Sisters in Cinema, established in 1997 as an online platform dedicated to African American women media creators, has joined forces with six Black women industry experts to offer mentorship to emerging filmmakers within the Sisters in Cinema community.
Building on its commitment to center and celebrate the voices of Black women and gender non-conforming media makers in non-fiction, six filmmakers have been paired with industry professionals committed to providing individually tailored mentorship focused on both professional and project development.
The six mentee/mentor pairs are: Moya Bailey and Tracy Heather Strain; Latoya Flowers and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon; Arlieta Hall and Michéle Stephenson; India Martin and Elissa Blount Moorhead; Tracye Matthews and Angela Tucker; Whitney Spencer and Yoruba Richen.
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to elevate such a talented and unique group of Sisters in Cinema filmmakers as they develop thought-provoking, character-driven non-fiction projects” said Founder/CEO of Sisters in Cinema, Yvonne Welbon. “We are grateful to our dynamic mentors whose experience and support will be transformational to the program and to the filmmakers creative practice.”
Through a variety of programs and initiatives, Sisters in Cinema provides Black women and gender non-conforming media makers developing non-fiction projects with creative consultation and feedback, project funding, relationship building opportunities, and mentorship. This support especially nurtures the filmmakers as they aim to challenge societal narratives and empower marginalized communities through documentary storytelling.
Filmmaker Mentors
Sabrina Schmidt Gordon (Mentee: Latoya Flowers)
Sabrina Schmidt Gordon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and impact strategist from NYC. Her films employ provocative, nuanced storytelling to center marginalized voices, illuminate diverse experiences, and inspire around the issues that affect our global society. Since her Emmy-winning editing debut for WGBH, she has distinguished herself as a producer, editor, and director. She is a Women at Sundance Fellow, recipient of the Dear Producer Award recognizing excellence in independent filmmaking, and is an inducted member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Sabrina’s 2023 film, Victim/Suspect, a Netflix investigative documentary about police handling of sexual assault cases, premiered Sundance Film Festival. Produced with the Center for Investigative Reporting, it was in the US competition for Best Documentary. Sabrina was also at Sundance with To the End, which follows four young women of color, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the front lines of the fight to end the climate crisis. She is also the producer of QUEST, an intimate portrait of a North Philadelphia family, from the 2008 election of Barack Obama through to the 2016 nomination of Donald Trump. It also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2017, receiving critical acclaim and awards on the festival circuit and beyond. It is a New York Times Critics Pick, a Rolling Stone Top 10, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, a Peabody Award, and two Emmys. In an interview with VOGUE magazine, Sabrina discusses authorship, collaboration, and authentic storytelling in Quest, a Documentary Disrupts American Narratives About Race.
Sabrina produces, directs and edits content for many video journalism platforms and organizations. Among these are The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Frontline, American Masters, The Ford Foundation, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness, Agricultural Missions, the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights, and more. She also produces and consults on engagement and impact campaigns for documentary films and other media projects. Sabrina has a Masters in Journalism and serves on many media panels and juries. She is Chair of the Black Documentary Collective and a founding member of Beyond Inclusion, advancing equity in the documentary film industry. Sabrina is an honors graduate from New York University.
Elissa Blount Moorhead (Mentee: India Martin)
Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist, curator, mother, producer, and visual storyteller exploring the poetics of Black quotidian life. She has created public art, books, exhibitions, and images and cultural programs for the last 25 years. She creates films and time-based installations, such as Back and Song, As of A Now, and Jay Z’s 4:44 video. Elissa has been recognized with the Sundance Institute | Comedy Central Comedy Fellowship, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship, US Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, and is developing a project in the Sundance Episodic Lab. She is currently a creative partner at TNEG film studios, which creates films and time based-installations.
By exploring the poetics of quotidian Black life, the regularity, ubiquity, and simplicity, Elissa attempts to emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building. For her, this humor, love, strife, and care highlights the familiar worlds she strives to convey. Elissa dwells in immutable Black culture and the impermanence of its physical manifestations. Her aesthetic and narrative choices hinge on things that may be unseeable or veiled.
Yoruba Richen (Mentee: Whitney Spencer)
Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on multiple outlets, including Netflix, MSNBC, FX/Hulu, HBO, and PBS. Her most recent film, The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and won a Peabody Award. It is currently streaming on Peacock. Other recent work includes the Emmy-nominated films American Reckoning (Frontline), How It Feels to Be Free (American Masters), The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show (Peacock), and Green Book: Guide to Freedom (Smithsonian Channel).
