NuWave

A child grave cleaner turned writer/director/producer, Alyssa Katalyna has haunted the streets of Los Angeles since her graduation from the USC’s School of Cinematic Arts with a MFA in Film & Television Production. A lover of mythology, maternal horror, and haunting nature, Alyssa is most at peace with a genre script in hand. In 2024, Alyssa was a Season Three Starz Writers’ Intensive Fellow and a Tomorrow’s Filmmakers Today Fellow at the Hola Mexico Film Festival. In 2025, her scripts received finalist placements from the Humanitas Awards and Sundance Cultural Impact Residency. As a director, her podcast Jack and Lou: A Gangster Love Story, starring Lisa Kudrow, won Best Audio Fiction Series and Best Ensemble at the 2022 Indie Series Awards.  Alyssa was also a 2022 NALIP Emerging Content Creator and multiyear National Hispanic Foundation of the Arts Scholar. The projects she has produced have been the recipients of multiple grants and accolades including the Rideback Rise Fellowship, winner of the American Pavilion's Best Emerging Filmmaker Documentary at Cannes 2024, Jury Award at the 28th DGA Student Film Awards, Epic Unreal Mega Grant, and several more. When she isn't directing, writing, or producing, Alyssa can be found exploring the wilderness, rock climbing, or catching up on the latest horror series.

Asha Dahya is an Emmy-nominated Producer, writer, TEDx speaker and storyteller. She is the director and producer of an award-winning short documentary about later abortion called SOMEONE YOU KNOW. She created, Executive Produced and co-hosted an audio and video series about Latin America’s Green Wave abortion rights movement called GREEN TIDE RISING, which was nominated for a Webby Award in the U.S., and a One World Media award in the UK, both in 2025. In 2024, Asha was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work producing the short film MY NAME IS SIRI, an autism awareness documentary that premiered on PBS. She is directing and producing a new short documentary about Meg Crane - the woman who invented the home pregnancy test, titled A TINY REVOLUTION, to be released in 2026.

Ava Davis is a Sundance Fellow ('21, Trans Possibilities Intensive) and is also known as the Duchess of Grant Park. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her partner, and has appeared on stage in New York City (Pride50) and Atlanta (Alice in Wonderland, Peril, The Odd Couple). She has also appeared in films (Give Me an A, Could This Have Been An Email, The Duchess of Grant Park). She is also an advocate for increasing trans and queer representation, especially that of black and other minorities. She founded her production company, Studio Vosges, in 2019 with the expressed purpose of telling the stories of queer and trans (GSM) black, brown, and beige people. She hosts the talk show, The Ava Davis Show, on you42.com. She has acted in, written, and produced several short films, including Feast, The Decision, and the upcoming experimental horror short, Torn Together. She also created, produced, and acted in the short film The Duchess of Grant Park, about a trans woman who claims the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta as her duchy. With her production company, Davis recently signed a deal for this short film to screen and stream on Atlanta's PBS affiliate WABE for the next two years. She is currently working to produce and secure financing for her first feature film, The Waltz, about a single young trans woman who teams up with a reluctant dance partner to pursue her dream of learning the waltz.

Born and raised in a humble town within the terrains of Latin America, Berenice Molina is a filmmaker, actor, writer, and active advocate for authentic representation of POC stories within the film industry. Known for her role in 4TH WAVE FEM, and the upcoming series VASTLAND SAGA.

Brit Fryer is an artist and filmmaker from Chicago's South Side, currently based in Brooklyn, NY, whose unique approach to nonfiction storytelling centers on gender and queerness through process-forward and collaborative methods. His most recent film, THE SCRIPT, co-directed with Noah Schamus, unpacks the boundaries of language and the role of performance in shaping an expansive and gender-expansive healthcare system. The film was shortlisted for the 2023 IDA Awards and won the Creative Activism Award at the 2024 SIMA Awards. It is distributed on The Criterion Channel and The New Yorker.He is also the director of CARO COMES OUT, which premiered on HBO Max after winning the Knight Made in MIA Award at the Miami International Film Festival. His other films include ACROSS, BEYOND AND OVER and TRANS·IENCE.His films have been screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including Blackstar, CPH: DOX, Newfest, and MIX NYC. He has received generous support from Sundance, the Gotham, and Points North.

Dani Hanks (they/she) is a disabled writer/director based in NYC. After winning the 2024 Austin Film Festival, they were named one of ISA’s Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch in 2025.Dani grew up elbow-deep in human organs at their mom’s pathology lab in Porterville, California. A direct result of inhaling too much formaldehyde in their formative years, they dove headfirst into the entertainment industry and received a BFA in Drama at NYU Tisch. Shortly afterwards, they directed the Banff-nominated comedy web series “Fake News Writer,” which was optioned after winning the Webby Award for Video Entertainment in 2019.Drawing from their experience as the only purple-haired snowflake in a deeply conservative family, they promote empathy for underrepresented identities through offbeat stories centered around diverse found families. Dani approaches the taboo with both levity and nuance and loves finding humor in the mundane.Dani has worked on projects in development at FilmRise, RKO, and Josephson Entertainment, and is a fellow of Stowe, Disability Belongs, and the WGAE SSTP. They are a full-time meme connoisseur, part-time AD, former member of Mensa, and have 10 years of experience cutting animal tissue for medical research (much to the dismay of their pet rats).

