Director Paris Barclay was elected President of the Directors Guild of America by acclamation at the Guild’s National Biennial Convention held over the weekend at DGA National Headquarters in Los Angeles.

“I am profoundly honored to be elected President of the DGA,” said Barclay to the assembled delegates after the vote. “The DGA has worked for more than three-quarters of a century to advance the creative and economic rights of directors and their teams and I look forward to continuing this strong tradition of service. As the son of a glass blower and a tile maker from Chicago, I am extremely humbled to have the honor to serve in the footsteps of the legendary leaders of the DGA like Frank Capra, Robert Wise and Gil Cates.”

Barclay has a deep history of service to the Guild, having most recently served four terms on the National Board as First Vice-President, beginning in 2005 and as Third Vice-President from 1999 to 2005. Barclay joined the Guild in 1992 and began his service as a member of the African American Steering Committee in 1993. He joined the Western Directors Council in 1997 as an alternate and was elected a full Council member in 1999 and has served on the Council for 16 years. In 2007, the Guild honored Barclay with the Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award for extraordinary service to the DGA and its membership.

Barclay has directed over 130 episodes of television during his directing career, including: Sons of Anarchy, Glee, Smash, House, Cold Case, NCIS: Los Angeles, In Treatment, The Good Wife, CSI, Lost, The Shield, The West Wing, ER and NYPD Blue. In addition to episodic directing, Barclay has been an active director-producer, currently serving in that role in Sons of Anarchy and previously for In Treatment, Cold Case, City of Angels and NYPD Blue.  

Barclay has received 10 DGA Award nominations for Outstanding Direction in Comedy and Drama Television. He became the first Director in the history of the Guild to receive a comedy and a drama nomination in the same year, two years in a row (2008 In Treatment & Weeds and 2009 In Treatment & Glee). He won the 1998 DGA Dramatic Series Award for his NYPD Blue episode “Heart and Souls” featuring the death of Jimmy Smits’ character Bobby Simone. He has also won two Emmy Awards for his direction of NYPD Blue and received four additional Emmy nominations for producing and directing. Barclay has also received three NAACP Image Awards, four Peabody Awards, two Humanitas Prizes, and countless other recognitions. He also directed the HBO movie for television The Cherokee Kid and the Miramax feature Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. He began his career in advertising working as a creative executive and then segued into directing commercials and music videos for artists including: Janet Jackson, Bob Dylan, and LL Cool J.

Barclay, a graduate of Harvard College, is married to his husband, Christopher Barclay, and has two sons.

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11 artists and filmmakers have been selected for the 2013 Sundance Institute | Time Warner Foundation Fellowship Program. The Fellowship program promotes cultural, socio-economic and gender diversity as well as artistic collaboration and innovation among emerging film and theatre storytellers, documentary filmmakers and film composers.  Each Fellow was identified by one of the following core programs of the Institute: Documentary Film Program, Feature Film Program, Film Music Program, Native American & Indigenous Film Program and Theatre Program.  Time Warner Foundation has supported the Institute since 2007, enabling direct support of 37 film and theatre artists, including Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station), Aurora Guerrero (Mosquita y Mari) and Annie Baker (Circle Mirror Transformation).

The 2013 Sundance Institute | Time Warner Foundation Fellows are:

Johnny 
Symons and S. Leo Chiang, Out Run (Documentary Film Program and Fund)— A transgender pioneer fights hostility and discrimination as she campaigns for Congress in the Philippines, illuminating the challenges facing openly LGBT politicians emerging in traditional parts of the world.

Johnny Symons (Co-Director) is an Emmy‐nominated documentary filmmaker based in San Francisco. Creating films since 1991, Johnny’s work primarily focuses on LGBT culture and politics. His film Daddy & Papa, about the personal, cultural and political impact of gay men raising kids, premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

S. Leo Chiang (Co-Director) is a Taiwan-born, San Francisco-based filmmaker. His current documentary Mr. Cao Goes to Washington, won the Inspiration Award at the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. His other films include: A Village Called Versailles, To You Sweetheart, Aloha, One + One and Safe Journey.

Chinaka Hodge, 700th & International (Feature Film Program) — A trash-talking hood track phenomenon named Tuka dies by an unexpected bullet; she awakes to find herself in a corrupt version of heaven where everyone has a job – namely, to decide the exact moment of death for someone still living on earth.

