2020 Award Jury Members

Jen Alvares

Jen Alvares is a Film & TV producer based in Los Angeles, California. She’s been working in the advertising and film industry for over 13 years now, developing and producing multimillion-dollar content for global brands and clients, including commercials, films, and TV series. Jen is a Partner & an Executive Producer at Hunters House Entertainment Group, a Co-Founder & President of iFilm Festival, a Board Member and an Advisor to a number of companies, including GLG, Guidepoint and Alphasights. She is a seasoned professional in the film & advertising industry that advises and speaks on all matters within the scope of video production, entertainment, media, marketing, advertising and business strategy. Jen’s clients include Amazon, Investigation Discovery, Coca-Cola, Samsung, L’Oréal, Nestle, Nissan, and General Motors, just to name a few. She has managed multinational advertising agencies such as McCann, TBWA, BBDO, DDB, JWT, Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, and others.

Claudia Bauer

Claudia Bauer is a journalist, critic, dancer and historian, and a lifelong devotee of film, music, poetry and the performing and visual arts. She is a contributing writer at Dance Magazine and writes frequently for Pointe Magazine, DanceTabs.com and San Francisco Classical Voice. For seven years she covered dance, theater and musical theater for the San Francisco Chronicle, and her writing has appeared in the East Bay Express, Diablo Magazine, SF/Arts Monthly, Dance Teacher Magazine and the San Jose Mercury News. After earning a degree in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, Claudia worked in production and production design on feature films, then served as the assistant to an agent representing film composers at Creative Artists Agency. Fascinated by ballet history and the social history of art, Claudia studies 19th-century technique under the mentorship of Romantic-ballet scholar Sandra Noll Hammond and teaches master classes in the technique and artistry of 19th-century ballet.

Robert Moses

Since founding Robert Moses’ Kin in 1995, the artist Robert Moses has created numerous works of varying styles and genres for his highly praised dance company. His work explores topics ranging from oral traditions in African American culture to the nuanced complexities of parentage and identity and the simple joys of the expressive power of pure movement. In addition to his work with Robert Moses’ Kin, Moses has choreographed for Alvin Ailey American Dance, The San Francisco Opera, and Ailey 2 and other esteemed dance companies.He has choreographed for the SFFF, The Lorraine Hansberry Theater, New Conservatory Theater, Los Angeles Prime Moves Festival (L.A.C.E.), and Olympic Arts Festival.

RMK has earned eight Isadora Duncan awards for work supported by  funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, and San Francisco Foundation, and among others and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Bonnie Bird North American Choreography Award, the SF Weekly Black Box Award for Choreography, and the SF Bay Guardian Goldie Award. RMK performs at venues such as the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Fall for Dance/City Center, Bates Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival and Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. The company performs its two annual home seasons in San Francisco. 

KIMBERLY MARIE OLIVIER headshot, 2020 SFDFF Award Jury

Kimberly Marie Olivier

Born in New York, New York, Kimberly Marie Olivier has been a Corps de Ballet dancer with the San Francisco Ballet since 2010 after being named an apprentice in 2009 (formerly as Ms. Braylock). Nominated “Excellence in Individual Performance” for the 2018-2019 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards in Tomasson’s The Fifth Season, Kimberly continues to develop her artistry within a numerous amount of featured and soloist roles. Her SFB repertoire includes, yet not limited to: “Hippolyta” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “2nd Theme” in The Four Temperaments (Balanchine), “Swan Maidens” and “Spanish Princess” in Tomasson’s Swan Lake, Ashton’s Symphonic Variations, and “Lady of the Sea” in Caniparoli’s Ibsen’s House.

Kimberly has taught ballet for a variety of organizations such as San Francisco Ballet School. Her students have ranged in both age and level teaching whether locally or nationally. Her particular passion for teaching is in mentoring and coaching. Recently, she has expanded to teaching virtually and also educating the public through her social platforms about nutrition, injury prevention, and mental health. Kimberly is developing choreographic skills through her own ballet improvisations that embrace different music genres, whether pop to hip-hop or African to classical.

Johnny Symons Headshot, SFDFF 2020 Award Jury

Johnny Symons

Johnny Symons is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker with 25 years experience creating award-winning LGBT documentaries. His film Daddy & Papa (2002) was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, aired on PBS’ Independent Lens and garnered 12 festival awards. His other feature documentaries include Out Run (2016, Full Frame Premiere, PBS/DocWorld), Ask Not (2008, PBS/Independent Lens) and Beyond Conception (2006, Discovery Channel). He is co-producer of the Academy Award-nominated Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2000, HBO, Sundance Grand Jury Prize) and executive producer of Pray Away (2020, Tribeca Premiere). His current projects include Get Your 10s, a film about the global vogue dance scene. Symons’ work has screened in 300+ international film festivals. He has been a Fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, and received support from ITVS, IFP/HBO, Catapult, Sundance, and Tribeca. Symons graduated with honors from Brown University and has a master’s in documentary production from Stanford. He is an Associate Professor in documentary at San Francisco State University.

Categories​

Jury members will select winners in each of the following categories:

Best Documentary Film – $1,000

Best Screendance Film
• Under 10 minutes – $500
• 10 minutes and over  – $500

Best Student Film – $500

Best Art/Experimental  – $500

Best Music Video – $500