Empowering the Next Generation of Visionaries: Film Independent Announces 2026 Producing Lab Fellows

The path of an independent film producer is rarely a straight line. Ask any veteran of the indie circuit, and they will tell you that the profession demands uncommon endurance and a remarkably long-term vision. The journey begins with a spark—discovering a project or a voice you fiercely believe in—followed by the grueling uphill battle of convincing investors to share that vision. Producers must navigate endless pitching rounds and meticulous development stages, hoping that the stars align so they can finally yell "action."

Yet, production is merely the first hurdle. For documentary producers, principal photography alone can span several grueling years. Fiction features face their own trials through dizzying post-production iterations. And once a film is finally finished, the producer’s role shifts into that of a tireless champion, shepherding the work through competitive festival runs, distribution negotiations, and theatrical or streaming releases.

To survive and thrive in this high-stakes ecosystem, indie producers need more than passion; they need a strategic map. They need to know where to find seasoned industry experts willing to offer candid advice, career-planning coaching, essential grants, and a nurturing community that brings all these vital elements together. Thirteen exceptionally talented producers have found precisely this support system in the 2026 Film Independent Fiction Producing Lab and Documentary Producing Lab. Film Independent is proud to officially unveil this year’s incoming fellows.

Fact Meets Fiction: Meet the 2026 Film Independent Producing Lab Fellows

Chronology and Program Structure: A Legacy of Fostering Talent

This year marks a major milestone for the organization, celebrating the 26th annual Fiction Producing Lab—scheduled to run from September 28 to October 9—and the 3rd annual Documentary Producing Lab, which officially wrapped its intensive sessions on September 18.

Both initiatives are rigorous, immersive programs specifically designed to accelerate the careers of independent producers. Throughout the labs, fellows work side-by-side with leading industry advisors to refine their projects, workshop creative roadblocks, and gain real-world, highly practical insights into the complex business and financial mechanics of modern producing.

The timing of these programs aligns with a broader industry push to stabilize independent filmmaking at a grassroots level. Alongside the fellowship announcement, Film Independent has unveiled major financial backing to alleviate the financial pressures traditionally associated with early-stage development.

Most notably, the prestigious $30,000 Alfred P. Sloan Producers Grant—awarded annually to a project that seamlessly weaves compelling science or technology themes into dramatic storytelling—has been granted to Justin Hung Nguyen for his feature Stem. Additionally, the $10,000 Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation Fellowship was awarded to Drew Dickler. This unrestricted grant is specifically designated to support a Jewish filmmaker participating in a Film Independent Artist Development Program.

Supporting Data and Institutional Impact

The pedigree of Film Independent’s Producing Labs speaks for itself. Over the decades, the labs have served as launchpads for some of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed independent films in recent memory.

On the fiction side, notable alumni projects include In the Summers (winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize); The Inspection (showcased at TIFF and NYFF before its theatrical release by A24); Joyland (winner at Cannes Un Certain Regard and an Independent Spirit Award winner); All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Spirit Award nominee); and Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Spirit Award nominee).

The documentary roster is equally impressive, featuring alumni projects such as Natchez (Best Documentary at Tribeca); Ascension (Academy Award nominee); Minding the Gap (Academy Award nominee and Spirit Award winner); and United Skates (Emmy Award nominee).

This year, the institutional support running behind the scenes is stronger than ever. Fellows receive specialized professional coaching courtesy of Renee Freedman & Company, backed generously by The Harnisch Foundation. Furthermore, participants benefit from vital sustainability grants provided by Film Independent’s newly launched Artist Sustainability Fund.

Official Responses and Industry Insights

The leadership behind these programs emphasizes that the labs are as much about mental resilience and community building as they are about project development.

"Making a documentary is rarely a straight line, and producers are the people who keep moving the project forward when the path gets complicated," said Daniel Cardone, Senior Manager of Nonfiction Programs at Film Independent. "We’re excited to bring together this year’s cohort to tackle those challenges head-on, share what they’ve learned, and build a community that extends well beyond the Lab."