Chinaka Hodge is a poet, educator and playwright from Oakland, California. She received her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School and her MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. After nearly a decade of performing her own words around the globe and on two seasons of Def Poetry, she made the transition to the screen and received her first credit for Brave New Voices on HBO.

Yotam Silberstein (Film Music Program) — Since landing in New York, internationally-acclaimed guitarist Yotam has earned a well deserved spot among the Jazz elite by collaborating with legendary musicians such as James Moody, The Heath Brothers, Paquito D’Rivera, and the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars. Yotam’s mastery of the guitar is featured on an array of hit albums, ranging from his recent releases Resonance and Brasil on the Jazz Legacy Productions label, to Monty Alexander’s Grammy-nominated Harlem-Kingston Express Live! The Sundance Institute | Time Warner Foundation Fellowship included support for Yotam to procure recording equipment needed to build a small home studio and usable recording rig at his residence in Brooklyn.

Brooke Swaney, Circle (Native American & Indigenous Film Program) — Auralee, trapped in a dead-end job and a dead-end relationship, searches for her native roots while coping with a sudden onset of baby-mania. Frankie, a teenage Haida girl in Montana, acquaints herself with her new foster family while combating the after effects of abuse. Auralee wants a kid, Frankie wants love, and only one knows it is each other.

Brooke Swaney (Blackfeet & Salish) received her MFA in Film and Television from NYU’s Tisch School of Arts. Her first film, The Indigenoid, was nominated for Best Live Short at the 2005 American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco. In 2011, Ok Breathe Auralee premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate (Theatre Program) — The Lafayette family patriarch (and compulsive hoarder) is long dead, and it’s time to deal with the deserted and heavily mortgaged Arkansan homestead. When his adult children descend upon the former plantation to liquidate the estate, a gruesome discovery among his many belongings become just the first in a serious of treacherous surprises. A play about family secrets, memory loss and the art of repression.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright. He is Usual Suspect and a former New York Theatre Workshop Playwriting fellow, an alum of the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab, Public Theater Emerging Writers Group and Ars Nova Playgroup. His honors include a Princess Grace Award, the Dorothy Strelsin Playwriting Fellowship, the Paula Vogel Award, and a fellowship in playwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is the recipient of the first-ever Sundance Institute Tennessee Williams Award.

Tanya Saracho, Song for the Disappeared (Theatre Program) — This new drama tells the story of a fractured family that comes together when the youngest son mysteriously disappears—presumably at the hands of the narcos that dominate the U.S./Mexico border. When their carefree (and sometimes careless) younger brother Javi disappears, the family is forced into their first reunion since their mother’s funeral as they search of the brother that no one—not the headstrong daughter nor the larger-than-life father—knows how to find.

Tanya Saracho was born in Sinaloa, México. She’s a playwright, director and actor as well as a writer for the upcoming Lifetime series Devious Maids and for the untitled Michael Lannan project for HBO. Named “Best New Playwright of 2010” by Chicago Magazine, Saracho is a new ensemble member at Victory Gardens Theater, a resident playwright emerita at Chicago Dramatists and a Goodman Theatre Fellow. Song For The Disappearedis a Goodman commission.

The Sundance Institute | Time Warner Foundation Native Producing Fellows are:

Ross Chaney, I am Thy Weapon — Written by Razelle Benally, I am Thy Weapon is the hard-edged fictional account about a dispirited 17-year-old young woman and her precocious eight-year-old sister as they search for light in the heavy shadows of life cast by poverty and apathy on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona.

Ross Chaney (Osage & Cherokee Nations) is a multi-media artist who works in video, installation, painting, drawing and digital imagery. He has served as Executive Vice President of the Otoe-Missouria Tribal Economic Development Holding Company and as the COO and CFO of the Indian Affairs Cabinet of the State of New Mexico.

Jonny Cournoyer, Across the Creek — A contemporary vision of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian Reservations in South Dakota.

Jonny Cournoyer (Rosebud Sioux) is a multi-disciplinary artist with a primary focus on filmmaking. He is currently in post-production on his debut documentary, Across the Creek, funded by VisionMaker Media. He is based in Los Angeles, California.

Kasmira Kipp, Alaska is a Drag — Leo, a charismatic 17-year-old gay boy, lives in blue-collar Alaska while working at a fish cannery. His two options for getting out of Anchorage are to train to become a professional boxer or train to become a fabulous drag queen. His worlds collide when he is forced to scale fish, box in the ring, and perform on stage, all in one day. Written by Shaz Bennett.

