Director

Alejandra Vasquez

Alejandra Vasquez is a Mexican-American filmmaker raised between rural Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her award-winning films spotlight youth, art & culture, and convey a cinematic sense of place in rural and borderland environments. Her feature directorial debut, co-directed with Sam Osborn, GOING VARSITY IN MARIACHI, premiered at Sundance 2023, won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition, and is now streaming on Netflix. Her short films include “Folk Frontera” (Independent Lens), winner of Best Texas Short at SXSW; “Baca” (LA Times Short Docs), commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and “When It’s Good, It’s Good” (POV Shorts), a co-production with Latino Public Broadcasting currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. Alejandra began her career as a producer, contributing to acclaimed documentaries such as MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A. (2018), US KIDS (2020), PLAN C (2023), and most recently co-produced Nanfu Wang’s HBO Original Documentary, NIGHT IS NOT ETERNAL (2024). Now based in Los Angeles, Alejandra co-founded Masa Films with her partner Sam Osborn, where they are developing, producing, and directing nonfiction and narrative projects. She is writing her first feature script, HALF ORANGE, with support from the SFFILM Rainin Fellowship.

Director

Sam Osborn

Sam Osborn is a director and editor based in Los Angeles. His most recent film Going Varsity in Mariachi, co-directed with Alejandra Vasquez, premiered at Sundance 2023 and won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for the U.S. Documentary Competition. It went on to screen at festivals worldwide and is currently streaming on Netflix. Sam’s debut feature-length documentary as a director, Universe, about Wallace Roney, the only protege of Miles Davis, was awarded Best Music Documentary by the International Documentary Association in 2020. His short-format films include Folk Frontera, a surrealist portrait of the West Texas borderlands, which won the SXSW Jury Award for Texas Shorts; Night Shift, a series for Topic about New Yorkers who work the graveyard shift; and Language Keepers, a hybrid documentary project meant to help sustain the endangered Athabaskan language of Gwich’in, which premiered at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Producer

Bennett Elliott

Bennett Elliott is an Emmy award-winning, Peabody award-nominated producer based in New York. She is the producer and co-director of COUPLES THERAPY (Showtime, Seasons 4 & 5), the associate producer of HBO’s PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF (2025), and the producer of Robert Kolodny’s THE FEATHERWEIGHT (Venice Film Festival 2023), Robert Greene’s PROCESSION (Netflix, 94th Academy Awards Short List), Kim Snyder’s US KIDS (Sundance 2020), Abel Ferrara’s SPORTIN’ LIFE (Venice Film Festival 2020) and Robert Greene’s Gotham Awards-nominated BISBEE ’17 (Sundance 2018). Bennett was the co-producer of Greene’s multiple award-winning Sundance documentary KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016). She was selected as a Berlinale Talent (2025), a 2017-2018 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow, a DOC NYC “40 Under 40” fellow, and has produced documentary films for David Byrne, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman and Nan Goldin.