EXCLUSIVE: Celebrating its fifth 12 months, NewFest has named the recipients of its 2026 New Voices Filmmaker Grant.
On Thursday, the New York LGBTQ movie competition named rising filmmakers Georgia Krause, Star Amerasu, Deborah Devyn Chuang and AJ Dubler & Carmela Murphy as this 12 months’s honorees, every to obtain a $25,000 grant and profession improvement alternatives as a part of the collaborative effort with Netflix to help daring administrators telling tales from a queer perspective.
Chosen from greater than 500 purposes, with help from NewFest’s New Voices Filmmaker Grant Coordinator Arno Mokros, this 12 months’s recipients had been chosen by jury members Silas Howard (director of By Hook or By Criminal), River Gallo (author and star of Ponyboi), and nonfiction movie chief Merrill Sterritt (senior supervisor of partnerships & innovation and director of IF/Then Shorts at Subject of Imaginative and prescient).
“We’re thrilled to announce the most recent class of rising administrators to obtain the New Voices Filmmaker Grant,” mentioned NewFest Interim Govt Director Lesli Klainberg. “Devyn, Georgia, Star and directing duo AJ & Carmela deliver impressed and contemporary views to LGBTQ+ storytelling by stop-motion animation, documentary, slapstick comedy, science fiction and physique style. Due to Netflix for his or her generosity in partnering with NewFest on this very important artist initiative.”
Mokros added, “Thanks to the analysis committee for thoughtfully reviewing every software, and we’re particularly grateful to the ultimate jury for his or her visionary management in choosing filmmakers whose work spans such various cinematic approaches to LGBTQ+ tales. We stay up for supporting this cohort’s skilled progress and impressive new initiatives and to sharing their work with NewFest audiences on the New York LGBTQ+ Movie Competition in October.”
With mentors together with Andrew Ahn, Isabel Sandoval, Charlotte Wells, Chase Joynt, and Howard Gertler, previous years’ recipients have gone on to earn writing credit on studio sequence and develop characteristic movies
