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2026 Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellows Named

Ten Emerging Filmmakers Ages 18 to 25 Will Start Fellowship Year at Ignite Lab from June 14–19

LOS ANGELES, CA, June 15, 2026 — The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the names of 10 up-and-coming filmmakers who will take part in the yearlong…
2026 Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellows Named

LOS ANGELES, CA, June 15, 2026 — The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the names of 10 up-and-coming filmmakers who will take part in the yearlong Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellowship. The program begins with the Ignite Lab at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, from June 14–19. For more than a decade, the Ignite fellowship has brought together talented storytellers ages 18 to 25 for professional development and community-building. The yearlong fellowship, supported through the Adobe Film and TV Fund, begins with the lab, a fun week that helps cultivate the creative processes of early-career artists and introduces them to the opportunities they’ll participate in over the coming months. 

Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe fellows receive a $5,000 artist grant as well as a one-year complimentary membership to Adobe Creative Cloud in order to propel them in this stage of their careers. After the in-person lab in June, participants join monthly webinars to focus on specific topics around creative and professional development with the Ignite cohort. Fellows will also gather in person again for a curated program at the 2027 Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado. This year’s cohort was selected from over 1,100 global applications.

“It’s with great pleasure that we return to MASS MoCA to kick off a new year with our Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe fellows. The filmmakers selected represent an exciting cross section of perspectives, and we’re appreciative of our partners at Adobe for their collaboration in bringing the group together this week,” said Toby Brooks, Director, Sundance Institute Ignite. “Our team is looking forward to facilitating a dynamic cohort of emerging filmmakers and connecting them with the tools needed to build a solid foundation for their careers in this coming year and beyond. Ignite is first and foremost a community — of alumni and mentors alike — and we’re thrilled to welcome these 10 fellows into it.”

“Every filmmaker deserves the chance to bring their vision to life. Together with the Sundance Institute, we’re working to make sure access to tools and funding is never what stands between a creator and their story, said Amy While, Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Adobe. “Over 15 years as partners, we’ve seen firsthand what happens when emerging filmmakers get that support and we couldn’t be more excited to see what the new cohort of fellows brings to the screen.”

Since its founding in 2015, the Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellowship has had 19 alumni projects selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, with several winning jury awards. Former fellows include Giselle Bonilla (director of The Musical, in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival), Sean Wang (2023 Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs fellow and winner of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic for his feature Dìdi (弟弟)), Charlotte Regan (her debut feature, Scrapper, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and later opened the 2023 Sundance Film Festival: London), Lance Oppenheim (his feature Some Kind of Heaven premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival), Terrance Daye (his film –Ship: A Visual Poem won the Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival), Aurora Brachman (co-producer of Girls State, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival), and Olivia Peace (winner of a 2022 Student Academy Award for Against Reality).

Former Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe fellows have also won prizes at SXSW and Tribeca Festival, as well as the Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination.

Former fellows have gone on to participate in additional Sundance Institute artist programs, including the Directors, Screenwriters, and Episodic labs, and received funding from the Documentary Fund.

Earlier this year, the Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellowship expanded to include a new short film fund available to Ignite alumni that supports more projects moving from concept to screen in the coming years. This direct-to-creator pathway allows for a more inclusive, innovative, and creator-driven entertainment ecosystem, one where technology helps unlock limitless creativity.

LIST

The fellows selected for the 2026 Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellowship are:

Simisolaoluwa Akande is a Nigerian British multiaward-winning artist filmmaker whose work spans fiction and speculative nonfiction. Grounded in queer African epistemologies, her practice challenges dominant narratives around African identity, memory, and representation.

Aicha Cherif is a director based in New York City drawn to storytelling as a means of excavation and the emotional architectures that shape how we belong to one another. Her documentary Heat screened in Film Forum’s Tenement Stories, a century-spanning New York City retrospective, where she was the youngest director.

Blake Knecht is a filmmaker from Las Vegas, Nevada. Her work explores landscapes as evolving narratives, tracing relationships between land, labor, and movement. She earned her MFA in documentary media from Northwestern University, and her work has screened at IDFA, Slamdance, American Cinematheque, and more.

Franciszek Korolczuk is a Polish student filmmaker and music video director whose work blends narrative filmmaking with documentary realism. His debut short, Princeska, is currently on the festival circuit and premiered at the Brussels Short Film Festival.

Haneol Lee (이한얼) is an award-winning filmmaker exploring 1.5 generation Korean American identity, diaspora, and generational healing through a contemplative lens. His work has screened at BFI, Palm Springs Shortfest, and True/False.

Josiah Mendoza is a filmmaker and documentarian from O’ahu, Hawai‘i. His films examine the impact of memory through familial dynamics in varying communities. A graduate from Chapman University, his work has played at Hawai‘i International Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and NFFTY.

Muskaan Razdan is an Indian writer and filmmaker based in London. An alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and Barbican Young Poets, her work appears in Berlin Lit, Magma, among others. She received the Roundhouse Film Fund for her short film Salt, currently on the festival circuit.

Mia Lima Rocha is a Brazilian filmmaker from Rio de Janeiro. Her work explores moral ambiguity and the limits of empathy through women-centered stories shaped by discomfort comedy and occasionally breaking into musical numbers. Her latest film, TAG, tackles the discovery of sexuality in childhood.

Yace Sula is a filmmaker who often plays in the experimental arena. Their films have screened at festivals such as the New York Film Festival, Fantasia Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2025, they were named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

Japhet E. Velázquez is an LA-based filmmaker from Arroyo, Puerto Rico, and a recent graduate of the AFI Directing program. He began making horror shorts in San Antonio, Texas.

 

Sundance Institute Ignite is supported by Adobe and Arison Arts Foundation.

WHO

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 Institute 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, Dìdi (弟弟), Drunktown’s Finest, The Farewell, Fire of Love, Flee, Fruitvale Station, Half Nelson, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hereditary, 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, RBG, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, 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, 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, Gregg Araki, Darren Aronofsky, Lisa Cholodenko, Nia DaCosta, Ryan Coogler, The Daniels, Robert Eggers, Rick Famuyiwa, David Gordon Green, Sterlin Harjo, Marielle Heller, Miranda July, Nikyatu Jusu, James Mangold, John Cameron Mitchell, Kimberly Peirce, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Boots Riley, A.V. Rockwell, Ira Sachs, Walter Salles, Quentin Tarantino, Erica Tremblay, 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, YouTube, X, and Bluesky.

 

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