-- Park City, UT - Sundance Institute has summoned 23 film, theatre, culture and science experts for jury duty to award 27 prizes at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, January 21-31 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.
(L-R) Sundance Film Festival, Credit: Fred Hayes; Taika Waititi, Credit: Sundance Film Festival; Director Crystal Moselle, Credit:Jemal Countess.
Also announced today, filmmaker and Institute alum Taika Waititi will host the feature film Awards Ceremony on Saturday, January 30 at 7:00 p.m. MT, which will be live streamed at sundance.org. Waititi will be premiering his latest film Hunt for the Wilderpeople at the Festival, has written and directed What We Do in the Shadows (2015), BOY (2010) and Eagle vs. Shark (2007) and he will direct the upcoming Thor 3. His previous films have been supported by Sundance Institute's Screenwriters and Directors Labs as well as its Native American and Indigenous Film Program. Hailing from the sub-sub-tropical continent of New Zealand, Oscar-losing director Waititi says he invented the sideways Whatchoo talkin' 'bout? look.
The six juries of film and culture leaders screen all films in their respective sections and jointly decide which standout artistic and story elements to recognize with prizes. In addition, Festival audiences vote for their favorite films and five Audience Awards are given to films in the U.S. and World Competitions and NEXT. Films that earned awards at the Festival in recent years include Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Cartel Land, The Wolf Pack, Twenty Feet from Stardom, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Dope, Whiplash, Fishing Without Nets, Dear White People, Fruitvale Station, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Searching for Sugarman, The Square, The Cove, Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Man On Wire.
Short Film Awards will be announced at a separate ceremony on Tuesday, January 26 at 9:00 pm MT and live streamed at sundance.org.
U.S. Documentary Jury
Simon Kilmurry
Simon Kilmurry is the executive director of the International Documentary Association (IDA). He joined IDA in 2015 and currently oversees all of its programs, including filmmaker services, educational programs, the IDA Awards, and advocacy. From 1999 to 2015, Kilmurry worked in various roles at POV-the long-running PBS documentary series-including that of executive producer from 2006 to 2015. He has received 15 Emmy Awards, more than 60 Emmy nominations, 5 Peabody Awards, and 4 duPont Columbia Awards. He also served as CEO of American Documentary (AmDoc), POV's nonprofit parent organization, where he developed America ReFramed, a documentary series on the WORLD Channel. Kilmurry has worked with a wide range of emerging and established filmmakers, including Laura Poitras, Marshall Curry, Yung Chang, Yoruba Richen, Natalia Almada, and Jennifer Fox.
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Much of her research, teaching, and writing explores absences and asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. As an essayist, she writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. Her many books include The Name of War (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; New York Burning (2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Book of Ages (2013), a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), a New York Times bestseller and winner of the American History Book Prize. Her next book, Joe Goulds Teeth, will be published in 2016.
Shola Lynch
Shola Lynch is a documentary filmmaker based in Harlem, New York City. She is best known for Chisholm '72-Unbought & Unbossed, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, which sold worldwide and won numerous awards, including the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary. Lynch is the curator of the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a position that fulfills her other passion-collecting, archiving, and preserving history. Lynch is an alumna of the Sundance Institute's Women Filmmakers Initiative. Her current project, The Outlaw-her first feature narrative based on a true story-recently received a Creative Capital award.
Louie Psihoyos
Louie Psihoyos is the Academy Award-winning director of The Cove (2009). His most recent film, Racing Extinction (2015), premiered on the Discovery Channel in an unprecedented global broadcast-220 countries and territories saw the film within 24 hours. Psihoyos is the executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, a nonprofit that educates, inspires, and empowers the global community to become change agents actively engaged in saving and preserving the oceans, endangered species, and our planet through the use of film, photography, social media, and collaboration. Prior to his filmmaking career, Psihoyos was a still photographer for National Geographic for 18 years. He is currently in production on a documentary film about plant-based super athletes.
Amy Ziering
Amy Ziering is a two-time Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. Her most recent film, The Hunting Ground-a piercing, monumental expos of rape culture on college campuses-premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, was released by Radius/The Weinstein Company and CNN, and was recently nominated for the 2016 Producers Guild of America's Best Documentary Award. Her previous film, The Invisible War-a groundbreaking investigation into the epidemic of rape in the U.S. Military-won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, two 2014 Emmy Awards for Best Documentary and Outstanding Investigative Journalism, and the 2013 Peabody, and it was
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-- Park City, UT - Sundance Institute has summoned 23 film, theatre, culture and science experts for jury duty to award 27 prizes at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, January 21-31 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. 
