Creative Fellowship

Scott W. Kekama Amona, homegrown on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, is a former educator turned award-winning Kanaka Maoli director, producer, and screenwriter. Native Hawaiian perspectives and values of aloha (unconditional compassion), moʻokūʻauhau (genealogical connectivity as the past before us), makawalu (eight-eye mindset), and aloha ʻāina (love for and connection to the land) are guiding stars for his creative works.

A previous fellow of the Sundance Native Shorts Lab, Good Pitch Hawaiʻi, and inaugural IllumiNative Producers Program in partnership with Netflix, Kekama was also one of eight Native Hawaiian writer-directors selected for the inaugural Makawalu feature film project with Hawaiʻi International Film Festival (HIFF) in collaboration with producers Sarah Kim and Brown Sugar Apple Grunt (BSAG) Productions to create a narrative portmanteau film around tourism’s impact on Hawaiian identity. Kekama previously produced Justyn Ah Chong’s award-winning short Down on the Sidewalk in Waikīkī and is an associate producer on Alika Tengan’s upcoming feature Molokaʻi Bound. His short E Mālama Pono, Willy Boy premiered at the 2022 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, winning the audience award at the 2022 Hawaiʻi International Film Festival and the 2023 Māoriland Film Festival, and is in script development for Kekama’s first feature-length narrative titled Keke.

Tsanavi Spoonhunter is a reporter and nonfiction filmmaker. Spoonhunter was born and raised by her Paiute peoples in Central California, but is also a proud citizen of the Northern Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Her ancestry and upbringing in Indian Country have strongly informed her storytelling and artistic vision. Spoonhunter earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno; and an M.J. from the University of California, Berkeley with a documentary film concentration. Since then, her short films have screened on Alaska Airlines, at the National Museum of the American Indian, The Redford Center, art museums and PBS affiliates.

Presently, she serves as director and producer on her first feature-length documentary titled Holder of the Sky (2025). In 2023, Spoonhunter became a Firelight Media Documentary Lab fellow and a Woodstock Film Festival resident. As a Northern Arapaho and Paiute reporter and filmmaker, she understands the impact that the media industry can have on individuals and communities. With that in mind, her goal is to pursue the highest levels of accuracy and ethical standards when crafting stories that contribute to solution-based coverage.

Christen strives to create films that spark empathy for and empowerment in underrepresented communities. With her films, Christen does not aim to create a window for her viewers to gaze through, but she wants her viewers to be moved to action.

She was a Producer on the fourth season of the CNN series United Shades of America, which won the 2019 Emmy for Unstructured Reality Program, and was a part of the Producing team for Belly of the Beast, a documentary feature film about modern day coerced sterilization taking place California womenʼs prisons, which premiered on the documentary series Independent Lens on PBS and won the 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary. Her Directorial debut documentary film, E Haku Inoa: To Weave A Name, was completed in partnership with PBS Hawai`i, ITVS, and Pacific Islanders in Communications.

She has worked over 10 years as a Director and Producer for broadcasters including Discovery, Nat Geo, PBS, Oxygen, CNN, NBC Universal, and Netflix. She has been awarded the “Through the Soul of an Artist'' grant for Artistic Innovation by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and participated in CPB/PBS Producer's Academy. In 2018 she was awarded a Big Sky Native Film Fellowship and included in the 4th World Media Lab to workshop and develop her current documentary project tentatively titled Lucky We Live Hawaii.

Zack Khalil is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work centers Indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—using innovative nonfiction forms.

His debut feature film INAATE/SE/ (2016), co-directed by his brother Adam Khalil, premiered as the closing night film of the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight film festival, and won the Best Director award at the Tulsa American Film Festival. Their follow up short film, The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets, originally commissioned for the Contour Biennial, screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and is a Vimeo Staff Pick. Khalil is also a core contributor to New Red Order, a public-secret society which calls attraction toward Indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co- examination and expansion of Indigenous agency.

His work has been exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Walker Arts Center, Artists Space, Toronto Biennial 2019, and Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including but not limited to: the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Grant, and Gates Millennium Scholarship.

Yolanda Cruz (Chatino) from Mexico – Yolanda is the Director, Writer, and Producer of El Camino de Esperanza (Hope’s Journey), an experimental narrative that shifts the emotional perspective of both the viewer and the viewed by its attention to an epic landscape, traditions of the faithful, and the intimacy of fear.

(Ngāti Māoate, Ngāti Tamarua o Takitumu, Ngāti Paerangi o Ngamaru) from the Cook Islands – Sharlene is the producer of Billy & the Kids, a documentary, turned narrative feature length film about Billy, a kid who grew up rough but was saved by his boxing coach Dick Dunn. Now his five gym academies are saving kids just like him.