Dart Center Names 2025 Documentary Film Fellows

The Dart Center has announced the 15 recipients of its second annual fellowship for documentary filmmakers. The 2025 fellows include outstanding filmmakers from four continents.

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism announced today the recipients of its second annual Documentary Film Fellowship.

“This year’s 15 fellows immerse themselves in the most difficult human experiences, bringing audiences into intimate engagement with stories of violence, conflict and tragedy,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center. ​"Representing eight countries and four continents, they are all innovators committed to trauma-informed filmmaking.”

Through seminars with leading trauma experts and practitioners, the weeklong fellowship will equip these exceptional filmmakers with the knowledge and skills needed to work with vulnerable individuals and communities ethically and effectively, and to advance the well-being of documentary teams on these demanding yet crucial projects.

The fellowship, underwritten by the Dart Foundation and the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation, will be held February 9-15, 2025 at the Evermore Resort in Orlando, Florida.

The 2025 Dart Center Documentary Film Fellows are:

Shirley Abraham is an Indian documentary filmmaker. The Cinema Travellers, her debut film made in collaboration with Amit Madheshiya, premiered as an Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival 2016, winning 19 awards globally. Shirley and Amit have since made a trilogy of shorts: Searching for Saraswati (New York Times Op-Docs), The Hour of Lynching (Guardian Documentaries) and The Great Abandonment (Guardian Documentaries). Their films have earned numerous national and international honours, including the World Press Photo, the Human Rights Watch Award, the Rory Peck Trust Award and the President’s Medal in India. Shirley’s work is supported by the Sundance Institute, Pulitzer Center, IDFA Bertha Fund, Chicken & Egg, Field of Vision, InMaat Foundation, Lannan Foundation and Catapult Film Fund, among others. 

Kavitha Chekuru has worked as a journalist and documentary filmmaker for over a decade. With a focus on human rights, her documentaries received the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club, Edward R. Murrow Award and five News and Documentary Emmy nominations. Her reporting has spanned a range of issues, including the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, the civilian casualties in the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, multiple investigations into the killing of land rights activists across Latin America, the legacy of government boarding schools for Indigenous children in the US and family separation at the US-Mexico border. Most recently, she directed and produced The Night Won't End (Fault Lines/Al Jazeera English), a feature-length documentary investigating Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the role of the Biden administration. 

Zoe Hutton is a documentary director/producer with more than a decade of experience making award-winning, highly acclaimed documentaries for channels including the BBC, Netflix and Channel 4. Zoe began her career at the BBC’s Documentaries Department covering social issues. During this time, she developed the BAFTA-winning factual drama Murdered by My Father and produced the Grierson Award-nominated film exploring London’s housing crisis, No Place to Call Home. After working on the BAFTA-winning series of BBC’s Ambulance, she was awarded the Fulbright Award in Journalism to study documentary directing in New York. Since then, she has produced the Netflix feature documentary Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King. Most recently, she directed Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Scandal, a Netflix series exploring sex and relationships.

Brandon Kapelow is a visual storyteller from Wyoming who has worked as a director, photographer and cinematographer. As a survivor of suicide loss at an early age, Brandon is passionate about exploring topics surrounding mental health. His work has been published in the New York Times, NPR, TIME Magazine and Magnum Photos. Outside of his creative practice, Brandon is a peer-support facilitator for SOLACE and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, serving on their Ethical Reporting Advisory Committee.

Brittany Kaplan is an award-winning editor based in Brooklyn, focusing on justice-oriented documentaries. In 2016, Kaplan was a Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship finalist with the feature documentary, Beyond Borders: Undocumented Mexican Americans, which aired on PBS. Her next feature documentary, Sweetheart Deal, won Best Editing and Best Feature Documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival and Outstanding Storytelling Craft at the inaugural Slamdance Indies Awards in 2024. In 2022, Kaplan edited the finale of Jennifer Tiexiera’s documentary series Unveiled: Surviving La Luz del Mundo (HBO), which was Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Crime & Justice Documentary, as well as a Columbia duPont-Award finalist. Recent television editing credits include: The Vow Part II (HBO), Harry & Meghan (Netflix) and Unknown, The Lost Pyramid (Netflix). In 2024, she edited the feature documentary Left Behind, which premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival and Doc NYC.

