Filmmakers Alina Simone and Marlén Viñayo Awarded 2025 Academy Gold Fellowship for Women

Filmmakers Alina Simone and Marlén Viñayo have been selected as the recipients of the 2025 Academy Gold Fellowship for Women.

The Gold Fellowship for Women is a one-year program that combines support, personalized mentorship and access to once-in-a-lifetime networking opportunities for emerging women filmmakers to further their pursuits in the field of cinema. The Academy awards two fellowships annually, one to a U.S.-based filmmaker and one to a non-U.S.-based filmmaker. The fellowship is presented in partnership with CHANEL.

“Championing and inspiring new generations of global filmmakers is core to the Academy’s mission, and we’re thrilled to continue this work through the Gold Fellowship for Women. We are incredibly grateful for the generous support of our partner CHANEL, which shares our commitment to nurturing talented women filmmakers and opening doors to meaningful opportunities in the film industry,” said Kim Taylor-Coleman, Academy governor and president of the Academy Foundation Board.

Simone is a Ukrainian-born journalist and award-winning filmmaker whose work has appeared in “The New York Times,” “The Wall Street Journal,” “The Guardian,” “The Atlantic,” NPR and more. Her debut documentary Black Snow (2024) was executive produced by Erin Brockovich and premiered at CPH:DOX before going on to screen at more than 20 international film festivals. Simone has won numerous awards for her work, including the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight Award, the F:ACT Award at CPH:DOX, the Sustainable Future Award at Sydney Film Festival, and the International Green Film Award from Cinema for Peace. “Black Snow” is being distributed in the United States by PBS as part of the 2025-26 season of its “POV” series. Simone is the recipient of fellowships from NYSCA/NYFA, Film Independent and Mountainfilm and has taught the art of nonfiction writing at Yale University.

Viñayo is an award-winning documentary film director, writer and producer. Since 2013, she has been based in El Salvador, where she founded her production company, La Jaula Abierta Films. Viñayo’s feature film Cachada: The Opportunity (2019) and short film “Unforgivable” (2020) have won awards at international film festivals such as SXSW, IDFA, Hot Docs, Slamdance, Palm Springs ShortFest, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival and DocsBarcelona, and have been selected at over 150 film festivals in more than 30 countries, including Telluride Film Festival, AFI DOCS, Göteborg Film Festival, Heartland International Film Festival and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. In 2021, Viñayo won the Gabo Award and was named Ibero-American Filmmaker of the Year at POY Latam. She was nominated for an IDA Documentary Award in 2020 and an Emmy® Award in 2019.

The 2025 fellows were selected from a group of six finalists. The finalists are:

U.S.
Coleen Baik
Jasmín Mara López

Non-U.S.
Zaynê Akyol
Mor Israeli