The Shorenstein Center is proud to announce the Spring 2025 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.
“Our new class of Fellows embody the courage and generosity of the documentary field, especially during a time of drastic change,” said Enrique Pedraza-Botero, Program Manager of the Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative. “Having extensive experience in the industry in different capacities, their commitment to public interest filmmaking and innovation are core values of their work. At the Shorenstein Center, they will be tackling the impact of a threatened independent voice in our field, as well as the ethical examination of documentary film participants in an ever-changing media landscape, where the people we decide to collaborate with bear the heaviest weight of vulnerability and risk.”
The Spring 2025 Fellows will be engaged in their research work until the end of May, with the results of their work made public in the months following.
Spring 2025 Documentary Film Fellows:
Shirley Abraham is a Cannes prize-winning Indian documentary filmmaker. As a child, she came to the movies by rebellion. She watched them in secret—covering the television screen with a cloth, making her own magical cave.
The Cinema Travellers, her debut film made in collaboration with Amit Madheshiya, premiered as an Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival 2016, winning 19 awards globally. Shirley and Amit have since made a trilogy of shorts: Searching for Saraswati (New York Times Op-Docs), The Hour of Lynching (Guardian Documentaries), and The Great Abandonment (Guardian Documentaries). Their films have earned numerous national and international honors, including the World Press Photo, the Human Rights Watch Award, the Rory Peck Trust Award and the President’s Medal in India.
Shirley’s work is supported by the Sundance Institute, Pulitzer Center, IDFA Bertha Fund, Chicken & Egg, Field of Vision, InMaat Foundation, Lannan Foundation, and Catapult Film Fund, among others. She has been a fellow with the Sundance Labs, MacArthur Foundation, Cluster of Excellence Heidelberg, Diane Weyermann Fellowship with Points North, and the Democracy Story Lab with Doc Society. She is a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has served as a juror and panelist at festivals around the world, and is currently on the International Engagement Committee of the Academy.
During her time at Shorenstein, she will be researching freedom of thought as the beating heart of the independent voice. Can one create memories of the future even as the dissenting voice finds itself choked around the world today?
Sarafina DiFelice is a documentary producer, creative executive, and curator. She was previously on the Netflix Original Documentaries team where she oversaw global non-fiction acquisitions, as well as a commissioned slate of celebrated and award-winning documentary feature films. Prior to this, Sarafina spent over a decade as a curator at some of the world’s largest film festivals, including roles as the Associate Director of Programming for Hot Docs, and the Documentary Programming Associate for the Toronto International Film Festival. She is currently producing non-fiction projects with the Media Courthouse Documentary Collective.
While at the Shorenstein Center, Sarafina will research the evolution of duty of care protocols for documentary, with a specific focus on digital streaming platforms.
Sarafina DiFelice will engage in her research until the end of May 2025, and Shirley Abraham will engage in her work until the end of 2025. 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. The Fall 2024 class included Bernardo Ruiz and Abby Sun.
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 documentary film practice and infrastructure that 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.
For more information, go to: https://shorensteincenter.org/programs/documentary-film/
