Salt Lake City, March 23 – Faith Strongheart—writer, filmmaker, and 2020 RespectAbility Lab alumna—won the most recent NYWIFT Loreen Arbus Disability Awareness Grant for her deeply personal documentary Faith Brings the Wild. This grant supports a film that amplifies the voices of people with physical or developmental disabilities in the post-production phase. While Strongheart is still [click to continue...]
Salt Lake City, Feb 23 – Aleeya, written and directed by RespectAbility Lab Alum Nina Mahesh (she/her), follows a trans woman in small-town India as she tries to buy a sewing machine for her boyfriend. This short film is both a simple love story and an intricate depiction of how trans women are treated in [click to continue...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCcnn-qbm5c Oreo explores identity and nonconformity through four different black women’s experiences. The short film centers around the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” It looks at black identity through religion, class, race, and culture, and does so [click to continue...]
Maddie Jones graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, CA. She believes that stories are the fundamental building blocks of society and that if we want to see significant change for the disability community, we must start by influencing the stories we tell and see.
Salt Lake City, Feb 3 – Juliet Romeo (she/her) is a disabled filmmaker based out of Miami, Florida. Along with being a creative (and 2021 Respectability Lab alumna), Romeo is an advocate for disability representation on screen and accessibility at film festivals. She is the founder and a programmer for Slamdance’s Unstoppable. Unstoppable features films [click to continue...]
Salt Lake City, UT, Jan. 30 – As part of Slamdance’s first in-person Unstoppable series, a showcase of films made exclusively by disabled artists, “Teacher of Patience” spotlights the Felter Family and follows them as they travel to educate the public and advocate for people with disabilities. After Tom Felter heard multiple stories about first [click to continue...]
