Launched in 2020, the Catapult Research Grant provides diverse filmmakers in the U.S. with funding and dedicated mentorship to support the early conception of new nonfiction projects.
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Isabel Castro
Isabel Castro is a five-time Emmy-nominated Mexican-American filmmaker and photographer. Her latest documentary, Selena y Los Dinos, had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2025 in the U.S. It won a Special Jury Award for archival storytelling in the Documentary Competition, multiple audience awards and premiered on Netflix. Her first feature film, Mija (Sundance Film Festival 2022) was a New York Times critics pick, on the DOC NYC shortlist, won a Cinema Eye Award and it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. She directed, produced and filmed the Emmy®-nominated, award-winning documentary short USA v Scott (Tribeca 2020, The New Yorker), Emmy®-nominated Darlin (Tribeca 2019, NYT OpDocs), GLAAD award-winning Crossing Over (Univision/Participant Media) and on the Emmy®-nominated Netflix docu-series Pandemic. She’s worked on dozens of stories as an opinion contributor, producer, cinematographer and multimedia journalist for The New York Times, as an Edward R. Murrow-award winning producer at The Marshall Project, and as an Emmy-nominated producer covering civil rights and policy at VICE on HBO. Castro was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film'' and DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40”, and she was nominated for an Independent Spirit award. She is developing her first scripted feature with The Department of Motion Pictures and working on Untitled Los Angeles, a photography and film project.
Lauren Domino
Lauren Domino is a writer and Peabody, PGA, and Grammy award winning producer with a focus on the healing power of film. Her work as a producer includes the Academy Award nominated TIME (Amazon Studios), and BAFTA and Academy Shortlisted American Symphony (Netflix), as well as Alone, The Earth is Humming, Black Folk Don’t, Like, and America. She has produced branded content and live events for The New Yorker, Elle Magazine, The Oscars, Microsoft, and Essence Festival. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Doc Branch, Producers Guild of America, The Documentary Producers Alliance and the Writers Guild of America. Butts: A Backstory is her first foray into Directing.
Amber Fares
Amber Fares is an Academy Award–nominated documentary director, producer, and cinematographer whose work explores power, identity, and political narratives through character-driven storytelling. Her latest film, Coexistence, My Ass!, premiered at Sundance 2025 and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. Her directing credits include Speed Sisters (Hot Docs 2015), We Are Ayenda (Amazon, 2023), Reckoning with Laughter (Al Jazeera Witness, 2021), and Convergence: Courage Under Crisis (Netflix, 2021), which she co-directed. As a cinematographer and producer, she has worked on the Peabody Award–winning The Judge (PBS, 2017), the Sundance Special Jury Award–winning Life After, and the Academy Award–nominated short The Devil is Busy (HBO, 2025).She is a Sundance Momentum Fellow and Pillars Artist Fellow, and is based between New York and Montreal.
Ivan MacDonald
Ivan MacDonald is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe. His most recent documentary project, Bring Them Home, which is about his tribe's efforts to establish the first tribally managed wild bison herd, aired nationally on PBS in the fall of 2025. Bring Them Home is executive-produced and narrated by Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone. He was an inaugural fellow for the Netflix and Illuminative Producers fellowship and was an inaugural recipient of the Hulu and Firelight Kindling fund. He was also the 2024 Mark Silverman honoree for the 2024-2025 Sundance Producing Lab. With his sister Ivy, he is directing When They Were Here which is a feature-length documentary about the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls crisis told through the lens of their family and community. Sundance, ITVS, and IDA have supported his work.
Igor Myakotin
Igor Myakotin is an Emmy-nominated, BAFTA- and Peabody-winning filmmaker drawn to stories of queer survival and liberation in restrictive and dangerous environments. His work follows people who refuse the roles imposed on them, finding beauty, defiance, and political force in acts of becoming. He produced Queendom, shortlisted for the 97th Academy Award for Documentary Feature, and Welcome to Chechnya, shortlisted for the 93rd Academy Awards for Documentary Feature and Visual Effects, the first documentary ever recognized in the Visual Effects category. Igor is currently directing his debut feature documentary. A 2025 Berlinale Talents participant, 2022 Sundance Creative Producing Lab fellow, and NextDoc alumnus, his films have screened at Sundance, Berlinale, BFI London, CPH:DOX, True/False and others. He has served on the international juries of DOC NYC and the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, and was named one of DOC NYC's "40 Under 40."
Sabaah Folayan
Sabaah Folayan combines nuance and optimism with cultural relevance to tell stories that inform, uplift, and engage audiences. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Hawaii, Sabaah graduated from Columbia University as a pre-medical student. The desire to do healing work at a collective scale evolved into a unique storytelling practice that is informed by principles of behavioral science and social justice.
