SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF., February 13, 2025 — The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) and the nonprofit Sundance Institute have partnered for a third year of the “Sundance Institute | The Asian American Foundation Fellowship and Scholarship,” providing Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) artists working in film and television with professional development resources and opportunities to connect with peers and mentors. The initiative supports creatives at all stages of their career from emerging artists to more seasoned professionals with the goal of meaningfully increasing AANHPI representation in independent media.

TAAF’s support for the program underscores its commitment to narrative change, promoting more diverse and nuanced portrayals of AANHPIs on screen. “Authentic representation in media is about more than just visibility—it’s about creating a sense of belonging for our communities, and fostering greater safety and prosperity,” said Norman Chen, CEO of TAAF. “When our stories are told by us with depth and complexity, they can challenge and dismantle stereotypes, strengthen our shared identity, and contribute to a more inclusive society where everyone can thrive.”

Each year, the Fellowship program provides six AANHPI artists at critical junctures in their career with a year-long fellowship that focuses on advancing their creative and technical development. Fellows receive creative guidance, practical support, and a $20,000 unrestricted grant. In addition, six emerging AANHPI creatives are awarded Scholarships, which include a year-long artist development experience that offers mentorship from a Sundance artist alumnus, personalized career and project support , and opportunities to engage with Sundance staff and the broader creative community virtually and in person at the Sundance Film Festival. Artists may work in either film or television, across both fiction and nonfiction genres.

“Our ongoing partnership with The Asian American Foundation reaffirms our commitment to uplifting AANHPI artists and ensuring their stories influence independent film and television. By offering essential financial and career development support at a pivotal moment in an artist’s career, we empower them to thrive and create work that resonates beyond their immediate communities. We’re honored to celebrate the third year of the Fellowship and Scholarship and eagerly anticipate the incredible impact these artists will make,” said Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs, Director, Artist Accelerator and Women at Sundance at Sundance Institute. 

The Sundance Institute | The Asian American Foundation Fellowship and Scholarship was created in 2022 through the generous financial support of founding partners Panda Express, who provided the grant to TAAF, and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to provide artists with grants and year-round resources to help facilitate professional growth and industry connections.

The artists selected for the year three cohort of fellows are:

Nicole Docta

About the Artist: Nicole Docta is an award-winning filmmaker who’s focused her career on socially impactful projects and BIPOC stories. Docta was a Special Initiatives Producer at Firelight Media, is a DOC NYC 40 Under 40 Alum, Producers Guild of America Create Alum, Sundance Institute Producer Fellow and Impact Partners Producer Fellow.

Project: Adopting | All adoptions start with a trauma. Through this lens, Adopting explores adoption practices in need of reform. The film explores the emotional journey unique to adopted people and the life-long lessons generations of adoptees have to offer.

Masami Kawai

About the Artist: Masami Kawai is a Los Angeles-born filmmaker of Ryukyuan descent. She was a Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directing Fellow, participated in Gotham Project Market and Film Independent’s FastTrack. Her films have screened in various venues the Rotterdam Film Festival, LACMA, and Palm Springs ShortFest.

Project: Valley of the Tall Grass | A TV/VCR combo set is thrown out, but it survives and circulates through the lives of various working-class indigenous characters of color in an Oregon town. They find forgotten memories, love, and connection through this seemingly obsolete object.

Courtney Loo

About the Artist: Courtney Loo is a writer-director & entrepreneur. She’s a 2024 Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow and 2023 Almanack Screenwriting Fellow. Her latest short premiered at SXSW 2023. As an entrepreneur, Loo co-founded a management company that reps multi-platinum musicians. Bangbang Teahouse will be her debut feature.

Project: Bangbang Teahouse | Hayley and Mimi – a Chinese American music duo – stop at absolutely nothing to convince their label to release their long-awaited album over a raucous, self-destructive 48 hours in New York City.

Jess dela Merced

About the Artist: Jess dela Merced is a Sundance Institute Episodic Lab fellow, a director in the Disney-ABC Directing Program, one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, a SFFILM Rainin grant recipient, and a Hamptons Screenwriters Lab participant. Her recent writing credits include a feature comedy for Sony.

Project: SPARES | An aging Filipina mother’s belief in putting family first is put to the ultimate test when she unexpectedly reignites her passion for bowling, setting off a high-stakes journey of self-discovery.

Jing Wang

About the Artist: Jing Wang, was born in China, where her name means “quiet,” Wang has made a stark contrast by vocally advocating through her films. They are powerful stories about the immigrant experience, which highlight her commitment to both her craft and her community.

Project: Ride with Delivery Workers | Ride with Delivery Workers explores the unseen lives of NYC’s Chinese immigrant delivery workers through filmmaker Wang’s intimate lens, as they fight for e-bike legalization, and through the traumas the pandemic inflicts on these frontline heroes.

Emily Yue

About the Artist: Emily Yue is a filmmaker and film editor from the New England area. They are currently directing their first feature documentary, editing an upcoming feature documentary, are a 2024 Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellow, and recently were a 2023 Sundance Institute Contributing Editor Fellow.

Project: BLOWW | Welcome to the brawl of the century! BLOWW, a queer feminist wrestling league, fights to smash the patriarchy, build community, and make rent to save one of Boston’s iconic subcultures. In and out of the ring, they always punch up.