Ahmad Mahmoud is a Sudanese filmmaker and documentary producer with over a decade of experience creating impactful films that explore themes of identity, displacement and resilience. Ahmad's work has been commissioned by international NGOs and recognized at film markets and festivals across Africa and the Middle East, winning awards from the Durban Film Mart and Red Sea Film Festival. Ahmad is currently developing Jango: The Migrant Soundtrack, a documentary about Sudanese migrants’ experience in Europe through the lens of hip hop culture.

Neha Tara Mehta is a documentary producer and journalist based in New Delhi. She also has photography and print experience, covering breaking news and feature stories in the Hindustan Times, Mail Today, Guardian, New York Times, Al Jazeera English, The Telegraph, Smithsonian Magazine and BillMoyers.com. Her work centers around sexual violence, terror, trauma, mental health, economic inequality, political protests, elections, and education. She started with Al Jazeera English, at its New York and UN bureau, and also worked on the flagship discussion show, Empire. Most recently, she worked on The Midwife’s Confession, a BBC film on the killing and saving of baby girls in Bihar, India. She was previously based in Doha with Al Jazeera English, where she worked with the investigative documentary strand People & Power and the environmental series Earthrise, where the episodes she worked on received several nominations and prizes at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. 

Amanda Mustard is a queer filmmaker and photojournalist raised on a Christmas tree farm in rural Pennsylvania. She began her career as a photojournalist during the Arab Spring in Egypt, and spent a decade working regularly for the New York Times and National Geographic first in the Middle East, and then in Thailand covering southeast Asia. Her journalism experiences instilled a strong commitment to ethics in her work and a drive to uphold the dignity of both her subjects and colleagues. Amanda has worked with multiple press freedom groups to advocate for freelance sustainability and mental health awareness. She recently directed her first feature documentary Great Photo, Lovely Life, which examined generational trauma in her family and is available on HBO Max.

Andrea Patiño Contreras is an Emmy-nominated video journalist from Bogotá, Colombia. She is based in Boston where she produces, shoots and edits documentaries. Most of her work revolves around questions of migration, mobility and gender and sexual violence in the U.S. and across Latin America. Her 2022 film #IamVanessaGuillen, a Livingston Award in National Reporting finalist, explores the mental health impact of survivors of military sexual violence. Her work has been recognized by the Hillman Foundation, the National Murrow Awards, the Gracie Awards, Picture of the Year International and Fundación Gabo de Periodismo, among others. She is a ceramics artist when she is not working behind the camera and the co-founder of the studio Rabbit Raccoon. As a 2024 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she studied how journalists can improve trauma-informed practices when reporting on vulnerable populations, particularly survivors of sexual violence.

Eliane Scardovelli directs and scripts documentaries at Globoplay. For ten years, she was a reporter at Profissão Repórter, a special report weekly program of TV Globo, the leading Brazilian broadcaster. She was a screenwriter for the 2020 series Marielle, The Documentary and winner of the ABRA (Brazilian Art Academy) screenplay award. Her most recent works include the series MC Daleste - Who Murdered the ‘Pobre Loco’?, Extremists.br (script), Gabriel Monteiro - Herói Fake (direction), the film Escola Base - A Reporter Faces the Past (direction), winner of the APCA (São Paulo Association of Art Critics) award and the film Sieged - The Press vs. Denialism, finalist for the International Emmy and the Hot Docs Festival in Canada. She also directed two short films: Muro (2015), finalist at the Gramado Festival, and The Life I Wish I Had (2021), finalist at It's All True at the International Documentary Film Festival.

Michelle Shephard is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, podcast host and producer and author who has covered issues of terrorism and civil rights since the 9/11 attacks. During her two decades at the Toronto Star, she reported from more than 20 countries, including Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan and went behind the wire at the U.S. Naval prison in Guantanamo Bay more than two dozen times. Shephard's films include The Perfect Story and the Emmy-nominated documentary Guantanamo’s Child.

