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Shaz Bennett is an American writer, filmmaker, performance artist and film programmer.
| This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
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Shaz Bennett is an American writer, filmmaker, performance artist and film programmer.
Bennett was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a mother who was a journalist for the Associated Press and a father who ran a leasing company and now owns Squashworks, a Squash club in Salt Lake City. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband filmmaker Jean-Pierre Caner. Bennett studied acting at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her popular performances and award winning films have been screened in theatres, museums, and abandoned warehouses around the USA and in Mexico, Canada, Europe.
While living in New York in the early '90s she studied with Spaulding Gray and wrote & performed four one-woman shows: "The Shaz Show," "Abrasive Fairy Tales," "Eyes, Lips, Legs," and "Hungover Angel." In addition to New York these shows have been performed extensively across the country, Mexico and Europe and as part of several spoken word tours sponsored by MTV, Hennessey and NOW. Her pieces have been performed in Museums, Universities, theatres and abandoned warehouses. She performs frequently with the Heroine Addicts, The Moth, Third Saturdays, A Shot and a Beer, and Sit n Spin at The Comedy Central Stage.
Bennett has written numerous short stories, several screenplays, and has developed a television pilot based on the material she performs. Her essays have been published in Cake Magazine, Imaging Ourselves, “Best Monologues for Women” and in the upcoming book "Dirty Laundry".
Bennett wrote and starred in the award winning short films "Martini” and "Tunnels," an official selection of The Los Angeles Film Festival and Cinevegas. Her new film "Top of the Circle," screened at over 50 film festivals including, The Los Angeles Film Festival, The True West Cinema Festival, Silverdocs, Lunafest and at the International Women’s Museum.
Bennett started working at the US Film Festival that ultimately became the Sundance Film Festival. She worked for the Sundance Institute both in Utah and Los Angeles from 1989-1997. She also worked at the Los Angeles Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festivals. She was the Assoc. Director of Programming for the American Film Festival AFI FEST from 1999-2009. She contributes regularly to film blogs online and Moving Pictures Magazine.
Trent Harris is an Independent American filmmaker based in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2013, Indiewire proclaimed Harris "The Best Underground Filmmaker You Don’t Know — But Should."
Siân Heder is an American filmmaker who is best known for writing and directing the films Tallulah and CODA. CODA earned Heder an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film also won the Academy Award for Best Picture and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Troy Kotsur.
Sleeping Beauties is a 1999 short comedy film directed by Jamie Babbit. It premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. It stars Sarah Lassez as a morgue beautician trying to get over her ex-girlfriend, played by Radha Mitchell. Babbit made the film with help from David Fincher and Michael Douglas. It played at several film festivals during 1998 and 1999, and was later distributed on a DVD collection of short films by production company POWER UP. Babbit won a Channel 4 award for the film.
The 2007 Sundance Film Festival ran from January 18 until January 28, 2007, in Park City, Utah with screenings in Salt Lake City, Utah and Ogden, Utah. It was the 23-rd iteration of the Sundance Film Festival. The opening night film was Chicago 10; the closing night film was Life Support.
Gariné Torossian is a Canadian filmmaker. Her works include Stone, Time, Touch which won best documentary at the Warsaw International Film Festival in 2007. Her films have screened at MoMa, the Telluride Film Festival (Colorado), Lux Cinema (London), the Egyptian Theatre, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Warsaw International Film Festival, Berlinale, and a host of cinematheques, including those in Berlin, Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Torossian's debut short, Visions (1992), was part of a retrospective at Centre Pompidou when she was 22. Her subsequent shorts were screened at New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series when she was 25, and at the Spielberg theatre at the Egyptian in Los Angeles (2019). Torossian's work has been broadcast on Arte France, Documentary Channel (Canada), Bravo Canada, Sundance Channel (USA), SBS (Australia) and WTN (Canada). Her films focus on notions of memory, longing and identity, underlined by her diverse and comprehensive filmography.
