2025 Jurors

Narrative Jurors

 

 

FERDINAND DIZON LAPUZ

 

Ferdinand Dizon Lapuz is an award-winning Filipino film producer.  He migrated to Canada in 1990 and promoted Filipino films in international film festivals including Magnifico (Crystal Bear, Berlin 2004), Woman Of Breakwater (Directors’ Fortnight 2004) and The Masseur (Golden Leopard, Locarno 2005). He returned to the Philippines in 2005 and worked full time as producer.  

His filmography includes Serbis (Cannes Competition 2008), Kinatay (Cannes Best Director, 2009), Lola (Venice Competition 2009), Bwakaw (New York 2012), Barber’s Tales (Tokyo Best Actress 2013), Ekstra (Toronto 2013), Hustisya (Toronto 2014), Die Beautiful (Tokyo Audience Award and Best Actor 2016), Pamilya Ordinaryo (Venice Days BNL Award 2016), School Service (Warsaw Competition, 2018), Kalel, 15 (Tallinn Best Director 2019), About Us But Not About Us (Tallinn Best Film, Critics’ Pick 2022) and Your Mother’s Son (Toronto 2023).  

He was awarded the Camera Obscura award from the Film Development Council of the Philippines in 2018 and a Career Achievement award from the Fantasporto International Film Festival in Portugal in 2023.  

He is a member of the Asian Film Awards and Asia Pacific Film Festival Awards.

 

JAMES MARQUAND

 

James Marquand is an award winning director and writer. His work includes “Dead Man’s Cards” (starring Paul Barber and Tom Bell) a homage to the western, nominated for the Michael Powell Award and winner of Best Film at the Harlem International Film Festival in 2006. The feature length documentary “Pacific Warriors” for Netflix and “Beautiful Devils,” a contemporary retelling of William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” starring Osy Ikhile, Rachael Hurd-Wood, and Iain Glen for Sky Cinema also showed at the Harlem International Film Festival.

James also wrote and directed the World War Two spy thriller “The Partisan.” Starring Morgan Polanski, Piotr Adamczyk, and Malcolm McDowell.  James is currently in Post Production on his latest film as writer/director – “Dog and Bull”, a crime drama with comic undertones, starring Malcolm McDowell, Alex Hassell, Francis Magee, Laura Peak, Sinead Cusack, and Paul Barber.


 

DOMINIQUE MORISSEAU

 

Dominique Morisseau is the author of The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle): Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company/Broadway, Tony Award nomination for Best Play), Paradise Blue (Signature Theatre), and Detroit ’67 (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and NBT). Additional plays include: Bad Kreyòl (Signature Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club), Confederates (Signature Theatre), Pipeline (Lincoln Center Theatre), Sunset Baby (LAByrinth Theatre), Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre) and Follow Me To Nellie’s (Premiere Stages).  She is the Tony Award–nominated bookwriter on the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations (Imperial Theatre) and is currently working on her latest, Hippest Trip – The Soul Train Musical (ACT).  She served as Co-Producer on the Showtime series “Shameless.”  Awards include: PoNY Fellowship, NBTF August Wilson Playwriting Award, Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, one of Variety’s Women of Impact for 2018, and a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow.



 

 

VICTOR WILLIAMS

 

Victor Williams was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY.  Most recently he was seen as “Wendell Robinson” in JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL for F/X and recurred on the Peabody Award winning Showtime series THE GOOD LORD BIRD opposite Ethan Hawke. He has also been a regular/recurred on other favorite series including THE AFFAIR, HAPPY TOGETHER, SNEAKY PETE, BULL, THE SINNER, THE HUNTERS, NYC 22, and can be seen in a memorable episode of HBOMax’s THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES. He is best known for his role as “Deacon Palmer,” on CBS’ KING OF QUEENS.

His feature roles include the upcoming THE BEST YOU CAN, NOVEMBER CRIMINALS as well as Netflix’s THE LAND OF STEADY HABITS. He was recently seen in the film THE HOME starring Pete Davidson.

Victor also has a vibrant stage career that includes recent Off-Broadway performances including AMERIKIN at Primary Stages, IN THE SOUTHERN BREEZE with Rattlestick Theatre and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM with Classical Theatre of Harlem. Other stage work includes MTC Stage’s 2018 Pulitzer Winner COST OF LIVING, and the Off-Broadway production TOUGH TITTY at La MaMa.



Documentary Jurors

 

 

 

 

 

SHONNESE C.L. COLEMAN

 

Shonnese C.L. Coleman is an actor, writer & radio host. As an actor, she is comfortable both in front of a camera and on-stage. As a writer, her works have been commissioned and performed nationally & internationally by Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, Deeply Rooted Productions, Mind-Builder’s Creative Arts Center & Harlem School of the Arts among others. Ms. Coleman has 2 published books of poetry, “Revelation Art” Poems & “The Stride of Our Walk…The Root of Our Stand” A Collection of Performance Poetry. Radio Theatre For Your Soul, Where Storytellers Gather…Around The Mic is where you can hear her hosting talent. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the American Musical & Dramatic Academy, New York City.



 

ABOU FARMAN

 

An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience and Clerks of the Passage. He is producer and writer on several feature films including Icaros: A Vision, Vegas: Based On A True Story and Uyra: The Rising Forest.  He is an Associate Professor of Anthology at The New School for Social Research.



