The Shorenstein Center is proud to announce the Fall 2024 cohort of Documentary Film Fellows. The group joins the Center under the auspices of the Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative and will spend the semester conducting research and engaging with the HKS community about the challenges facing the field and its impact on civic life. The Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative is designed to support new research, analysis, innovation, and provocation around core issues facing the documentary film sector. Through the Fellows’ projects, the Shorenstein Center will engage in examinations of public impact and media policy.
Sara Archambault, Program Director of the Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative said: “We are absolutely thrilled to have Bernardo and Abby join us this Fall. We are at a critical moment in the United States as public media and its role in our national media landscape feel particularly vulnerable, and tangible public policy solutions to the struggles we face seem far off. We see great potential in the research into public media history and public policy opportunities that Bernardo and Abby are talking on and their ability to spark new conversations and new directions for the documentary film field as their work develops.”
Fall 2024 Documentary Film Fellows:
BERNARDO RUIZ is a three-time Emmy®-nominated documentary filmmaker and member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. For more than two and a half decades, he has worked in the documentary field—primarily as a director and producer, but simultaneously as an organizer, mentor, and panelist. Ruiz was an active steering committee member of the Independent Caucus, created to represent the interests of independent filmmakers in public media, where he lobbied public media and local station leadership to keep Independent Lens and POV on the primetime schedule in 2015. Previously, Ruiz served in an elected position on the council of the Writer’s Guild of America, East (WGAE), where he helped to successfully lobby the House Appropriations Committee for increased funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Ruiz has also served on the board of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), during a period when the organization was actively involved in advocating for increased public media funding and distribution opportunities for filmmakers from Latino/x/e communities.
As a working filmmaker, Ruiz has directed and produced five feature-length documentaries as well as a host of nonfiction programming for both public media and commercial outlets, including HBO, ESPN, and Disney+. His latest film, EL EQUIPO (THE TEAM), was recently nominated for an Emmy®, was awarded the Jury Prize for best documentary feature at the 2023 Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival and was named a “Top 20 Audience Favorite” at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival. He is currently working with a talented team of journalists and filmmakers on “Latino Vote 2024,” which will air nationally on PBS, followed by free streaming on pbs.org, this Fall.
To address significant changes within the independent documentary field by illuminating potential lessons from past organizing efforts, Ruiz will examine the role of public media in this ecosystem through the creation of an oral history that offers insights from the key participants who successfully lobbied Congress “to expand the diversity and innovativeness of programming available to public broadcasting” by creating the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in 1988.
ABBY SUN is the Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary Magazine at the International Documentary Association (IDA). Most recently, she was a 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow and the Curator of the DocYard. As a graduate researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, she edited Immerse from 2020-2022. With Keisha Knight, Abby co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video and launched Line of Sight, a suite of artist development activities, in 2021. Through her work, Abby considers the power dynamics in the documentary form’s inherent smudging of reality, with a particular interest in the media infrastructures and cultural artifacts of moving image circulation.
Abby has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker, Film Quarterly, MUBI’s Notebook Magazine, Sight & Sound, Hyperallergic, and other publications. She has served on festival juries for Hot Docs, Dokufest, Cleveland, Palm Springs, New Orleans, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. Abby has reviewed artist and project applications for Brown Girls Doc Mafia, National Endowment for the Arts, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, IDFA Forum, Princess Grace Foundation, and spoken on and facilitated panels at TIFF Doc Conference, NYFF Talks, EFM, Locarno’s Future of Attention, and other film festivals. Her latest short film, CUBA SCALDS HIS HAND (co-directed with Daniel Garber), is streaming on the Future of Film is Female. Abby is producing Jordan Lord’s sophomore feature, THE VOICE OF DEMOCRACY. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri.
Through her research, Sun will investigate how a lack of government regulation and oversight in streaming has eroded fundamental audience and impact support structures for documentary films and local media, in addition to developing and presenting policy recommendations that will provide mechanisms for supporting distributed, local, independent, and diverse documentary media infrastructure.
The Fall 2024 Fellows will be engaged in their research work until the end of 2024, and the results of their work will be made public in the months that follow. This is the Shorenstein Center’s 3rd class of documentary fellows. The inaugural class included filmmakers Jacqueline Olive, Mary Lampson, Natalie Bullock Brown, and Kirsten Johnson. The Spring 2024 class included Amy Hobby, Tabitha Jackson, and Karin Chien.
About the Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative
The goal of the Shorenstein Center’s Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative, launched in March 2023, is to inspire a documentary film practice and infrastructure that can contribute to strong societies. The Initiative’s activities are designed to cross bridges between thinking and acting by bringing together practitioners and researchers, journalists and documentary filmmakers, in a shared project to build a stronger, more resilient field that can serve the needs of a democratic public by design.
