Park City, UT - 23 celebrated voices across film, art and culture will bestow this year's awards to feature-length and short film at the Sundance Film Festival, at a digital ceremony taking place February 2nd. This year's Festival is fully available online at Festival.Sundance.org; Awards Night will be live-streamed. Award-winning films will be available for special extended-run viewing the day after the ceremony. The awards, which recognize standout artistic and story elements, are decided on by each of 6 section juries. As in years past, Festival audiences have a role in deciding the 2021 Audience Awards, open to films in the U.S. Competition, World Competition and NEXT categories.
Our jurors have reached a high level of achievement in their individual fields, and can bring their unique perspective to the process of analyzing and evaluating films, said Kim Yutani, the Festival's Director of Programming. We're pleased to bring this accomplished, creative group together, and look forward to hearing their thoughts.
The juried Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize was awarded to Son of Monarchs; information on those jury members is included below.
The 2021 Sundance Film Festival Jury members are:
U.S. DRAMATIC JURY
Twenty-eight years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke through racial and gender boundaries with Daughters of the Dust (Best Cinematography, 1991 Sundance Film Festival), and she became the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film. In 2004 the Library of Congress placed Daughters of the Dust in the National Film Registry, where it joins a select group of American films preserved and protected as national treasures. Dash has written and directed television projects including episodes of Queen Sugar for the Oprah Winfrey Network. She also directed The Rosa Parks Story, Incognito, Funny Valentines, Love Song, and Subway Stories.
Cynthia Erivo is a Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning actress and singer as well as an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild nominee. Erivo burst onto West End and Broadway stages in The Color Purple and has since taken the world by storm in movies such as Harriet. Currently, Erivo can be seen on the HBO series The Outsider. She will play Aretha Franklin on National Geographic's Genius: Aretha in March, will be releasing her debut album in the Summer of 2021 and will soon star in Universal's Talent Show.
Hanya Yanagihara is the author of the novels The People in the Trees and A Little Life. She is the editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine and lives in New York.
U.S. DOCUMENTARY JURY
Ashley Clark is the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. He previously worked as director of film programming at Brooklyn Academy of Music and has organized film series at venues including MoMA, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and BFI Southbank. Clark has written features and criticism for publications including the New York Times, Sight & Sound, Reverse Shot and 4Columns. He is the author of the book Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2015).
Joshua Oppenheimer's films include the diptych The Act of Killing (2013) and The Look of Silence (2015), which sheds light on one of history's worst atrocities, the Indonesian genocide, and its terrible legacy of corruption and fear. His filmmaking explores impunity, fantasy, and guilt, investigating how our past haunts our present. Oppenheimer has received two Oscar nominations, a MacArthur Fellowship, a BAFTA Award, a Film Independent Spirit Award, and the Venice International Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize.
Lana Wilson is an Emmy-winning director. Her latest film, Miss Americana, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was a New York Times and IndieWire Critics' Pick. Previous work includes The Departure (2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Independent Spirit Award nominee for best documentary), A Cure for Fear (International Documentary Association Award nominee for best short-form series), and After Tiller, which premiered at Sundance in 2013 and won an Emmy for best documentary.
WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC JURY
Zeynep Atakan is a producer in stanbul. She won the European Film Academy's Best European Co-Producer award. Her production Winter Sleep won the Palme d'Or at the 67th Cannes Film Festival. She is the vice president of the European Women's Audiovisual Network and the art director of the Sabanci Foundation Short Film Platform. Atakan is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the European Film Academy, and the Asia Pacific Screen Academy.
Isaac Julien CBE RA has had films in festivals at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin and in the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and Tate collections. Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize at Cannes, and Looking for Langston has garnered 30 years of acclaim. Currently, 10-screen film installation Lessons of the Hour is at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, and nine-screen film A Marvellous Entanglement is at MAXXI, Rome.
Daniela Vega is a Chilean actress known for starring in the Academy Award-winning feature A Fantastic Woman. She was the first transgender woman to present an award at the Oscars, and she was one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in 2018. Vega has won awards at several festivals and won the 2018 Platino Award for Best Actress. She currently works as executive producer and host on the upcoming docuseries Peace Peace Now Now.
WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY JURY
Kim Longinotto attended the National Film and Television School, where she made Pride of Place and Theatre Girls. The Day I Will Never Forget premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003. Other films include Rough Aunties, Pink Saris, and Salma. Dreamcatcher and Shooting the Ma