Additionally, this year’s six Scholarship recipients are:

Candace Ho

About the Artist: Candace Ho is a Taiwanese American filmmaker based in Los Angeles whose work centers around womanhood, coming of age, and navigating the gray areas of life through a comedic and absurdist lens. She was a 2023 Indeed/Hillman Grad Rising Voices fellow, a 2021 Armed With a Camera fellow, and a 2021 Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles fellow.

Project: Pixel Affection | When a petty woman discovers that her younger sister is secretly a successful influencer, she spirals into the world of internet hate culture and becomes her sister’s biggest troll in an attempt to keep her close.

Chheangkea Ieng

About the Artist: Chheangkea Ieng is a Cambodia-born filmmaker based in Brooklyn. He is currently developing his first feature film, Little Phnom Penh, which was selected for HamptonsFilm Lab, MunichFilmUp, and New York University Purple List. Recently, his short film Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites won the Short Film Jury Award in International Fiction at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Ieng has an MFA in filmmaking at New York University Graduate Film.

Project: Little Phnom Penh | Spanning two ever-changing decades, from post-Khmer Rouge Phnom Penh to early 2000s California, a Cambodian woman grapples with her identity, family, and love amidst profound cultural and historical upheavals.

Steven Raven Liang

About the Artist: Steven Raven Liang is a community-based, punk, DIY writer-director from the working-class town of Rosemead, CA. Their current work explores the ripple effects of incarceration on Asian American communities. Previously, they worked as a writer-producer at Warner Bros. Television. 

Project: Godfrey’s Time Out | A formerly-incarcerated man must navigate rebuilding his life in today’s Asian America after prison leaves him feeling like an immigrant all over again.

Ethan Newmyer

About the Artist: Ethan Newmyer is a Korean-American writer, director, and photographer from Chula Vista, California. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a BA in Cinema & Media Studies. Newmyer co-wrote the short film Last Days of the Lab, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Project: Loma | A competitive swimmer becomes disillusioned with her purpose after an injury forces her to move back home and return to her high school job as a pool lifeguard.

Jot Sahi

About the Artist: Jot Sahi is a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn. Previously, she worked as a documentary associate producer at Multitude Films. Sahi is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently a student at Cardozo School of Law. Her work explores her experiences as a Punjabi-American woman.

Project: Mother Tongue | When Alzheimer’s sufferer Amanat loses her grasp of English, her daughter Meera struggles to care for her in their native language of Punjabi and faces losing the closest relationship in her life.

Sonejuhi

About the Artist: Sonejuhi is a filmmaker working in TV and film. Her films have screened at several film festivals including the Cannes Film Festival and SXSW. Her debut feature, Stray Dolls (Tribeca Festival 2019), won Tribeca Film Institute’s IWC award and earned her recognition as one of IndieWire’s 25 Rising Filmmakers to know.

Project: Seven Days in Rome | At the height of the War on Terror, an Indian American diplomat in Rome is unmasked as a covert agent, and accused of masterminding a CIA kidnapping plot. Inspired by a true story.

About TAAF

TAAF serves the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) community in their pursuit of safety, belonging, and prosperity that is free from discrimination, slander, and violence. Launched in 2021 in response to the rise in anti-Asian hate and to address the long-standing underinvestment in AANHPI communities, TAAF mobilizes to fight against hate and violence, reclaim our narratives and celebrate our stories through our core pillars of Anti-Hate, Education, Narrative Change, and Resources & Representation. Through our high-impact initiatives, events, and investments in national and local nonprofits, we’re creating a permanent and irrevocable sense of belonging for millions of AANHPIs in the United States. For additional information about TAAF, please visit https://www.taaf.org/ or follow @TAAForg on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

About the Sundance Institute
As a champion and curator of independent stories, the nonprofit Sundance Institute provides and preserves the space for artists across storytelling media to create and thrive. Founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, the Institute’s signature labs, granting, and mentorship programs, dedicated to developing new work, take place throughout the year in the U.S. and internationally. Sundance Collab, a digital community platform, brings a global cohort of working artists together to learn from Sundance advisors and connect with each other in a creative space, developing and sharing works in progress. The Sundance Film Festival and other public programs connect audiences and artists to ignite new ideas, discover original voices, and build a community dedicated to independent storytelling. Through the Sundance Institute artist programs, we have supported such projects as Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Big Sick, Bottle Rocket, Boys Don’t Cry, Boys State, Call Me by Your Name, Clemency, CODA, Drunktown’s Finest, The Farewell, Fire of Love, Flee, The Forty-Year-Old Version, Fruitvale Station, Half Nelson, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hereditary, Honeyland, The Infiltrators, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Little Woods, Love & Basketball, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Mudbound, Nanny, One Child Nation, Pariah, Raising Victor Vargas, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, RBG, Sin Nombre, Sorry to Bother You, Strong Island, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Swiss Army Man, A Thousand and One, Top of the Lake, Walking and Talking, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and Zola. Through year-round artist programs, the Institute also nurtured the early careers of such artists as Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Gregg Araki, Darren Aronofsky, Lisa Cholodenko, Ryan Coogler, Nia DaCosta, The Daniels, David Gordon Green, Miranda July, James Mangold, John Cameron Mitchell, Kimberly Peirce, Boots Riley, Ira Sachs, Quentin Tarantino, Taika Waititi, Lulu Wang, and Chloé Zhao. Support Sundance Institute in our commitment to uplifting bold artists and powerful storytelling globally by making a donation at sundance.org/donate. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.

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