Kasmira Kipp (Nez Perce & Umatilla Tribes) has produced award-winning short films and also produced multimedia content featured on Comedy Central’s atom.com, IFC and the Sundance Channel. Kaz is a board member to Longhouse Media, an indigenous media arts organization that nurtures the expression and development of Native artists.

Blackhorse Lowe, Walk in Beauty — This animated film set in the 1600s follows twin Navajo girls, Morning Star and Evening Star, who come across a dead Spaniard’s body and find the skin so beautiful they are inspired to find a way to turn white.

Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo) is known for narrative films set on the Navajo reservation that explore the pull between Navajo tradition and contemporary non-Navajo ways. In 2007 Lowe received a New Visions/New Mexico Contract Award to direct Shimásání. His first feature film, 5th World, premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. 

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22 Fellows representing nine documentary film projects have been selected to participate in the Sundance Institute 2013 Documentary Edit and Story Labs, June 21-29 and July 5-13 at Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah.

Built upon the immersive Lab model launched in 1981 by Sundance Institute President & Founder Robert Redford, each session of the Documentary Edit and Story Labs brings together director and editor teams with world-renowned documentary filmmakers and Sundance Institute staff to support creative risk-taking around issues of story, dramatic structure and character development.

JUNE 21-29 DOCUMENTARY EDIT AND STORY LAB

A BLIND EYE (U.S.)
Director: Kirsten Johnson
Editor: Amanda Laws
The voice of an American camerawoman explores the nature of cinematography and what she has failed to see while filming in Afghanistan through her encounters with two Afghan teenagers. Najeeb, a one-eyed boy, struggles to hide what really haunts him, while a bold teenage girl must decide how much she will risk to be visible. A U.S. Military surveillance blimp in the sky over Kabul tracks their every move.

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM (U.S.)
Co-directors and Editor: Ed Pincus, Lucia Small
Producer: Mary Kerr
Two filmmakers of different generations turn the camera on each other to explore friendship, legacy, loss and living with terminal illness. Told from two points of view, Elephant in the Room offers a unique, raw, personal glimpse into a creative partnership and the difficulty of capturing the preciousness of life.

THE LAST HIJACK (U.S., Netherlands)
Co-directors: Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting
Editor: Edgar Burcksen
Mohamed, an experienced Somali pirate, assembles his team to conduct his final hijacking. Increasing pressure from his family and future wife to quit an increasingly dangerous profession provide the backdrop for this dramatic tale about survival in a failed state.

STREET FIGHTING MAN (U.S.)
Director: Andrew James
Editor: Jason Tippet
In a new America where the promise of education, safety and shelter are in jeopardy, three Detroit men fight to build something lasting for themselves and future generations.

TOTONEL (Romania)
Director: Alexander Nanau
Editor: Mirceau Olteanu
What happens when we discover that we can get more from life than our parents have to offer?

JULY 5-13 DOCUMENTARY EDIT AND STORY LAB

AN AFRICAN SPRING (U.S.)
Director: Elizabeth ‘Chai’ Vasarhelyi
Editor: Jay Freund
In the Spring of 2011, Senegal was pitched into crisis when President Abdoulaye Wade decided to change the constitution to allow for a third term. An artist-led youth movement erupted to protect one of Africa’s oldest and most stable democracies.

THE HOMESTRETCH (U.S.)
Co-Directors: Anne de Mare, Kirsten Kelly
Editor: Leslie Simmer
Four homeless teenagers brave Chicago winters, the pressures of high school, and life alone on the streets to build a brighter future. Against all odds, these kids defy stereotypes as they learn to reach out for help and create new, surprising definitions of home.

RICH HILL (U.S.)
Co-directors: Tracy Draz Tragos, Andrew Droz Palermo
Editor: Jim Hession
Rich Hill chronicles the turbulent lives of three boys living in a dying Midwestern town, witnessing their struggles up close as they fight to have self-worth, a sense of belonging and a family bond. Despite deep need, these boys still have hope. There is still the dream of transformation: that cycles of poverty can be broken, that love will sustain, that hard work will be rewarded, and that even they can live the American dream.

STRONG ISLAND (U.S.)
Director: Yance Ford
Editor: Shannon Kennedy
Haunted by the violent death for over 20 years, Strong Island is the director’s meditation on loss, the impact of grief over time and the illusive meaning of “justice.”

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