ANAYANSI PRADO: 2022 CHICKEN & EGG AWARD RECIPIENT

Anayansi Prado is an award-winning Latina documentary filmmaker and educator born in Panama and raised in the US from the age of 13. Her independent productions focus on issues of undocumented immigration, indigenous rights and race identity, and have aired nationally on PBS. Her feature documentary work includes Maid in America (2005), about Latina domestic workers in LA; Children in No Man’s Land (2008), about unaccompanied immigrant minors crossing the US/Mexico border; Paraíso for Sale (2011), about American developers migrating to a rural island in Panama; and The Unafraid (2018), about undocumented students in Georgia. Anayansi is a Creative Capital Artist, a Rockefeller Media Fellow and a Film Expert for the State Department’s American Film Showcase. Her work has received support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation: Just Films, Chicken & Egg Pictures, ITVS Development Fund, The Fledgling Fund, Latino Public Broadcasting, Paul Robeson Media Grant and Pacific Pioneer Fund. As an educator, she’s taught at various educational institutions including UCLA’s Film School, Chapman University and Cal State Northridge; as well as documentary filmmaking workshops across five continents. Anayansi holds a BS degree in TV & Film Production from Boston University. She resides in Los Angeles, CA.

CURRENT PROJECTS

Based on The New York Times Best Selling book My Grandmother’s Hands, Taming The American Soul is a documentary series that explores racialized trauma and a pathway to healing.

Witchin’ is a cultural documentary series that explores and honors Africana and Indigenous religious practices.

BEVERLEY PALESA DITSIE: 2022 CHICKEN & EGG AWARD RECIPIENT

Dr. Bev Palesa Ditsie (Hon) is a radical gender nonconforming lesbian activist and an award winning filmmaker, disruptor and change agent who was instrumental in bringing LGBTIQA+ rights into focus in the late 80’s and 90’s in South Africa and in the world. They are a founding member of the first multi racial LGBTI organization in South Africa, Gay and Lesbian Organization of Witwatersrand (GLOW), which hosted the first Pride March in Africa.  

Beverley is first of many things, but is best known for being the first African lesbian to address the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995—the subject of their latest documentary, Lesbians Free Everyone, filmed entirely during the Global lockdown of 2020.  They have also directed some of the biggest reality TV shows in South Africa including: Big Brother Africa, Survivor South Africa, All You Need Is Love; The Voice South Africa and Project Runway South Africa.

Independently, Beverley has also written, directed, produced and consulted over 20 socio political and human rights documentaries, and screened nationally and Internationally. Their first film, Simon & I, won best documentary at the Oxfam/Vues ‘d’Afrique in Montreal, Canada, (2004). Bev was bestowed an honorary doctorate by Claremont Graduate University in California in 2019. 

CURRENT PROJECT

Eaglette, a former 1970’s superstar, has never heard her own voice–except through monitors during live performances. This mother of two sacrificed her marriage, her family and her reputation for a dream that almost destroyed her. Now, almost forty years later, with the help of her filmmaker daughter, she embarks on a journey to find and to hear her own voice.
This story of love, heartbreak, tragedy and hope, proves that it is never too late to fulfill a lifelong dream. All it takes is one song.

 

PETRA COSTA: 2022 CHICKEN & EGG AWARD RECIPIENT

In Petra Costa’s work the personal and the political are inextricably linked. Her films The Edge of Democracy, Undertow Eyes, and Elena are part of a trilogy where she investigates her family story. The Edge of Democracy was nominated for an Academy Award® for Documentary Feature in 2020 and was included in the list of Best Movies of 2019 by The New York Times. The film recounts with intimacy a citizen’s trauma of being a witness of rising authoritarianism and a crumbling democracy. Elena is a mixture of documentary, diary, and fever dream. It tells the story of two sisters, as one searches for the other, their identities begin to blur. The New York Times named the film “a cinematic dream”, and was the most-watched documentary in Brazil in 2013. Petra also directed Olmo and the Seagull, which premiered at Locarno Film Festival in 2016. 

She is the Associate Producer of Barbara Paz’s Babenco (2019), Producer of Moara Passoni’s Ecstasy (2020) and Executive Producer of Rebeca Huntt’s BEBA (2021). Petra worked in theater in Brazil and then studied Anthropology at Barnard College of Columbia University. She completed her master’s in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

TRACY HEATHER STRAIN: 2022 CHICKEN & EGG AWARD RECIPIENT

Tracy Heather Strain, a two-time Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated filmmaker, explores stories about the ways diverse peoples have experienced life in the U.S. In 2019 she won an NAACP Image Award for Motion Picture Directing for Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and aired on American Masters. 

Her directing debut, Bright Like a Sun and The Dream Keepers, in Blackside’s series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, “leaps off the screen” noted The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter praised her first film for American Experience, Building the Alaska Highway, as “dynamic” and “truly great storytelling.” Other credits include Race: The Power of an Illusion and Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?

Tracy’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Brother Thomas Fund at The Boston Foundation, Mass Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, CPB/PBS Producers Academy, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Black Public Media, Ford Foundation, ITVS, and Color of Film Collaborative. 

She also teaches documentary filmmaking at Wesleyan University. 

CURRENT PROJECT

Sparked from the director’s childhood witness of a near-drowning experience at a northern Black suburban swimming pool, Survival Floating is an essay film that weaves historical and contemporary African Americans’ relationships to swimming as a metaphor of the centuries of Black struggle for survival.