director of Artist Development at the Francisco Film Society where she ran grants, residencies and artist programs and launched SFFILM Invest, an ethical film financing initiative in partnership with Cinereach.

Prior to SFFILM, von Kuhn co-founded the Points North Institute with Ben Fowlie and Sean Flynn, turning the four-day Camden International Film Festival into an internationally recognized documentary institute. She remains on as Points North Institute’s Board Chair and serves on the Catapult Film Fund Board.

Tabitha Jackson

Board

Tabitha Jackson has spent 30 years working in Public Broadcasting (BBC and Channel4 in the UK) and Film (Film4 and Sundance Institute) supporting the independent voice, championing the social and cultural power of artful nonfiction, and furthering the mission of uplifting a more expansive set of makers, audiences, and forms. As the first woman and person of color to be appointed Director of Sundance Film Festival she re-imagined and led two technologically innovative and radically accessible pandemic editions that expanded the possibilities of what a film festival can be, and who it can be for. Previously she headed Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program rethinking traditional project support in favor of artist-centered models, and advocating for more institutional support of formal innovation in nonfiction cinema. Tabitha is now researching Trust, Truth and Reality in Documentary Practice with Fellowships from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.