Loira Limbal
Loira Limbal is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in documentary film, video installation, and DJing. Limbal’s most recent film, "Through The Night" is a cinema verité portrait of three working NY mothers whose lives intersect at a 24-hour daycare center: a mother working the overnight shift as a hospital nurse; another holding down three jobs to support her family; and a woman who for over two decades has cared for the children of parents with nowhere else to turn. "Through The Night" garnered a duPont-Columbia award, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick, premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, and aired on PBS' POV series in May 2021. Limbal’s first film, "Estilo Hip Hop", was a co-production of ITVS and aired on PBS in 2009. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, a NAACP Image Award nominee, and a 2024 Creative Capital Award grantee.
Peter Nicks
Peter Nicks is an award-winning cinematographer/director known for his immersive camera work and cinema vérité style. He helmed the critically acclaimed documentary "The Waiting Room", which was shortlisted in 2012, followed by "The Force", recipient of the Sundance Director’s Prize in 2017. "Homeroom", winner of the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, completed his trilogy of timely, immersive docus exploring the interconnected narratives of health care, criminal justice and education in Oakland, CA. Nicks recently released "Anthem", a feature documentary that follows composer Kris Bowers on a journey to create a new American anthem. His most recent film, "Underrated", chronicles the coming-of-age story of Bay Area superstar Stephen Curry. Nicks co-founded Proximity Media with fellow Oakland-based filmmaker Ryan Coogler and is on the board of trustees of the Sundance Institute.
Hazel Gurland-Pooler
Hazel Gurland-Pooler is a Colombian-born, New York City-based documentary filmmaker. She directed 10 episodes of PBS' "Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr." and co-produced the 6-hour "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross" also with Dr. Gates, which won Emmy, Peabody, duPont-Columbia, and NAACP Image awards. Hazel also produced "Roots: A History Revealed" simulcast on HISTORY/A&E/Lifetime, which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary Television, and screened at the 2016 Bushwick Film Festival. Hazel has contributed to documentaries for ABC News, A&E, AMC, CNN Originals, FRONTLINE, and HBO.
Set Hernandez
Set Hernandez is a filmmaker and community organizer whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. As a queer, undocumented immigrant, their filmmaking lies at the intersection of the poetic and the political. Their feature debut “unseen” (POV/PBS, 2024) received an Independent Spirit Award and was shortlisted for Best Feature at the IDA Documentary Awards. Set’s past documentary work includes the short “COVER/AGE” (2019) and impact producing for “Call Her Ganda” (Tribeca, 2018). An alumnus of the Disruptors Fellowship, Set is also developing both a TV comedy pilot and a feature-length screenplay. Since 2010, Set has been organizing around migrant justice issues, from deportation defense to healthcare access. They co-founded the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which promotes equity for undocumented immigrants in the film industry. Set’s work has been supported by Firelight Media, Sundance Institute, NBCUniversal, Ford Foundation among others. In their past life, Set was a published linguistics researcher, focusing in the area of bilingualism. Above all, Set is the fruit of their family’s love and their community’s generosity.
Arielle Knight
Director Arielle Knight is a New York/Mexico-based filmmaker and creative producer. Mining the absurd, the mythological and the mundane, the work of her life and practice seeks to center and recover the multiplicity of Black experiences and the narrative possibilities therein. Through her own filmmaking practice and in collaboration with like-minded creators, Arielle aims to inundate the world with the dreams, visions, and beauty of diverse perspectives on screen. Arielle has directed emotionally resonant short form and commercial projects for clients like Lexus, Audible and eBay. She has also worked to champion progressive political issues and candidates through her work with Everytown Against Gun Violence, the Stacy Abrams campaign and ActBlue. Her work has been sustained through the support of The Ford Foundation's JustFilms, The Sundance Institute, Chicken and Egg, NYC Women’s Fund for Media in association with the New York Foundation for the Arts, If/Then and Field of Vision.
Tracy Heather Strain
Director/Writer/Producer. Tracy Heather Strain, a two-time Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker and 2022 Chicken & Egg Award winner, explores stories about the ways diverse peoples have experienced life in the United States. In 2019, Strain won an NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing for “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and aired on American Masters. Her directing debut, “Bright Like a Sun” and “The Dream Keepers,” in Blackside’s I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, “leaps off the screen” noted The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter praised her first film for American Experience, “Building the Alaska Highway,” as “dynamic” and “truly great storytelling.”
So Yun Um
So Yun Um is a Korean American Director and Producer born and based in Los Angeles. Her directorial debut documentary feature film, LIQUOR STORE DREAMS, about second generation Korean American children of liquor store owners in the LA area, made its world premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and its broadcast premiere on PBS POV. Her work has screened at Tribeca Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, BFI London and more. So Yun was a 2022-2023 BAFTA Breakthrough USA participant, an alumnus of the 2021 CAAM Fellowship, Armed with a Camera Fellowship by Visual Communication, recipient of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Grant.
Chris Filippone
Chris Filippone is a documentary filmmaker whose works have screened in Berlinale, Visions du Réel, SXSW, Hot Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and on The New York Times Op-Docs. His films are aesthetically immersive, exploring social issues and themes around the survival economy, marginalized perspectives, and liminal spaces. He is a graduate of Stanford University’s M.F.A. Documentary Film program.