Ashley Flores, Manager of Fiction Programs, shared a parallel sentiment regarding the momentum of the fiction track. "We’re proud to support this incredible group of producers and the visionary projects they’re bringing to life," Flores noted. "Fellows will leave the Lab with greater clarity, confidence, and meaningful relationships to help move both their projects and careers forward."

Meet the 2026 Fellows and Their Projects

This year’s cohort features an eclectic mix of boundary-pushing storytellers addressing everything from corporate exploitation and historical reckonings to healthcare crises and coming-of-age digital dilemmas.

The 2026 Fiction Producing Lab Fellows

Megan Leonard

Based in the Pacific Northwest, Megan Leonard is an award-winning creative producer, festival programmer, and alumna of both the Sundance Institute and The Gotham. Her films have premiered at top-tier festivals like Sundance and SXSW, landed on global streaming platforms including Hulu and MUBI, and earned five Vimeo Staff Picks. Her notable credits include Dream Creep (dir. Carlos A.F. Lopez), Harbor Island (dir. Calvin Lee Reeder), The Influencer (dir. Lael Rogers), and Mixtape Marauders (dir. Peter Edlund). Alongside her producing work, Leonard serves as the Festival Programming Manager at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Project: Call Cutters
Logline: At a gamified call center where pay is dictated by performance and competition is fierce, a new threat forces a motley crew of night shift employees to band together and decide what winning really means in a system built for them to lose.

Oscar Hernandez

Oscar Hernandez is an award-winning Mexican-American filmmaker based in Los Angeles. After starting his academic journey studying ancient architecture, he pivoted to film and earned his master’s from NYU’s graduate film program. His work has screened at Tribeca, the LA Film Fest, Austin Film Festival, Cinequest, and Seattle. Hernandez served as the lead producer on Nigerian Prince, an indie feature selected for the Tribeca Film Festival’s AT&T Untold Stories competition. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he concentrated on pioneering new business models and financing structures to economically empower creators.

Carolina Tamez

A Mexican producer dedicated to championing multicultural, globally minded narratives, Carolina Tamez began her career in television training with the BBC, National Geographic, and NBC. She was a Creative Producer on Fernando Frías’s I’m No Longer Here, which premiered at Tribeca, won 10 Ariel Awards, and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Her producing credits have screened at Cannes Critics’ Week, Berlinale, TIFF, Slamdance, and FICG, backed by grants from the Spike Lee Film Production Fund and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Fellows Fund.

Project: Lucius Luz
Logline: When teenager Lucius is sent from Mexico to work with his estranged father in California, he becomes drawn to Angel, who is believed to possess divine healing powers and is the son of the local pastor. As their bond deepens, Lucius begins to uncover dark secrets that upend his life and threaten to tear the town apart.

Justin Hung Nguyen

Justin Hung Nguyen is a 2026 Film Independent / Sloan Fiction Producing Lab Fellow and a member of the Gold House Producer Accelerator. He produced the USC and Sloan Foundation-supported short Stem—a Student Academy Awards finalist that screened at the Telluride Film Festival and is actively being developed into a feature via the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive. His other credits include the feature Too Soon. A graduate of USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program and NYU Tisch, Nguyen also works as a guest lecturer at USC and co-founded EDscapade Games, a San Jose escape room enterprise.

Project: Stem (2026 Alfred P. Sloan Producers Grant Recipient)
Logline: Inspired by a true scandal, a devoted female researcher risks everything to earn the approval of a world-renowned stem cell scientist—only to uncover the dark secrets behind his miracle cure that promises to end human disability.

Steven Snyder

Steven Snyder is an independent producer whose short films Azi and Seniors both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A 2025 Sundance Producers Lab Fellow, Snyder previously collaborated with producer Jim Burke at Innisfree Pictures and served as an executive producer on Dreamin’ Wild, which premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. His extensive professional development includes stints in Film Independent’s Fast Track, PGA Create, and Inside Out’s International Finance Forum, the premier finance platform supporting queer creators.

Project: Tell Me a Secret
Logline: When eighteen-year-old Azi Rahimi meets Elizabeth Kessler, it unlocks hidden desires and leads to an unexpected game that affects Azi and those around her.

Po Wei Su

Po Wei Su is a Taiwanese filmmaker and Los Angeles-based producer whose career began in commercial and music video production before transitioning to US narrative filmmaking. His projects have screened at Tribeca, SXSW, Berlinale, Palm Springs, and Chicago. Drawing heavily on his roots in Taiwanese cinema, Su bridges Eastern artistic sensibilities with contemporary Western storytelling structures. Committed to uplifting underrepresented voices, he has produced multiple seasons for Tribeca Rising Voices and the CAPE Julia Gouw Program. He is currently in pre-production on two feature films: The Death of Youngjoo and Multiplier.

Project: The Death of Youngjoo
Logline: In the conservative 1980s Midwest, a fiery Asian American student investigates the suspicious suicide of her best friend, a pastor’s son, inside an elite white fraternity. She uncovers a tragic, forbidden romance involving the fraternity president, a governor’s son, ultimately forcing her to choose between vengeful justice and systemic reform.

Brian Grigsby

Raised in Pittsburgh and based in Los Angeles, Brian Grigsby is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and an NAACP Image Award nominee for the short film Blackout. Grigsby is an alumnus of both the Sundance Producer’s Intensive Fellowship and Film Independent’s Project Involve. He has produced commercial and narrative content for major entities including the NFL, NBA, HBO, and NBC. His production banner, Nelson Studios, specializes in narrative content centered on perseverance, redemption, and faith.

Project: The Last Cowboy
Logline: Saddled by crippling mob debt, a suave ex-con conspires with an unassuming bartender for a series of heists that will provide them with the freedom they’ve long desired, but they soon realize this union is more than what they bargained for as the struggle for power could cost them their lives.

The 2026 Documentary Producing Lab Fellows

Rachel Elizabeth Seed

Rachel Elizabeth Seed is a Los Angeles-based nonfiction storyteller working across film, photography, and writing. Her debut feature, A Photographic Memory, was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick, hailed as "one of the best docs of the year" by Rogerebert.com, and awarded a 2025 Film Independent Truer Than Fiction Spirit Award. Her work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Chicken + Egg Pictures, and Field of Vision, among others. Formerly a photo editor at New York Magazine, Seed’s photography has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography.

Project: Bad Girl Marcia Tucker
Logline: After being fired from NYC’s Whitney Museum for her radical exhibitions, feminist curator Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977 to champion marginalized artists. Through rare archive and insight from today’s artworld rebels, Bad Girl Marcia Tucker traces Marcia’s defiant legacy—offering a blueprint for resistance in the face of contemporary threats to art, artists, and art institutions.

Jyoti Sarda

Jyoti Sarda is an Emmy Award-winning, Los Angeles-based producer and the founder of Nimble Media. Leveraging her extensive corporate background as a senior global marketing executive at studios like Paramount and Fox, Sarda develops high-impact documentary and narrative works. Her impressive credits include the feature film Lilly (starring Patricia Clarkson), the POV docuseries And She Could Be Next, and the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary Black Barbie.

Project: The Cost of Care
Logline: In post-Dobbs America, state abortion bans are hollowing out the healthcare workforce—a crisis that goes far beyond bodily autonomy. The Cost of Care follows medical students, residents, and frontline doctors across two neighboring states, one banned and one protected, as they navigate legal risk, training gaps, and impossible ethical choices to reveal who really pays the price when politics dictates medicine.

Drew Dickler

Drew Dickler is a documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Deep Dive Films. A Sundance Institute fellow, she most recently served as the lead producer of What Will I Become?, which premiered at Berlinale and won the Amnesty International Film Award. She also directed the short documentary Big Bass, which earned jury awards at Outfest NEXT and Palm Springs International ShortFest. Her debut feature documentary, Fireboys, had its streaming premiere on HBO.

Project: The Grass Ceiling (2026 Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation Fellowship Recipient)
Logline: Filmmaker Sarah Strauss revisits her abandoned dream of playing professional baseball by following four girls fighting for a place in the sport, as a historic women’s league prepares to launch.

Sruti Lodha

Sruti Lodha is a producer and development lead at The Storiculture Company, where she stewards projects from early ideation to packaging, with a core focus on feminist perspectives and underrepresented cultural narratives. Lodha served as producer and impact producer on Auto Queens, a documentary centering women auto drivers in Chennai that premiered at IDFA 2025, expertly balancing rigorous narrative development with real-world social impact campaigns.

Project: In Search of Missing Clouds
Logline: When the monsoons fail and harvests collapse, eight-year-old burn survivor Aaru refuses to give up on her home in Vidarbha’s dry, saline land, which her family can no longer afford to stay on. In Aaru’s search for answers, a filmmaker returns to the questions that once led his own family to migrate from the same land.

Zak Piper

Zak Piper is an acclaimed documentary producer whose extensive credits include feature films, docuseries, and television. He produced The Luckiest Guy in the World, a multi-part series on NBA legend Bill Walton directed by Steve James for ESPN’s 30 for 30, which premiered at SXSW. Piper has collaborated extensively with James on projects such as The Interrupters (News & Documentary Emmy Award winner), Life Itself (Academy shortlisted), and the Emmy-nominated series City So Real. Furthermore, he co-directed The Ants and the Grasshopper and produced All These Sons and MTV’s 16 & Recovering.

Project: My First Phone
Logline: My First Phone follows four kids in Chicago before, during, and after they receive their first smartphones from their families. The film explores how the digital transition impacts their social experiences, family dynamics, and self-perception, using innovative perspectives to capture a defining modern rite of passage.

Beatriz Browne

Beatriz Browne is an award-winning documentary producer whose credits span platforms like HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, The New York Times, and CNN. Her projects have been recognized by the Cinema Eye Honors, Telluride, DOC NYC, and the Critics Choice Documentary Awards. Notable credits include The Best Chef in the World, HBO’s The Truth About Jim, and Rachel, Breathe (directed by Frank Marshall). She is currently in production on Southern Quest, which was selected for the 2026 Sheffield DocFest MeetMarket.

Project: Southern Quest
Logline: In search of an extraordinary adventure, a group of ordinary people set sail on an old fishing boat from London to Antarctica. Surviving plane crashes, shipwrecks, and each other, they become the last independent expedition to the South Pole. Four decades later, they finally reckon with the hidden cost and political impact of their ambition.

Implications and Industry Support Network

The success of these labs relies heavily on the generosity and mentorship of top-tier industry veterans who dedicate their time to shaping the next wave of talent.

Fiction Producing Lab guest speakers and advisors include Juliet Berman, Erika Canchola, Neal Champagne, Pierre M. Coleman, Kyle Greenberg, Sarah Kim, Kaylee Madrid, Lauren Mann, Amanda Marshall, Tony Yang, and Jim Young. Additionally, fiction fellows receive complimentary access to Rightscenter, an invaluable digital research service for film and television literary rights.

The Documentary Producing Lab is equally fortified by industry leaders, including Sarba Das, Orly Ravid, Ben Proudfoot, Smriti Mundhra, Alysa Nahmias, Senain Kheshgi, Diane Becker, Lauren Cioffi, Trevite Willis, Megan Gilbride, Dale Cohen, and Loralee Sundra.

Institutional support for the Fiction Producing Lab is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The Harnisch Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, while the Documentary Producing Lab receives vital backing from The Harnisch Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Through these comprehensive programs, Film Independent continues to champion singular, independent voices, ensuring that boundary-pushing creators have the structural, financial, and creative scaffolding necessary to bring vital stories from development to the global stage.