2021 Producers Fellows

Christina Avalos

Christina Avalos is a documentary producer passionate about telling character-driven stories that reveal the lives of those often left unseen. She began her career in documentary filmmaking after receiving a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Since then, she has helped produce feature documentaries and TV news documentary series for HBO, PBS, CNN and Netflix. Her work has covered various topics that explore inequality in America, including the criminal justice system and capital punishment, addiction, housing insecurity and homelessness, and the racial wealth gap. Christina is currently producing a feature-length verite documentary with Story Syndicate.

Brian Becker

Brian Becker is a New York-based filmmaker and producer who makes archival documentaries that highlight forgotten narratives of American culture. He was shortlisted for the 2021 FOCAL Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year Award and most recently served as archival producer on MLK/FBI and story producer/archival producer on Spaceship Earth. Both films were nominated for the 2021 Critics’ Choice Award for Best Archival Documentary and MLK/FBI was selected as the winner. He began his career on the Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America and has worked on the television projects The Fourth Estate and Bobby Kennedy for President. Before turning to production, he worked as an urban ecologist with an expertise in invasive mosquito populations. He is currently directing and producing his first feature Time Bomb Y2K.

Rebekah Fergusson

Rebekah Fergusson is a documentary producer with a passion for character driven stories. Based in Durham, NC, she has produced long form documentaries for Netflix, ITVS, HBO and Fox Sports. Prior credits include Crip Camp, winner of an Independent Spirit Award, Peabody Award, and Academy Award nominee; Q Ball produced for Fox Sports with executive producer Kevin Durant; and End Game, a Netflix Original about end-of-life care that premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award. 

Giona Jefferson

Giona Jefferson is a producer, writer, and founder of Third Rail, a multi-media production company based in Brooklyn, New York. Her prior work includes The Innocence Files (Netflix), the audio doc The Wilderness (Crooked Media), and content for AMC and Paramount. Formerly a Legal Assistant at the U.S. Department of Justice, and Washington, DC-based advocate for low-income families, Giona draws upon her versatile experiences to curate stories that explore the gray areas of humanity.  Among several projects in development, she is producing her first short film, Constructs, which explores her own complexities growing up amidst the shadows of the confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. 

Patrick Lee

Patrick G. Lee (he/they) is a queer diasporic Korean documentary filmmaker, writer, and community organizer. He’s interested in building collaborative, community-based models of filmmaking that reject traditional hierarchies of authority and that equip queer and trans people of color with media-making skills. Patrick has made award-winning films about Asian American coming out stories, LGBTQ self-representation, and queer Asian history. His writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, ProPublica, The Atlantic, and more. In 2018, Patrick helped organize KQTcon, the first national Korean queer and trans conference in the U.S. His debut feature documentary, UNTITLED KQT PROJECT, is supported by Firelight Media, Sundance, and CAAM. Patrick has been coping with pandemic times mostly by eating carbs.

Justin Levy

Justin Levy is a filmmaker from NYC working primarily in documentary film. His recent credits as producer include SNOWY, a short documentary that premiered at Sundance 2021, and the feature documentary WELL GROOMED that premiered at SXSW in 2019. He is the associate producer of 2018 Academy Award best short documentary nominee KNIFE SKILLS. He has directed short documentaries released by The New Yorker and Vice, and produced films released by HBO, PBS and TIME. He is a NYC Regional Representative of the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA). Prior to working in film, he was a public radio producer at NPR stations for 6 years.

Naja Lockwood

A producer, investor, patron and collaborator of social change through film and the arts, Naja is the Founder of RYSE Media which supports stories of diverse voices. Her independent producing and philanthropic credits include Try Harder! which premiered at Sundance 2021, 76 Days, the first major documentary about COVID in its earliest days in Wuhan, academy nominated Last Days in Vietnam, PBS Asian Americans film series, Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Coming Home Again, Gook, Cries From Syria and First Days with StoryCorp. The First Days Project is a collaboration between StoryCorps and PBS which aimed to collect, preserve and celebrate the stories of Vietnamese American refugees and Vietnam veterans throughout America. She is an associate instructor and lecturer at the University of Utah teaching the Power of Storytelling: Asia and the Global Cinema. She is currently working on three producing projects and directing and co-producing her first documentary.

Naja was an investor in Impact Partner Films, which supports documentaries that enrich and ignite social change. She was part of Silicon Valley’s campaign to fund and support Crazy Rich Asians that have blazed a pathway for greater Asian-American representation. She served on the Sundance Utah Advisory Board, working with Utah legislators and leaders to support the initiatives of Sundance. She partnered with Sundance Institute to help build and fund the Sundance Screenwriters Fellowships for Asian Americans filmmakers. Naja currently serves on the Board of the Utah Film Commission and Center for Asian America Media (CAAM). As a refugee, she continues to advocate for immigrants from her undergraduate years to her current work with the Governor's Workforce Services and Catholic Community Services in Utah. She serves on the Committee for Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies at Harvard University and The Coalition for Diverse Harvard. She is the Founder and CEO of www.najalockwooddesigns.com to support female artisans of Southeast Asia. Throughout Naja’s life, there has always been a commitment to social justice and making sure the voices of the under-represented, the minority and the oppressed are heard.