Mikaela Shwer is a documentary filmmaker and editor who loves to embrace storytelling with intimacy and impact. Her debut feature documentary about undocumented activist Angy Rivera, Don’t Tell Anyone/No Le Digas a Nadie, aired on PBS/POV in the fall of 2015 and was honored with the George Foster Peabody Award. Her second feature documentary, The Kids Are Not Alright, about the long-lasting impacts of the “troubled teen” industry premiered at Dances With Films New York in December 2024 where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary. She is an associate of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and a fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program and the Film Independent Documentary Lab.

Nadia Sussman is a filmmaker and journalist at ProPublica. Her upcoming feature documentary Before a Breath weaves together the stories of three mothers who have lost children to stillbirth and are now striving to make pregnancy safer. She co-directed the award-winning documentary Unprotected, which revealed the shocking secrets behind a celebrated American charity that claimed it was saving vulnerable girls in Liberia from sexual exploitation. Her work to amplify the voices of sexual assault survivors in Alaska in the Unheard project was honored with a Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma. Her work has also been recognized by the Edward R. Murrow Awards, the Society of Professional Journalists, Pictures of the Year International and the National Association of Science Writers. Before joining ProPublica, Nadia was based in Brazil, where she produced videos for outlets including The New York Times, BBC and The Wall Street Journal. Nadia began her career as an investigator for death row habeas corpus appeals in California.

Bonny Symons-Brown is an Australian documentary filmmaker and award-winning journalist with a focus on human rights and justice. Her international work exposes violence that is systemic, tolerated, forgotten or unseen. Bonny's documentaries have been commissioned by major broadcasters in Australia and the United States and have attracted millions of views. In remote Western Australia, Bonny directed a film about the mining industry’s destruction of globally significant Aboriginal cultural heritage sites (VICE World News/SBS), exploring the continued dispossession of First Nations peoples. In the Philippines, she captured the Marcos family's astonishing return to power after years of corruption and abuse (Foreign Correspondent/ABC News). In Mexico, she embedded with a team of paramedics to chronicle the devastating impact of COVID’s first wave (VICE World News/SBS). For the ABC, Bonny produced episodes on juvenile detention and prescription drug addiction for the highly successful factual series, You Can't Ask That. More recently, she was the executive producer of a bilingual digital documentary series on Indonesia’s presidential election. Bonny’s work was recognised with a fellowship to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In 2024, she founded the independent documentary production house NEW MUTINY.

Rory Toher is a documentary maker from London, UK. He recently directed a film for the BBC’s Life and Death Row - a BAFTA award-winning ob-doc series that focuses on the human experience of the death penalty in America. He has been responsible for a variety of critically-acclaimed documentaries over the past decade, bringing unusual characters, compelling narratives and stories of meaning to the screen with journalistic focus and rigor. He has worked alongside some of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the profession, specializing in hard-to-crack subjects and bringing new insight to questions of contemporary significance. 

 

About the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is dedicated to improving media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy. The Center also addresses the consequences of such coverage for those working in journalism. A project of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the Dart Center also operates programs in Europe, at the University of Washington and in Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region. The Dart Center also maintains a research lab at the University of Tulsa’s Department of Psychology. The Dart Center develops educational resources for use in journalism schools and news organizations, provides training and conducts research about news coverage of violence and trauma. For more information, visit www.dartcenter.org

About the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

For almost a century, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has been preparing journalists in a program that stresses academic rigor, ethics, journalistic inquiry and professional practice. Founded by Joseph Pulitzer in 1912, the school offers Master of Science, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. For more information, visit www.journalism.columbia.edu

About the Dart Foundation

Since 1984, the Dart Foundation has worked alongside community partners, building relationships that go beyond traditional grantmaking. Inspired by the curiosity and open-mindedness of founders William A. Dart and Claire T. Dart, the Foundation creates lasting change through both program support and infrastructure investments, identifying emerging needs before they become mainstream priorities. For more information, visit www.dartfoundation.org