Event

Register Here.

 

September 23, 2020

3:00 p.m. ET/12:00 p.m. PT

 

"The 20/20 Series" is a pop-up event that takes us into the homes, hubs and workspaces of an array of dynamic creative visionaries to allow for relaxed, engaging conversations on craft, creation and artistic vision.

 

Each conversation with a creative visionary features 20 minutes of discussion with a moderator and a 20 Q&A from YOU, the audience.

 

This event is open to the public, as a means of promoting global connection and creativity, a key mission of NYFA.

 

Nina Menkes is considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers. Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals including Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes (ACID), Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, La Cinematheque Française, British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, and MOMA in NYC.

 

Menkes’s honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an AFI Independent Filmmaker Award, a Creative Capital Award and a Berlinale FIPRESCI Prize for the feature documentary Massaker. In 2011, her feature film The Bloody Child (1996) was named one of the most important films of the past 50 years by the Viennale International Film Festival, Austria.

 

Two of Menkes’s early feature films, Queen of Diamonds and The Bloody Child have been selected for restoration by the Academy Film Archive and Scorsese’s Film Foundation. The re-release of Queen of Diamonds in 2019 by Arbelos Film distribution was a hit, being widely described as “a modern masterpiece”.

 

Menkes holds an MFA in Film Production from UCLA, is a two-time Fulbright Fellow to the Middle East and is a member of the film faculty at California Institute of the Arts.

 

Maria Giese, after four years of activism in the Directors Guild of America, became the person who instigated the groundbreaking industry-wide Federal investigation for women directors in Hollywood. In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis referred to her work as “a veritable crusade.”  

 

She is the subject of the award-winning feature documentary This Changes Everything. Her new TEDx talk, “The Battle For Female Voices in Entertainment Media,” and her upcoming book, Troublemaker, describe her work getting the ACLU and EEOC to investigate this issue— the ramifications of which are resonating globally.

 

Prior to that, Giese wrote and directed the 1996 feature film When Saturday Comes starring Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite, and the award-winning digital feature film Hunger based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winner Knut Hamsun. She has also directed two Golden Cine Eagle-winning short films, and has written three screenplays that have been produced into feature films. She is a member of 
the Directors Guild of America, Film Fatales, and the Alliance of Women Directors, and is founding chair of the annual Women’s Media Summit.

In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious EQUITY AWARD from Stanford University and her articles have appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Elle, IndieWIRE, and Film Inquiry.  Giese herself has appeared on CNN Global, BBC International, ABC Live, Sky TV UK Live, Bloomberg TV, and NPR.  She has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, Fortune, Cosmopolitan, LA Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, The Guardian, among others internationally.