Sofian Khan
Sofian is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and founder of Capital K Pictures. He directed, produced and shot THE INTERPRETERS, a feature-length documentary following Afghan and Iraqi interpreters being targeted for their work helping American forces that made its broadcast premiere on the 2019 season of PBS Independent Lens. His episode of the PBS American Masters series IN THE MAKING (2021), co-directed with Joseph Patel, received a Webby Award and an NAACP Image nomination. In 2022, Sofian directed an episode of the new series TAKEOUT WITH LISA LING on HBOMax and produced AN ACT OF WORSHIP under the Capital K Pictures banner, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and broadcasted on PBS' POV series. He was one of DOCNYC’s 40 Under 40 in 2019 and a Sundance Producing Fellow in 2019-2020. His short work has appeared on Field of Vision, The Atlantic, TOPIC, Al Jazeera and NBC Digital.
R.J. Lozada
R.J. Lozada is a Filipino-American documentary filmmaker whose works have screened at Sundance, Tribeca, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. Lozada focuses his work on communities in flux, from those affected by America’s criminal justice system to the breadth of experiences in the Filipino diaspora. Lozada is a graduate of Stanford University’s M.F.A. Documentary Film program.
Sam Osborn
Sam Osborn is a filmmaker of Mexican-American descent. His debut feature-length documentary, Universe, was awarded Best Music Documentary by the International Documentary Association in 2021. His short film Folk Frontera was awarded the Jury Prize for Texas Short Film at SXSW 2022 and premiered on PBS’ The Latino Experience. His second film Going Varsity in Mariachi premiered at Sundance 2023 and won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for the U.S. Documentary Competition.
Alejandra Vasquez
Alejandra Vasquez is a Mexican-American director and producer. Raised in rural Texas, Vasquez directed the short films “Folk Frontera,” winner of Best Texas Short at SXSW, and “When It’s Good, It’s Good,” co-produced with Latino Public Broadcasting. She cut her teeth on the producing side as part of the teams behind the award-winning features Matangi/Maya/M.IA. (2018) and Us Kids (2020) and is set to co-produce an upcoming feature directed by Nanfu Wang. Her directorial feature-length debut Going Varsity in Mariachi premiered at Sundance 2023.
Lauren Wimbush
Lauren Wimbush is a documentary filmmaker and archival researcher dedicated to telling thought-provoking stories featuring underrepresented characters and communities. Her work has been featured in theaters and on multiple networks including Hulu, OWN, PBS, BET and ABC. Her current projects include a short for MTV Documentaries and a series for NBC News Studios. A Dream Displaced is her directorial debut.
Farihah Zaman
Farihah Zaman is a queer Bangladeshi-American filmmaker, critic, educator, and curator, whose award-winning work includes directing the films Remote Area Medical, To Be Queen, which is part of the Emmy-nominated New York Times Op-Doc series From Here to Home, and producing the Netflix Original, Ghosts of Sugar Land, which won a Grand Jury Prize at its Sundance Premiere in 2020 and was subsequently shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. She is the Director of Grants and Fellowships for Brown Girls Doc Mafia, a nonprofit supporting women and nonbinary people of color working in nonfiction.
Adaeze Elechi
Adaeze Elechi is an award-winning filmmaker, audio storyteller, and author focused on telling African and Black diaspora stories. Her works are influenced by her desire to better understand the ways individual and collective histories influence our present understanding of ourselves, as well as a desire to explore spaces of intimacy and softness within and between people.
Caitlyn Greene
Caitlyn Greene is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker from the American South. She creates films that push boundaries to tell stories of our beautiful and bizarre existence.
Tracy Jarrett
Tracy Jarrett is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker whose vérité style storytelling has documented some of the most high-profile stories of the last decade.
Yvonne Michelle Shirley
Yvonne Michelle Shirley is a filmmaker based in Newark, NJ. She is Co-Founder of The Newarkive, an arts initiative centering the archives of Newark’s Black communities. She is also a member of the collective, New Negress Film Society.
Jameka Autry
Jameka Autry is a producer, director, and 2020 Women at Sundance | Adobe Fellow. Past fellowships and honors include the 2019 Sundance Creative Producing Lab Fellowship, 2017 Impact Partners Creative Producing Fellowship, and 2018 Double Exposure Investigative Film Fellowship.
Reid Davenport
Reid Davenport makes films about disability from an overtly political perspective. He was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40” in 2020.
Jon-Sesrie Goff
Jon-Sesrie Goff is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator. He has an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. He is in production for his feature-length documentary, "After Sherman."
Priscilla González Sainz
Priscilla González Sainz is a Mexican-American documentary filmmaker and writer based in Southern California. Her documentary ROOM 140 was nominated for an IDA Award, and her most recent film STATUS PENDING won the IF/Then Shorts Pitch for the American West, receiving funding and distribution mentorship. The film was supported by Tribeca Film Institute and NALIP.
Edwin Martinez
Edwin Martinez is a Bronx-born filmmaker whose award-winning first feature documentary TO BE HEARD was named a New York Times critics pick and “one of the best documentaries of the year.”
