12 Sep Introducing New MIT OpenDocLab 2024-2025 Fellows
The MIT Open Documentary Lab welcomes three new fellows this semester. Two come to us as joint fellows with our partners Royal Shakespeare Company and Onassis Onx Studio and one is a Co-Creation Studio fellow.
Yara Feghali, an Onassis Onx Fellow, is a French Lebanese architectural designer working at the intersection of architecture pedagogy, transmedia, and immersive technologies. She is a Design Faculty at UCLA AUD, and the creative director of Folly Feast Lab co-founded with Viviane El Kmati based in Los Angeles, California. While at MIT, she will be designing a puzzle game with thematics based on immigration and queer culture and informed by Lebanese folklore and Arabic precedents of housing, marketplaces, communal living, and harbor design from the Phoenician era.
Tabitha Jackson , a Royal Shakespeare Company Fellow, is an arts advocate and consultant who has spent her 30 year career supporting the independent voice, championing the social and cultural power of artful cinema, and uplifting a more expansive set of makers, audiences, and forms. In 2020, as the first woman and person of color to be appointed Director of Sundance Film Festival, she re-imagined and led two technologically innovative and radically accessible pandemic editions which ‘expanded the possibilities of what a film festival can be, and who it can be for’. During her fellowship with MIT Open Doc Lab, she will be pursuing three lines of inquiry relating to independent documentary, trust, and truth.
Aaron “AJ” Nunes-Zaller (AJ), a Co-Creation Studio Fellow, is an educator, independent filmmaker, and community-engaged learner whose work is grounded in humanizing the world. He has decades of experience teaching and studying cultural, political, and social paradigms, and his background is genuinely interdisciplinary. At Florida Gulf Coast University, AJ teaches courses about sustainability, civic engagement, and political science, focusing on race, class, and ethnicity. He is a storyteller who uses filmmaking to engage people in meaningful discourse on critical issues. AJ will focus his Co-Creation Studio Fellowship on co-creating a documentary with New Image Youth Center (NIYC) and Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (UPVA).
They join our cohort of returning fellows all of whom you can see here.