Born in Vietnam, Naja immigrated to Massachusetts during the Fall of Saigon. She graduated with a BA from Boston University. She then returned to Vietnam under the sponsorship of Georgetown University, from 1991 to 1993, as one of the first Vietnamese Americans to study at Hanoi University after the war. After returning from Vietnam, Naja earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked in investment banking and media in New York, Singapore and London. She was the first Vietnamese-American to be appointed by Mayor Willie Brown and Mayor Gavin Newsom to be Arts Commissioner of San Francisco with a focus on community and diversity and the expansion and capital campaign development of the Asian Art Museum.

Rajal Pitroda

Rajal Pitroda is a producer of fiction and non-fiction films that examine issues of race, class and gender beyond the mainstream narrative. She is a 2020-2021 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow, a Black Public Media 360 Incubator Fellow, an Impact Producing Fellow with Firelight Media, and a Resident at SFFILM FilmHouse. Rajal most recently produced “Down a Dark Stairwell,” a feature documentary that premiered at the 2020 True/False Film Festival and was broadcast on Independent Lens. Prior to producing, Rajal was the Founder/CEO of Cinevention, a media company focused on marketing and distribution where she designed and executed distribution strategies for feature films. Rajal started her career in film working in international marketing for Bollywood movies based in Mumbai. She has a degree in Economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from London Business School.

Richie Reseda

Freed from prison in 2018, Richie is a producer, abolitionist-feminist community organizer, and the founder of Question Culture, a social impact media company. 

Ann Rogers

Originally from Montana, Ann Rogers is a documentary producer and filmmaker. Her recent credits include co-producer for Participant’s feature documentary WHITE COAT REBELS, which had its world premiere at AFI Docs 2021 and Showtime’s feature documentary DETAINEE 001, which had its broadcast premiere in September 2021. She was also an associate producer for Fishbowl Film’s POV feature documentary INVENTING TOMORROW (Sundance 2018), which went on to win a 2019 Peabody Award. Ann’s past credits include Showtime’s feature documentary THE LONGEST WAR (2020), HBO’s feature documentary THE FINAL YEAR (Toronto 2017), CNN Film’s feature documentary LEGION OF BROTHERS (Sundance 2017), and Netflix’s docuseries FIVE CAME BACK (2017). In 2020, she pitched her directorial debut, THE PROGRAM, at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival’s Big Sky Pitch, which is currently in development. A member of the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA) and the Producers Guild of America (PGA), Ann now lives in Los Angeles.

Yvonne Shirley

Yvonne Michelle Shirley is a Newark, NJ-based filmmaker, inspired by filmmaking in the social realist tradition. In 2018, she produced the award-winning documentary short, Black 14, directed by Darius Clark Monroe and executive produced by Spike Lee. She produced and directed the webseries, Frame by Frame, for Topic, which premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. She's directed non-fiction work for NY Times' T Magazine, AFROPUNK and NIKE. And was named to DOC NYC's 2019 40 under 40 list. She is currently producing a feature length documentary on the artist Gil Scott-Heron, directed by Orlando Bagwell. In Newark, Yvonne is working with local storytellers to develop The Newarkive -- a creative archive, centering imagery of and by Newark’s Black communities. She is also a member of the New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women and non-binary filmmakers.

Elizabeth Woodward

Elizabeth Woodward is a producer of documentary and narrative films and founder of Willa Productions. Her recent projects include ON THE DIVIDE (Tribeca Film Festival 2021, POV) and YOU RESEMBLE ME (Venice Film Festival 2021, executive produced by Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, Alma Har’el, Abigail E. Disney). Past projects include Netflix’s THE GREAT HACK (Oscars shortlist, Emmy nominee, BAFTA nominee, IDA nominee, Cinema Eye winner, Sundance 2019), HBO’s hit series THE VOW, and PERSUASION MACHINES (Sundance New Frontier 2020). Her films have been supported by Sundance Institute, Tribeca Institute, Chicken and Egg, Film Independent, Impact Partners, Artemis Rising, Field of Vision, Level Forward, The Gotham, Perspective Fund, Berkeley Film Fund, Quiet, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the Documentary Producers Alliance. She was selected for Berlinale Talents and for the Impact Partners Producers Fellowship. She is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Cambridge.

Farihah Zaman

Farihah Zaman is a queer Bangladeshi-American filmmaker, critic, educator, and curator whose award-winning work has screened at Sundance, Toronto, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, South By Southwest, and more. Her first feature was Remote Area Medical, followed by This Time Next Year, and the doc-fiction hybrid Feast of the Epiphany, as well as several shorts (Kombit, Nobody Loves Me, American Carnage, and To Be Queen, which is part of the Emmy-nominated New York Times Op-Doc series From Here to Home). She produced the Sundance-award winning Netflix Original, Ghosts of Sugar Land, which was shortlisted for 2020 Academy Award nomination. Zaman has written for Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Elle, Huffington Post, Filmmaker Magazine, and AV Club, among others, and her diverse background in the film industry includes roles at independent distributor Magnolia Pictures, IFP, The Flaherty Seminar, and serving as the Production Manager for Laura Poitras-founded Field of Vision, where she worked with artists like Garrett Bradley, Lyric Cabral, Steve Maing, and Ramell Ross on films eventually published at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Buzzfeed, Vice, Wired and more. Zaman supports other filmmakers and the documentary community through equity driven collectives like Beyond Inclusion and Brown Girls Doc Mafia, where she is the Director of Grants and Programs, and various teaching and mentoring roles over the years at SVA, NYU, Uniondocs, NYFF Critics Academy, University of Iowa, and others. She was the Documentarian in Residence at Bard College 2018-2019, has been named a Top 40 under 40 filmmaker by Doc NYC, and is a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.