Gus Reyes is an American television producer and theatre director. For nearly ten years was co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of The Next Stage Company, a New York-based performing arts company, where he produced and directed over 200 shows. In New York, Reyes also directed plays, staged reading and or workshops at the Roundabout, Atlantic Theatre, MTC, MCC, Summer Play Festival, the Underwood Theatre and Epic Rep. Regionally, he has worked at the Hartford Stage and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, the Adirondack Theatre Festival in New York, the Salt Lake Acting Company in Utah, Onyx in North Carolina, and the Philadelphia Theatre Company in Pennsylvania. He frequently works with J. T. Rogers.
Sharon Farber is an Israeli composer. She was born in Bat Yam, Israel.
Sundance Institute is a non-profit organization founded by Robert Redford committed to the growth of independent artists. The institute is driven by its programs that discover and support independent filmmakers, theatre artists and composers from all over the world. At the core of the programs is the goal to introduce audiences to the artists' new work, aided by the institute's labs, granting and mentorship programs that take place throughout the year in the United States and internationally.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with 423,234 combined in-person and online viewership in 2023. The festival takes place every January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres. Many films premiering at Sundance have gone on to be nominated and win Oscars such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Keirda Bahruth is an American filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. She began her career working on Music Videos and Commercials before a move to New York teamed her up with legendary Saturday Night Live director James Signorelli, famous for his commercial parody sketches. As Signorelli's assistant, she began shooting behind-the-scenes footage of life at SNL for the show's 25th Anniversary Special, which gave her complete access to the inner workings of the show. After three full seasons at SNL, Bahruth returned to Los Angeles in 2001 and joined the nascent world of reality television. She has worked as a director and producer on shows for the Discovery Channel, E!, Fox, NBC/Universal, The WB and BET.
Maya Entertainment Group, Inc. was an independent multi-platform video distribution company. Moctesuma Esparza founded the company in Los Angeles, California in 2007. Maya Entertainment procured and produced content that appealed to the new diverse American Latino and multi-cultural audiences. The company acquired a library of over 100 titles.
Nina Menkes is an independent filmmaker. Her films include The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), Magdalena Viraga (1986), Queen of Diamonds (1991), The Bloody Child (1996), "Massacre (Massaker)" (2005), Phantom Love (2007), Dissolution (2010), and Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022). Dissolution (2010) was filmed in black and white and is set in Israel. Nina Menkes' sister Tinka appears as an actress in many of them. Menkes teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, California. She has donated copies of several of her works to the Academy Film Archive.
Jessika Van is an American actress, singer-songwriter, pianist and dancer. Van is most known for playing "Becca," the ringleader of the Asians or the Asian mafia in Season 2 and Season 3 of MTV's Awkward. She also played Kim, a Hong Kong Police Officer and sister of Detective Lee in the Rush Hour television series. She has also starred as the antagonist "Li Xue" in the 2019 12-episode Chinese series,Yolk Man (蛋黄人).
The 2013 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 17, 2013, until January 27, 2013, in Park City, Utah, United States, with screenings in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ogden, Utah, and Sundance, Utah.
Erin Li is a Taiwanese-American filmmaker, writer, director and producer. She has directed and written the short films To The Bone, L.A. Coffin School and others. She has also served as an Associate Producer on the documentaries Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp (2012), The Girls in the Band (2011), America The Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments (2011), and Voices Unveiled: Turkish Women Who Dare (2009).
Marina Tetarić Prusec is a Croatian film director and screenwriter.
Christine Choy is a Chinese-American filmmaker. She is known for co-directing Who Killed Vincent Chin?, a 1988 film based on the murder of Vincent Jen Chin, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She co-founded Third World Newsreel, a film company focusing on people of color and social justice issues. As a documentary filmmaker, she has produced and directed more than eighty films. She is a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Lulu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing the comedy-drama films Posthumous (2014) and The Farewell (2019). For the latter, she received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and the film was named one of the top ten films of 2019 by the American Film Institute. Wang has also written, produced, and directed several short films, documentaries, and music videos.
Patti Cake$ is a 2017 American drama film directed by Geremy Jasper. It was screened in the US Dramatic Competition section of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. It was released on August 18, 2017, by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Alice Mayrine Backes was an American actress who performed on radio, television, and in films from the 1940s to the 1990s. Standing 5'9", she worked chiefly on television during her long career. She appeared in over 80 television series and made-for-television movies, specializing in character roles and dialects for scripts.