Sundance Institute Names 2026 Ignite x Adobe Fellows

 

Sundance Institute Names 2026 Ignite x Adobe Fellows

The Sundance Institute has named the 10 emerging filmmakers selected for the 2026 Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellowship, a yearlong program designed to support storytellers ages 18 to 25 as they build sustainable creative careers.

The fellowship begins with the Ignite Lab, held June 14-19 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass. The weeklong gathering introduces fellows to the creative and professional development opportunities they will take part in over the next year, including mentorship, community-building and industry conversations.

This year’s cohort was selected from more than 1,100 global applications. Each fellow receives a $5,000 artist grant and a one-year complimentary membership to Adobe Creative Cloud through support from the Adobe Film & TV Fund. After the June lab, fellows will continue with monthly webinars focused on creative and career development and will reunite for a curated program at the 2027 Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, Colo.

“It’s with great pleasure that we return to MASS MoCA to kick off a new year with our Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe fellows,” said Toby Brooks, director of Sundance Institute Ignite. “The filmmakers selected represent an exciting cross-section of perspectives.”

Amy White, Adobe’s global head of corporate social responsibility, said the partnership was rooted in removing barriers for emerging artists. “Every filmmaker deserves the chance to bring their vision to life,” she said.

Since its founding in 2015, the Sundance Institute Ignite x Adobe Fellowship has helped launch a notable group of young filmmakers. Nineteen alumni projects have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, with several winning jury awards. Former fellows include Giselle Bonilla, whose film The Musical screened in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival; Sean Wang, whose feature Dìdi won the 2024 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic; Charlotte Regan, whose debut feature Scrapper won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic in 2023; Lance Oppenheim, whose Some Kind of Heaven premiered at Sundance in 2020; Terrance Daye, whose -Ship: A Visual Poem won the Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction; Aurora Brachman, co-producer of Girls State; and Olivia Peace, a Student Academy Award winner for Against Reality.

Alumni have also gone on to win honors at SXSW, Tribeca Festival and Cannes, including the Short Film Palme d’Or, and have received an Academy Award nomination. Earlier this year, the fellowship expanded with a new short film fund for Ignite alumni, creating a direct-to-creator pathway to help more projects move from concept to screen.

The 2026 fellows are Simisolaoluwa Akande, a Nigerian British artist filmmaker whose work draws on queer African epistemologies and challenges dominant narratives around African identity and memory; Aicha Cherif, a New York City-based director whose documentary Heat screened in Film Forum’s Tenement Stories retrospective; and Blake Knecht, a Las Vegas filmmaker whose documentaries explore land, labor and movement.

Also selected are Franciszek Korolczuk, a Polish student filmmaker and music video director whose debut short Princeska premiered at the Brussels Short Film Festival; Haneol Lee, an award-winning filmmaker exploring Korean American identity, diaspora and generational healing; and Josiah Mendoza, a filmmaker from O‘ahu whose work examines memory through family and community.

Rounding out the cohort are Muskaan Razdan, an Indian writer-filmmaker based in London whose short Salt is on the festival circuit; Mia Lima Rocha, a Brazilian filmmaker from Rio de Janeiro whose women-centered stories mix moral ambiguity, discomfort comedy and occasional musical numbers; Yace Sula, an experimental filmmaker named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2025; and Japhet E. Velázquez, an LA-based filmmaker from Arroyo, Puerto Rico, and recent AFI Directing graduate.

Sundance Institute Ignite is supported by Adobe and Arison Arts Foundation.