Best Documentary Jury

  • Emett Casey

    Emett Casey is Colorado based filmmaker, working in both digital and analog traditions. His films run a spectrum from arthouse narrative to experimental abstraction.

    Concerned mostly with mythopoetics, Emett focuses on concepts of the identity and perception through myth, folklore, surrealism, magic and ritual, with a generally subtle inclusion of humor, irony and satire. His work has been shown at theaters, festivals, galleries and micro cinemas around the U.S. and abroad.

    Raised in Washington State, Emett attended Tacoma School of the Arts before pursuing a BFA in Film Production from Chapman University. Day-jobbing within Hollywood for twelve years to support his films, Emett became involved with the Echo Park Film Center as a Co-op member in 2016 until 2021, when he moved to Colorado.

    He works as a freelance Production Sound Mixer, while devoting his creative time to cinematic art works.

  • Adán De La Garza

    Adán is a professional misnomer. The correct spelling of Adán De La Garza is Adán De La Garza and the correct pronunciation of Adán is here. He has participated in exhibitions at the Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, Canada), AS220 (Providence, RI), The New School (New York, NY), The Future Gallery (Berlin, DE), The Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), Casa Maauad (Mexico City, Mexico), Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and festivals such as The Paseo (Taos, NM), PAF Festival of Film Animation (Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic), Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM), WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg, Canada), The Denver Noise Fest (Denver, CO), and The Biennial of the Americas (Denver, CO). Adán was a founding member of the Sound, Video and Performance Art collective The Flinching Eye (2011-2020), a co-conspirator of the media arts exhibition series Nothing To See Here (2013-2016), the sole member of the anonymous art project Collective Misnomer (2016 - present), smashes a lot of buttons with Dizzy Spell (2018 - present) and if you tune your radio at the right place and moment he can be heard on SQUELCH FM. Adán holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Originally from Tucson Arizona, Adán is currently based in Denver, Colorado, where he hates writing in the third person.

  • Jenna Maurice

    Jenna Maurice is an artist working in photography, video, and performance, who lives and works in Denver, CO. Her work deals with ideas concerning relationships (with herself, others, the past, and the landscape), non-verbal communication, and the language of the complicated human experience. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Material Art Fair in Mexico City, La Generale in Paris France, Satellite Art Show in Miami, Fl, LivingGallery in Lecce Italy, Festival of Moving Images in Winnipeg Canada, Satellite at SXSW in Austin, TX, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, CO. She currently teaches at Metropolitan State University in Denver.

Shorts and Emerging Artist Jury

  • Che Applewhaite

    Born 1998 in Trinidad, raised in London and studied in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I approach cultural work with internationalist and interdisciplinary commitments to politics of time, specificity, relation and cultural process. I write, curate, and make films, having been a joint major in Anthropology, and History & Literature at Harvard College, Class of 2021. My first film, A New England Document, received its world premiere in 2020 at Sheffield Doc/Fest, the UK’s leading documentary festival, and received the Jury Award for Best Emerging Artist at the Mimesis Documentary Festival. I have written for the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Advocate and the Harvard Political Review. I have worked as a student guide for the Harvard Art Museums, as a research assistant for Ja’Tovia Gary R.I. ‘19 and am a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.

  • Sean Hanley

    Sean Hanley is a New York City based director and cinematographer working primarily in documentary and artist moving image. His short films navigate the construction of Nature through studies of landscape, place-making, and the experience of the non-human. They have screened at venues and festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival, FLEXfest, Antimatter, the Aurora Picture Show, UnionDocs, the Imagine Science Film Festival, and the Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema.

    As a cinematographer, he has lensed three feature-length projects for filmmaker Lynne Sachs starting with Lynne Sachs Your Day is My Night (2013, MoMA Documentary Fortnight), Tip of My Tongue (2015, Closing Night of MoMA Documentary Fortnight), and most recently The Washing Society (2018, BAMCinemaFest). His cinematography has screened at the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Brandywine River Museum, Anthology Film Archives, and online for SFMOMA, the New Museum, and Art21.

    From 2012-2015 he was the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware, a non-profit cinema arts organization hosting analog filmmaking workshops and an annual exhibition of expanded cinema. He is a proud member of the Meerkat Media Collective, a group of media makers practicing collaboration and consensus.
    Sean holds a BFA in Film Production from Emerson College and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from CUNY Hunter College where he teaches documentary production.

  • Tiff Rekem

    Tiff Rekem is a filmmaker from Redlands, California. Working at the intersection of documentary and fiction, the experimental and the ethnographic, she engages her closest relationships, with family and partners, in explorations of the body, diasporic identity, and the outer limits of care, often through a return of the gaze. Her most recent film Declarations of Love (2022) is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and received the Jury Award for Best Emerging Artist at the Mimesis Documentary Festival. Tiff graduated from Harvard in 2021 with a B.A. in Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Social Anthropology. She now lives and works between Cambridge, MA and Brooklyn, NY.

Documentary Arts Jury

  • Emett Casey

    Emett Casey is Colorado based filmmaker, working in both digital and analog traditions. His films run a spectrum from arthouse narrative to experimental abstraction.

    Concerned mostly with mythopoetics, Emett focuses on concepts of the identity and perception through myth, folklore, surrealism, magic and ritual, with a generally subtle inclusion of humor, irony and satire. His work has been shown at theaters, festivals, galleries and micro cinemas around the U.S. and abroad.

    Raised in Washington State, Emett attended Tacoma School of the Arts before pursuing a BFA in Film Production from Chapman University. Day-jobbing within Hollywood for twelve years to support his films, Emett became involved with the Echo Park Film Center as a Co-op member in 2016 until 2021, when he moved to Colorado.

    He works as a freelance Production Sound Mixer, while devoting his creative time to cinematic art works.

  • Pat Clark

    Pat Clark is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. He received a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Film and New Media, an MA in Television, Film and New Media from San Diego State University and an MFA with an emphasis in multimedia from San Diego State University.


    While his narrative and documentary work explores a wide range of subjects, his films often present focused views of larger events. His video installation work focuses on human memory and the manner in which we collect, recall and assign value to our memories. His video work has screened at festivals internationally. More information can be found at his website, patclarkmedia.com.

  • Adán De La Garza

    Adán is a professional misnomer. The correct spelling of Adán De La Garza is Adán De La Garza and the correct pronunciation of Adán is here. He has participated in exhibitions at the Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, Canada), AS220 (Providence, RI), The New School (New York, NY), The Future Gallery (Berlin, DE), The Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), Casa Maauad (Mexico City, Mexico), Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and festivals such as The Paseo (Taos, NM), PAF Festival of Film Animation (Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic), Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM), WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg, Canada), The Denver Noise Fest (Denver, CO), and The Biennial of the Americas (Denver, CO). Adán was a founding member of the Sound, Video and Performance Art collective The Flinching Eye (2011-2020), a co-conspirator of the media arts exhibition series Nothing To See Here (2013-2016), the sole member of the anonymous art project Collective Misnomer (2016 - present), smashes a lot of buttons with Dizzy Spell (2018 - present) and if you tune your radio at the right place and moment he can be heard on SQUELCH FM. Adán holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Originally from Tucson Arizona, Adán is currently based in Denver, Colorado, where he hates writing in the third person.