She directed an episode of the award-winning series Black and Missing for HBO and High on the Hog for Netflix. Her film, The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award and is streaming on HULU. Her previous films, The New Black and Promised Land won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens and P.O.V. Yoruba is a past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow and she won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access. She was a Sundance Producers Fellow and Women’s Fellow and is a recipient of the Chicken & Egg Award. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She founded Promise Land Films, which focuses on producing nuanced, compelling documentary films that illuminate issues of race, space, and power.
Yoruba Richen’s pronouns are she, her, hers.
Michéle Stephenson (Mentee: Arlieta Hall)
Filmmaker, artist, and author, Michèle Stephenson is a platform-agnostic artist who pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces.
She tells emotionally driven personal stories of resistance and identity that are created by, for, and about communities of color and the Black diaspora. Her stories intentionally reimagine and provoke thought about how we engage with and dismantle the internalized impact of systems of oppression. She draws on fiction, immersive, and hybrid forms of storytelling to build her worlds and narratives.
Her feature documentary American Promise was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. Her documentary Stateless was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Stephenson collaborated as co-director on the magical realist immersive series on racial terror, The Changing Same, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival 2021. Along with her writing partners Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, Stephenson won an NAACP Image Award for Excellence in a Literary Work for their book Promises Kept Raising Black Boys to Succeed in School and in Life.
In 2023 her feature film Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and her short film Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games made for the iconic ESPN 30 for 30 series, were both Oscar shortlisted. She co-directed both films with her partner, Joe Brewster.
Stephenson is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Artist Fellow, and a Creative Capital Artist.
Tracye Heather Strain (Mentee: Moya Bailey)
Tracy Heather Strain teaches documentary production, storytelling and history at Wesleyan and brings to her students an enthusiastic interest in all styles, modes, models and platforms used in crafting nonfiction films. She is an award-winning filmmaker who directs, produces, researches and writes documentaries which gained support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Ford Foundation, Chicken & Egg, Independent Television Service, LEF Foundation, among other funding organizations.
In 1999 Strain won a Peabody Award for her first two feature documentaries Bright Like a Sun and The Dream Keepers as part of the six-part Blackside/PBS series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, and another in 2019 for the American Masters television broadcast of Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, the first feature film about the late artist/activist best-known for writing the play A Raisin in the Sun. The bio doc, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, also netted Tracy a 50th NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing last year, the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award, and a Creative Arts Emmy producing nomination. Her other directing and producing credits include Building the Alaska Highway for American Experience, The Story We Tell in Race: The Power of an Illusion, and When the Bough Breaks in the duPont Columbia-award-winning Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?. She shares an Outstanding Research News & Documentary Emmy nomination for her contributions to The Mine Wars American Experience film. Strain is President and CEO of The Film Posse, the production company she co-founded with her partner and CFILM colleague Randall MacLowry. Together, they have directed, produced and written the NEH-funded American Experience film American Oz, which premiered in 2021. Her most recent directing, writing, and producing effort, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space for American Experience, which was produced by MacLowry, premiered in January 2023. The pair is producing Strain’s feature essay film Survival Floating about Black peoples’ relationships to swimming and water, and the MacLowry-led music-rich John Henry: Unmasking America’s Real First Black Superhero. Strain is a recipient of the 2022 Chicken & Egg Award.
Angela Tucker (Mentee: Tracye Matthews)
Angela Tucker is an Emmy and Webby-winning filmmaker and artist. She is passionate about stories that highlight underrepresented communities in unconventional ways.
Recent work includes Belly of the Beast (dir. Erika Cohn), a NY Times Critics Pick, The Trees Remember, a Webby-winning branded series in collaboration with REI Co-Op Studios, and A New Orleans Noel, a Lifetime holiday film starring Patti LaBelle. Past directorial work includes All Skinfolk, Ain’t Kinfolk, a documentary short that aired on PBS’ Reel South; Black Folk Don’t, a documentary web series featured in Time Magazine’s “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life”, All Styles, a feature film on Showtime and (A)sexual, a feature-length documentary about people who experience no sexual attraction that streamed on Netflix and Hulu. Her newest film, The Inquisitor, about political icon Barbara Jordan, will be broadcast on PBS.
She is a Sundance Institute Women’s Fellow, a recipient of Firelight’s William Greaves Fund, an Amplifier Fellow with Film Independent, and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Founder of TuckerGurl Inc., a boutique production company, Angela received an MFA in Film from Columbia University.
ALSO READ:
