Celebrating Indigenous World Cinema

MorningStar Angeline was born in Santa Fe, NM and is a queer Navajo, Chippewa Cree, Blackfeet, and Latina actress, music performer, writer, and filmmaker. MorningStar has received acting awards from the American Indian Film Festival, Institute of American Indian Arts and has been honored by the New Mexico Film & Television Hall of Fame. She is a Sundance 2018 Native Lab Fellow for her short film Yá’át’ééh Abíní. She currently resides in Albuquerque, NM.

Dr. Castle brings almost 20 years of experience as a scholar, activist, and media maker working in collaboration with Native Nations and underrepresented communities. Warrior Women is based on the research done for her book "Women were the Backbone, Men were the Jawbone: Native Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement."

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While completing her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, she worked as a policy associate for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race and in 2001 she served as a delegate for the Indigenous World Association at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. While working as an academic specialist for UC Berkeley’s Oral History Office, she received the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Santa Cruz under the supervision of Professors Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker.

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Dr. Castle was a professor in the Native Studies Department at the University of South Dakota and is the founder and Executive Director of The Warrior Women Oral History Project. Castle has numerous publications including “The Original Gangster: The Life and Times of Red Power Activist Madonna Thunder Hawk.” Castle is a committed anti-racist ally and descended from the Pekowi band of the Shawnee in Ohio - both shape how she engages with community-based scholarship and organizing. Warrior Women is Castle’s directorial debut.

Being raised in Flagstaff, Arizona introduced Cegielski to many different cultures and values. Growing up multi-racial heavily influenced his adolescence, which shaped how he sees the world and what stories he strives to tell. 

Cegielski graduated from the University of Arizona’s B.F.A. Film Program. His short films have screened at multiple international film festivals including the Berlinale, imagineNATIVE, Sun Valley and SXSW. Cegielski was selected as a directing fellow for Film Independent’s Project Involve Program in 2016, where he was awarded the Sony Pictures Diversity Fellowship.

He remains an active participant in artistic development and mentorship for Native youth. In 2015, in partnership with Paper Rocket Productions, he mentored Native youth in a a four-week multi-media workshop held on the Navajo reservation. In 2017, Cegielski was a producer for Outlast Film Camp, a one-week filmmaking camp for Native youth on the Pine Ridge reservation. 

Currently, Cegielski lives in Los Angeles where he is developing and writing short films, pilots, features and commercial projects. He is currently working on his first feature, Movement Through the Valley, which was selected by the Sundance Native Lab for the Time Warner Producers Fellowship and the Sundance Creative Producing Summit.

Dustinn Craig is a White Mountain Apache filmmaker who began filmmaking as a teenager making skateboard films on the Reservation. He currently resides in Fort Apache Arizona on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. Dustinn has worked primarily on projects destined for national public television, the majority of his films focus on content pertaining to Native America.  As an independent producer/director Dustinn completed a biographic documentary on the Chiricahua Apache, Geronimo.  This film is the 4th episode in the 5-part Native American history series, We Shall Remain, produced by American Experience in 2009. 2003-marked Dustinn’s 1st national PBS broadcast. His personal short documentary film I Belong To This was the final film in the acclaimed four-part documentary series, Matter’s of Race, produced by Roja Productions.  In 2005, Dustinn was a recipient of the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and was also a Documentary Fellow of the Sundance Film Festival Native Institute. He has also taught and facilitated intensive filmmaking workshops geared toward young adults for the Ilisagvik College of Barrow, the only Native College in all of Alaska. Dustinn’s most recent PBS documentary was awarded the prestigious 2018 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for his work on the film Class of 27 about early childhood education programs in impoverished communities for the PBS World program America Reframed. Dustinn has several independent films in development, one on the Standing Rock Protests of 2016/17 and a History film about Apache Scouts. His 1st love and lifelong passion is skateboarding and youth culture that he stays connected to and involved with through grassroots endeavors of his skateboard company 4wheelwarpony.

Stacy Howard was raised on the Navajo Reservation in the small community of Mexican Water, Arizona. She is of the Many Goat clan and born for the Deer Spring clan. Stacy grew up with three sisters and her mother teaching them the Navajo way. Inspired by the beauty of her Navajo culture and language, Stacy wants to create Navajo stories and make them into films and bring them to a larger audience. 

After graduating high school, Stacy left the reservation in hopes of pursuing filmmaking in college. She first graduated from the Film School at Scottsdale Community College and then graduated from Apollo College to help support herself and her sister living in the city. When her sister graduated from Arizona State University with her bachelor degree, Stacy felt inspired and decided to pursue her own bachelor degree. She was accepted into the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television. In her junior year, she directed her first short film, The Chosen Path, a story about a young boy leaving the reservation for the first time. 

In the summer of her senior year, Stacy began writing her second film. The story developed around an image that lived in Stacy’s mind – an image of a little girl being dropped off at her grandmother’s remote hogan, and the truck driving away. For Stacy, the image felt authentic to her experience of the reservation. It made her smile. The resulting film, Amásání (Grandmother), which Stacy both wrote and directed, was her senior thesis film. 

Stacy graduated in May 2017 from The University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film & Television. To date, Amásání has been selected to screen at twelve film festivals nationally and internationally, including ImagineNATIVE, the world’s largest Indigenous film festival, and the Native Cinema Showcase, a presentation of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Blackhorse Lowe is a filmmaker from the Navajo Nation. His last feature film, Chasing the Light, won the Best Cinematography prize at the Terres en Vues/Land InSights Montreal First Peoples Festival 2016. The film has played to great praise at many domestic and international film festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Skabmagovat Film Festival and the Maoriland Film Festival. He is a 2012 Sundance Institute Native Producing Fellow. Lowe’s feature directorial debut 5th World premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and screened at film festivals around the world. He received the New Mexico New Visions Contract Award and Panavision Award for a short film he wrote and directed titled Shimásáni. The film premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to screen at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, as well as other Festivals around the world garnering many awards and accolades along the way. A recipient of a Re:New Media Award, Lowe is an alumni of the Sundance Institute’s NativeLab, Producers Lab and Screenwriters Writers Lab. Currently he is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow recipient, editing his next feature Fukry, producing short films, writing, programming film screenings, and working as a cinematographer/editor on various other projects.  

Drew Nicholas co-founded the Pittsburgh-based film collective In Medias Res, for which he performs many tasks from concept to completion. This includes co-producing the micro-budget feature I’m A Stranger Here Myself and shooting/producing video content that helped raise over $420,000 to preserve the Pittsburgh community landmark Kraynick’s Bike Shop. Drew’s films have been recognized by Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Minneapolis St.Paul International Film Festival, New Filmmakers: New York, The Sprout Fund, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and The Heinz Endowments. In addition to independent filmmaking Drew also works as a Location Scout/Manager on industry productions such as the Netflix Original Series Mindhunter and AnnaPurna’s Foxcatcher. He earned a B.A. in Cinema and Digital Arts from Point Park University and studied creative writing/poetry at Naropa University. Blood Memory is Drew’s feature film debut.

Deidra Peaches (Diné) is a Director, Producer, Indie filmmaker, Editor and Writer. In 2011, Peaches produced and co-edited The Rocket Boy, an Official Selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, which led Peaches and cinematographer Jake Hoyungowa to co-found the independent media company Paper Rocket Productions. Peaches made her documentary directorial debut with the film Tó éí iiná át'é which premiered in Paris, France at the Festival Ciné Alter'Natif in 2012. In 2013 Peaches made a series of short documentaries for Project 562 including Journey to Alaska.  Her feature documentary, Protect, is due for a 2019 release.

Donavan Seschillie (Navajo) is a self-taught filmmaker from Northern Arizona who specializes in short narratives, documentaries, promotional videos, and music videos. Donavan’s work has been showcased throughout Arizona and the United States at various film festivals, universities, schools, and special events. At the age of 17, Donavan created his first acclaimed and renowned short film entitled Real Love (2007), which was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian for their permanent collection. In 2011 at the age of 23, Donavan premiered his short film The Rocket Boy at the Sundance Film Festival to wide critical acclaim. He was and remains the youngest Native American to premiere a short film in a professional competition. In late 2011 he and his fellow filmmaking crew from The Rocket Boy formed Paper Rocket Productions - a company dedicated to telling indigenous stories throughout the United States. As his interests in the art of filmmaking grew, Donavan later parted ways with Paper Rocket Productions to further research new and upcoming techniques. In early 2014 Donavan formed his own company, Ambient Lens LLC, in which he collaborates with emerging artists and Arizona-based businesses to provide a wide range of production and marketing services to the local community.

Sarah Del Seronde is an instructor in the Cinema/Communications Department at Dawson College and producer for Aboriginal Lens LTD. She is from the Bennett Freeze area of the Navajo Reservation, an undeveloped area of land still in ownership dispute with the Hopi Tribe. She obtained a MA degree in American Indian Studies from University of Arizona and focuses on telling livelihood stories. Making the River, a biographical tale of an American Indian charged with the murder of a prison guard, took her inside the Washington State Penitentiary. Sarah Del also directed Metal Road, a film about Navajo Railroaders working on the 9001 Heavy Steel Gang.