 

 

 

NOVELLA FORD

 

Novella Ford is the Associate Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of The New York Public Library and one of the world’s leading cultural institutions devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. She has organized hundreds of public programs at the intersection of scholarship and popular culture and connects diverse audiences to the archives through dialogue, performance, literature, and visual arts.

 

Photo credit: Isseu Diouf Campbell/Schomburg Center



Mira Nair Award Jurors

 

ANNA FAHR

 

 

Anna Fahr is an Iranian-Canadian-American independent filmmaker and founder of Morning Bird Pictures, a production company dedicated to creating films and new media that focus on the contemporary Middle East and diaspora. Her debut narrative feature, Valley of Exile, is currently on the festival circuit with 9 awards and over 20 international selections to date. Her filmography includes the award-winning interactive documentaries, Migrant Mothers of Syria and My Life in Limbo, the dramatic short, Transit Game, which was shot in north Lebanon and screened in 50+ international festivals, and feature documentary, Khaneh Ma: These Places We Call Home, which was filmed in various cities in Iran, screened in international festivals, and was theatrically released at the NFB Cinema in Montreal. 



 

 

 

CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU

 

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Dean of Theater, Film and Television and Distinguished Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA.

She is well-known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She wrote The Movies of Racial Childhoods (Duke, 2024), The Proximity of Other Skins (Oxford, 2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (Duke, 2007) which won Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. She co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (The Feminist Press, 2012) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (ADVA Brill 2018). She served as Associate Editor of GLQ and Women Studies International Forum as well as founding USA Editor of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures. Her numerous peer-reviewed articles are published in the top journals in her field. Her research received funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Takahashi Foundation and fellowships from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her writings have been translated to French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

An ethnographer and historian of images, she makes experimental narrative and fiction films. Her films 80 Years Later: On Japanese American Racial Inheritance (2022) screened at over 50 film festivals and won 20 awards, and The Celine Archive (2020) screened at over 20 film festivals and won 10 awards for best historical documentary and excellence in directing from various festivals. Both are distributed by the Women Make Movies (www.wmm.com). Her latest So To Speak (2025) is on the festival circuit.

In recent years, she won the Mentorship Award from the Association for Asian American Studies (2022) and was inducted into the Stanford University Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame (2023).

She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, her M.F.A. in Film Directing and Production from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley. For more, go to www.celineshimizu.com


 

MARS VERRONE

 

Mars Verrone is a filmmaker, musician, and educator from Los Angeles, CA, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. As a first-time producer, Mars developed and produced Oscar-shortlisted feature documentary UNION, (dir. Stephen Maing, Brett Story) which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition and won a special jury prize for “The Art of Change.” As producer, Mars received a Cinema Eye Honors Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Production.” The film was distributed by PBS POV and the Criterion Channel. In 2022, Mars directed and produced award-winning short documentary GOLDEN VOICE, which continues to be programmed at LGBTQ+ festivals and events across the globe. Mars is a Sundance Documentary Producers Fellow, NBC Original Voices Artist Mentor and Fellow, PGA Create Fellow, Firelight Media Impact Fellow, Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist Fellow, Dear Producer Mentee, and was selected for DOC NYC’S 2024 “40 Under 40” cohort. Their work has been supported by Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, and the International Documentary Association, among others.

 

 

 

AKEEMA-ZANE

 

Akeema-Zane is a Harlem born artist and researcher working in literature, film, performance and music. 

She has published short stories “When Money Can’t Buy You Home” (2015) and “There’s a Monopoly on Change” (2015)  as well as poems “Basil Grows on Mother Earth” (2018)  and “Nonsecular Non Sequitur.” Some of her sound design has been featured in Nan Collymore’s short film “LANA” (2023), Kearra Gopee’s “Ca(r)milla” (2023) commissioned by The Kitchen: On Air;   Nile Harris’ “Testify (The Worst Is Yet To Come” (2023); commissioned by Under The Radar and Ping Chong and Company,  Shea Moisture’s Pride campaign (2021); Joselia Rebekah Hughes’ “Masque On” (2021) commissioned by ArtsNova; Mia Wright-Ross’ “A Moment To Breathe (2021); commission by MAD MUSEUM;  Naima Ramos-Chapman’s “In Place of Monuments” (2021);  Art 21’s short doc “Doreen Garner on Her Own Terms” (2021) and in the immersive installation debut of “Void Spa” (2023) with collaborator A. Sef at Recess Art.

In 2018, Akeema-Zane began her relationship with Good Light Productions, featuring in “Precious Metals” portraying the character Joy. In 2024, she made her directorial stage debut in this solo performance by Carolyn Harrison. 

 

With collaborator Rena Anakwe, the artist has developed works that combine her literary, film, performance and sound practices through “Our Mourning Due: A Funeral Sermon” (2022); commissioned by SCAD Museum of Art’s Evans Center for African American Studies and “Sonic Escape Routes: Shall We Fly? Or, Shall We Resist?” (2020); commissioned by Weeksville Heritage Center. Her featured role in the short film “When Rain Clouds Gather” by Christian Nyampeta debuted in the 2024 Venice Biennale. She is currently a film educator at Maysles Documentary Center and serves as board chair of The School of Making Thinking as well as on the board of directors of Cucalorus Film Festival.