The Documentary Development Initiative is a partnership between The Gotham and HBO Documentary Films. The program is for storytellers who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and/or storytellers with disabilities. It seeks to provide resources to develop thought-provoking, character-driven ideas for documentary films and limited series.
Through this initiative, filmmakers receive grants of $50,000, plus resources and mentorship to support the development of documentary projects. Grantees are also paired with an established documentary filmmaker who serves as their mentor for the duration of the program.
2022–2023 Cohort
Zeshawn Ali — Fellow
Zeshawn Ali is a director, originally from the Midwest and currently based in New York. His feature film debut, Two Gods, was released in festivals and theaters across the US and aired on “Independent Lens” on PBS. It was named a Critic’s Pick by the New York Times and nominated for a Cinema Eye Spotlight Award.
TJ Martin — Mentor
TJ Martin is an Academy Award- and Emmy Award-winning director and editor whose works include HBO’s Tina, LA92, Undefeated, and the Webby-nominated short My Favorite Picture of You. Martin became the first director of African-American descent to win an Oscar for a feature-length film in 2012 with his documentary Undefeated.
Brit Fryer — Fellow
Brit Freyer (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based queer and trans filmmaker from Chicago. His process-based nonfiction films, including The Script, Caro Comes Out, and Across, Beyond, and Over, use the act of creating to explore memory and imagine futures that aren’t here yet. Brit and his work have been supported by the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Creative Culture, Chicken & Egg, and GLAAD’s Equity in Media and Entertainment Initiative.
Cecilia Aldarondo — Mentor
Cecilia Aldarondo is a director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora whose feature documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016) and Landfall (2020) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the award-winning PBS series POV. Currently she is directing her third feature, a co-production with HBO. She teaches at Williams College.
Juan Pablo González — Fellow
Juan Pablo González is a filmmaker whose body of work includes The Solitude of Memory (IDFA 2014), Las Nubes (IFFR 2017), Caballerango (IDFA 2018), and Dos estaciones (Sundance 2022). His work has been supported by IMCINE, Venice Biennale, Sundance, Tribeca, FONCA, and the Vilcek Foundation.
Sam Pollard — Mentor
Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor and documentary producer/director. In 2020, he was one of the directors on the HBO series Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children, and he completed MLK/FBI, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. Recently, he co-directed Lowndes County and The Road to Black Power with Geeta Gandbhir, which will premiere in 2023 on the Peacock Channel.
Melanie Ho — Fellow
Melanie is a Vietnamese American filmmaker and writer with roots in Florida and Mississippi. Her work focuses on trauma, familial relationships, gender, displacement, and intimacy.
Rudy Valdez — Mentor
Rudy Valdez is a two-time Emmy-winning filmmaker and a 2018 Critics Choice Documentary Awards Nominee for Best New Director. Rudy’s directorial debut, The Sentence, premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, won the US Documentary Audience Award, and was acquired by HBO.
Crystal Kayiza — Fellow
Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” she is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Sundance Ignite Fellowship and Jacob Burns Film Center Woman Filmmaker Fellowship. Her work has screened at Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art and appeared on The New Yorker, Starz and PBS.
Matt Wolf — Mentor
Matt Wolf is a documentary filmmaker in New York. His features include Wild Combination, Teenage, Recorder, and most recently Spaceship Earth. Matt has made many short films, including Another Hayride and Bayard & Me.
Jasmín Mara López — Fellow
Jasmín Mara López is a Mexican-American filmmaker living between Los Angeles and New Orleans. Born in the U.S. with familial roots in México, her childhood was affected by issues experienced on both sides of the U.S.- México border. This instilled in her a strong passion for immigrant rights, youth empowerment, and social change.
Alex Stapleton — Mentor
Alex Stapleton is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, television director, and founder of the production company House of NonFiction. Her credits include Pride (FX), Hello Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea (Netflix), Shut Up & Dribble (Showtime), The Playbook (Netflix), and Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (A&E). Currently, she is directing two projects for HBO and a documentary feature on Reggie Jackson for Amazon, all of which will air in 2023.
Amber Love — Fellow
Amber Love is a filmmaker and festival programmer based in Chicago, IL. Her work has explored Afrofuturism, alternative families, and Black heritage, and has been supported by IF/Then, Short of the Week, Next Doc, and the Sundance Art of Editing Fellowship. Her forthcoming short film Lifetimes, is funded by the Firelight Homegrown: Future Visions initiative, and her upcoming feature One Another was selected for the Kartemquin 2022 Diverse Voices in Docs program.
Geeta Gandbhir — Mentor
Geeta Gandbhir is an award-winning director, producer, and editor with over 25 years of experience in the film industry. Her most recent film, After Selma: The Lowndes County Freedom Party, premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and will air on Peacock. The winner of three News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Gandbhir’s directing credits include Black and Missing, Why We Hate, I Am Evidence, and A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers.
Khaula Malik — Fellow
Khaula Malik is a Pakistani American filmmaker and artist whose work spans the documentary and fiction space and explores intersectional identity and concepts of home. Khaula is currently in post-production on her first feature doc, which has been supported by DOC NYC and the Catapult/True False Rough Cut Retreat. Recently, she co-produced Apple TV+’s Girls State and her work has been featured on PBS, the New York Times, and Sight & Sound.
Jennifer Tiexiera — Mentor
Jennifer Tiexiera is an award winning documentary director, producer and editor and one of the co-founders of Lady & Bird, a female-run documentary production company focused on telling stories from underrepresented voices. Her work has been showcased at the Tribeca, Sundance, SXSW, and Toronto film festivals. Tiexiera is a member of Brown Girl Doc Mafia, Documentary Producers Alliance, IDA, LatinX Directors, Women in Film and Film Fatales, and just finished directing the 3-part series Unveiled: Surviving La Luz del Mundo for HBO.
Habiba Nosheen — Fellow
Habiba Nosheen is a three-time Emmy award winning journalist and filmmaker. She is the creator and host of the investigative podcast, Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan with Gimlet Media and Spotify. Her documentary films have been supported by ITVS, PBS FRONTLINE, JustFilms, Firelight Media, The Pulitzer Center, and The Center for Asian American Media among others.
Matt O’Neill — Mentor
Matt O’Neill is an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker who has been working with Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) for the last 20 years. He co-created the HBO docu-news series Axios with Perri Peltz and has directed films including HBO’s Baghdad ER, China’s Unnatural Disaster and Alternate Endings among others, focusing on subjects ranging from the U.S. criminal justice system to the Egyptian Revolution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mobolaji Olambiwonnu — Fellow
Mobolaji completed his B.A. at UCLA and his MFA in directing at AFI. Mobolaji is the winner of the Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award for his feature documentary Ferguson Rises, which also qualified for the 2022 Academy Awards. Olambiwonnu’s goal is to use cinema as a tool to share diverse cultural and political experiences, critique the superficial conditions that divide us, and accentuate the merits of shedding our prejudices.
Smriti Mundhra — Mentor
Smriti Mundhra is an Academy Award- and two-time Emmy-nominated director/producer and one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 Filmmakers to Watch. Recently, she won a DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Children’s Programs for her work on Through Our Eyes with HBO Max and Sesame Workshop. She is also the creator and executive producer of the Primetime Emmy-nominated series Indian Matchmaking, an eight-part Netflix original documentary series.