Elif Koyutürk Hazen is a documentary director and cinematographer working in hybrid nonfiction. She began her career as a camera operator filming extreme sports and adventure stories around the world, a background that shaped a visual style grounded in presence, physicality, and intimacy with place.She is the director and cinematographer of Guardians of Anatolia, a 20-minute documentary short following the last nomadic Yörük communities of Türkiye, selected for the Mountainfilm Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship. She is currently developing Story of the Lost Goddess, an episodic documentary series examining goddess traditions across Anatolia, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, and is in post-production on Shaereh, a 6-minute art film centered on Iranian women’s expressions of freedom through Sama-inspired movement.In parallel with her film work, she was selected as an artist for Cambridge University’s Sci-Art program and has exhibited work internationally in museum and gallery contexts as both a visual artist and photographer. Her practice is research-driven, visually grounded, and internationally focused.

Gulet Isse is a trans feminine, Somali American filmmaker and actor straight out of NOLA, baby! Their work as a performer has earned them roles on-screen in productions such as LITTLE AMERICA (2022) and CANDIS CAYNE’S SECRET GARDEN (2023), as well as developmental fellowships from The Sundance Institute, Center for Cultural Power, and Transgender Film Center. In conjunction with their work in film, Isse founded BXD Collective—a medium-agnostic community platform through which they have curated annual summer exhibitions and raised over $25,000 to develop the work of 50+ underrepresented artists to date.

Hyten Davidson is a writer, producer, director, and SAG actor based in NYC. Her short, “The West Virginian Starfish,” which she wrote and co-directed, won the Long Island Film Expo award for Best Short Film, in addition to a host of other screenwriting wins and nominations over the years. Featured Female Filmmaker nominee at the Shortcut 100 International Film Festival. Her psychological thriller feature "Something of a Monster", which she wrote with Christian Missonak, was recently released on all VOD platforms.

Jessica Redish is an award-winning director, writer & choreographer and a recent graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts’ MFA Film & Television Production Program. She has been referred to as a “rising star” by Medium.com because of her accomplishments with her award-winning short films and music videos. Her body of work ranges from contributing choreography to The Smashing Pumpkins' International Tour to her short films “The Last Croissant,” “AIRWAY” and “cat.” winning Best Director and Best Comedy awards. She also has worked as a comedy writer for Emmy & Golden Globe Winner Joey Soloway, as well as Michael Bay & Adam Goodman’s Invisible Narratives. Her two most recent award-winning short films “Exit, Pursued by a Bear,” and “cat.” have distribution both internationally and domestically. She was honored to have both films individually win Audience Choice Awards, Best Comedy and receive placement in the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts and Raindance Film Festivals. Jessica is currently working on four full-length film and television projects in development at various stages and loves working with and featuring strong voices from marginalized communities. Jessica attributes her ability to work with actors and capture great performances because of her theatre work for which The Chicago Tribune named her production of “Merrily We Roll Along” as one of the top ten Sondheim productions in Chicago, putting her on a shortlist with Hal Prince. She is also the winner of the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Choreography for “Silence! The Musical!” a musical parody of “The Silence of the Lambs.” Inspired by the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, her detailed and honest work has been described has "Hilariously twisted" by the Hollywood Digest. Jessica resides in California where she tends to her “Golden Girls” Chia Pet.

Kyle Casey Chu (AKA Panda Dulce) is a Filmmaker, Author and a founding queen of Drag Story Hour. She is currently a 2024-2025 FilmHouse Resident at SFFILM.In 2022, far-right extremists stormed her reading in San Lorenzo, making global headlines. Based on the incident, her short screenplay, "After What Happened at the Library" won WeScreenplay, Titan Awards and SF Indie's Short Screenplay Competitions. With support from Sundance, SFFILM, Talon Entertainment, the SF Arts Commission and Skywalker Sound, the screenplay was produced and will premiere at Florida Film Festival and SF International Film Festival in April 2025.  This short is a proof-of-concept for her debut narrative feature film. The script is in an advanced draft and was workshopped at Sundance’s Trans Possibilities Intensive, Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat and Film Fatales. Kyle's debut novel, "The Queen Bees of Tybee County" (HarperCollins, 2025), was recently optioned by Lambur Productions into a UK TV show.

Lauren Melinda is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and founder of SIMBELLE PRODUCTIONS. Her work explores issues of feminine identity and perception, while critiquing the forces of culture and circumstance that mold the roles assigned to women.As a mixed-media artist, Lauren’s video installations have been commissioned by galleries, museums, and private collectors in North America and the Middle East, while her photographs have been sold to major collections around the world.As a filmmaker, Lauren has written and directed three short films that have screened in 52 festivals on nearly every continent – garnering the top prize at six of them. Her most recent narrative film, Before You, is playing the festival circuit and is in collaboration with Planned Parenthood. She is now developing her first narrative feature, ECHOES, in which an Iranian-American artist is offered a career-making show at a prestigious Berlin gallery, only to discover the price of success is the erasure of her identity, as well as a TV series based on her Ukrainian great-grandmother, who served as the midwife to the Shah of Iran.As a mother of two young girls, Lauren’s passion for women’s issues only continues to grow in depth and perspective. Inspired by her daughters, Lauren launched SIMBELLE PRODUCTIONS in 2024, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women through film. The organization fosters female-centric stories that promote mutual validation, awareness, and hope. Lauren received a dual Bachelor’s degrees in Fine Arts and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine. She is based in Los Angeles.