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.
