2016 Award Jury Members
Jury Members will select winners in each of the following categories:
• BEST SCREENDANCE SHORT OVER 10 MIN
• BEST SCREENDANCE SHORT UNDER 10 MIN
• BEST SCREENDANCE SHORT UNDER 5 MIN
• BEST DOCUMENTARY
• BEST STUDENT FILM
Ellen Bromberg
Ellen Bromberg is a choreographer, filmmaker, media designer, curator and educator. She has received numerous awards for her work including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, a Bonnie Bird American Choreographer Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the George Soros Foundation. Ellen’s screen works have been presented on public television stations, online channels, and at numerous national and international dance film festivals including Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival; Cinedans Amsterdam; VideoDanza, Buenos Aires; and Dance Camera West, Los Angeles. Recent work focuses on the integration of media in performance and she has designed video for stage and installations in her own work and in collaboration with other choreographers. A Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, and recipient of a 2012 Distinguished Innovation and Impact Award, Ellen is the founding director of the International Screendance Festival, which began in 1999. She also designed the first Graduate Certificate in Screendance.
Kat Cole and Eric Garcia
Kat Cole has had the pleasure of performing for 13th Floor Dance Theater, Amie Dowling, EmSpace Dance, and kelly kemp & company/number 9 dance. For over 5 years she served as Development Manager and later Program Manager for CounterPulse, and frequently works as a production manager and grant writer for several artists and dance companies in the Bay Area. Her work in the performing arts has led her to delve further into visual storytelling, and she is currently an MFA in Film student at California College of the Arts. Current works include a documentary short about family and acceptance as told through the partner of a transman, and an upcoming project on a foot-painting artist born with quad phocomelia. She has been a guest speaker at the University of San Francisco and Eventbrite, and her article about grassroots self-production was published in In Dance.
Eric Garcia is a choreographer, performer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist with deep roots in the Bay Area. Inspired by personal narrative and storytelling, Eric has collaboratively worked with groups of incarcerated men, senior adults, and self-identified non-dancers on various multi-media and site-specific projects. He proudly serves as Production Coordinator with Fresh Meat Productions, Sean Dorsey Dance, and the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. He has previously served as a Development Associate for Quinn Associates, and has held administrative/production positions for artists and organizations such as Dancers’ Group, Mica Sigourney/OX, Z Space, and CounterPULSE. Eric also co-hosts DRAG SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR, a sporadic cabaret of drag curiosities at The Rite Spot in San Francisco. Eric has performed works by Katie Faulkner, Sean Dorsey, Amie Dowling, Lisa Townsend Company, 13th Floor Dance Theater, Sharp & Fine, FACT/SF, The Anata Project, LEVYdance, Project Thrust, and many others. Together, Kat and Eric are Co-Artistic Directors of detour dance and the Tiny Dance Film Festival. www.detourdance.com
Kate Duhamel
Kate Duhamel has been writing, directing and producing independent films for 20 years. She has focused her work on dance and movement in recent years. Her short dance films have shown in film festivals around the world, won accolades, and been licensed for broadcast and commercial use. Recently, Kate was Video Designer for “Swimmer,” a stage ballet by Yuri Possokhov that premiered at San Francisco Ballet in 2015 to rave reviews. Kate’s previous film work includes writing and directing a feature and three short narrative films that showed in film festivals, and directing short documentary films for humanitarian organizations. Kate serves on several boards including SFJazz, San Francisco Ballet and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Kate previously chaired the US Board of Right To Play, an international humanitarian organization working in the field of sport for development, and the Far West Freestyle Ski Division. Kate attended Stanford University and Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Chris Metzler
USC business and cinema graduate Chris Metzler’s film career has taken him from the depths of agency work to coordinating post-production for awful American movies seen late at night in Belgium. His filmmaking work has resulted in him criss-crossing the country with the aid of caffeinated beverages, all the while making his way in the Nashville country and Christian music video industries, before finally forsaking his soul to commercial LA rock n’ roll. These misadventures culminated in him winning a Billboard Magazine Music Video Award. He eventually fled to San Francisco to join the independent documentary film scene and start work on his feature length directorial debut – the offbeat environmental documentary PLAGUES & PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA, which was narrated by legendary counterculture filmmaker and “King of Trash” John Waters. The film went on to win over 37 awards for Best Documentary and was named by Booklist as one its Top 10 Environmental Films. A cult favorite, the film was released theatrically in the United States and broadcast nationally on the Sundance Channel. With the success of that feature documentary, he has gone on to pursue other sub-cultural documentary subjects, including rogue economists, lucha libre wrestlers, swamp rat hunters, ganjapreneurs, and evangelical Christian surfers. Metzler’s most recent longform work is Tilapia Film’s Emmy-nominated documentary, EVERYDAY SUNSHINE: THE STORY OF FISHBONE (www.tilapiafilm.com), which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, screened at SXSW, and aired nationally on PBS and Starz. He is also the Associate Director of Programming for SF DocFest.
