Fatima Elzein is a multifaceted artist and community organizer born in Tovaangar (Los Angeles) and based on occupied Duwamish land (Seattle, WA), with ancestral roots in South Lebanon’s Shami region. A graduate of Seattle Central’s Film and Video program, she centers filmmaking to explore displacement, memory, and belonging. Her work archives community stories and collective grief while building connections across the diaspora. As project lead, producer, actor, and editor, Fatima brought the team together to create work that redefines home and identity within displacement.

instagram.com/fakla.va

Lilian Kasem (she/her) is a Palestinian filmmaker based in Occupied Duwamish Territory (Seattle, WA). Born into a family shaped by forced displacement following the 1948 Nakba, her lived experiences across the Sham and the UK inform her perspective and practice.

Her art is influenced by her upbringing and heritage. She works in themes of displacement and searching for community. She first discovered a love for filmmaking in her teens, finding herself entranced by the way film can communicate through more than just words. Lilian finds a voice through cinematography, and catharsis in the details. She finds joy in both capturing authentic moments, and in creating sequences that facilitate emotional connection.

Alaa Druz is a storyteller and creative grounded in healing, play, and reconnection. Her art is an act of resistance and remembrance, carrying ancestral ties to Palestine. In this project, she leads character development, direction, acting, and costume design.

Eman A. is a multimedia storyteller from Cairo who was raised across u.s. east and west coasts. she creates, queers, and curates narratives across film, sound, poetry, archives, and memory. her art and activism center, cherish, and fiercely arm collective freedom dreams of worlds to be.

Award Statement: We want to thank the Northwest Film Forum for the gift of creating with, and for, community. Receiving this award allows us to amplify our collective grief over the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Palestine.This project is an archive of truth—honoring our people’s history and our present moment through the lenses of displacement, diaspora, and belonging. It exists to strengthen our connection to one another and to the broader community that holds us. We are deeply grateful for this opportunity. We remain fully present in this moment, and through our art, we will remember, we will resist, and we will defend.

Jenna Hanchard is a visual poet, storyteller, and emerging actor based in King County. Her work weaves poetry, performance, and moving image to explore the intersections of motherhood, grief, and ancestral memory. A former journalist turned filmmaker, Jenna’s practice bridges truth-telling and experimentation, creating visual work that holds space for healing and dialogue among Black women and femmes.

Instagram: @JennaHanchard

Based in Seattle, Washington, Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) is a performing artist, curator, and community organizer. Focusing on sound in the genres of drone, noise and musique-concrete, Galbraith creates avant-garde sound collages centering indigenous experience and epistemologies. Additionally, Galbraith has worked with artists Lori Goldston, Raven Chacon, Jessika Kenney, Warren Realrider, Nathan Young, Chloe Alexandra Thompson, Catherine Guesde, and Noel Kennon. Galbraith regularly collaborates with visual artist Sean Waple in the Audio-Visual duo HMFF, and have exhibited works in Seattle, Berlin, Düsseldorf. New York City and Denver. Galbraith is a member of the indigenous film collective COUSIN and curated for the 2024 Non-Sequitur music series at the Chapel Performance space.

kolegalbraith.bandcamp.com/

instagram.com/klglbrth/

cousincollective.org/

Carlee Heger is a 25 year old skateboarder, filmmaker, and printmaker living in Beacon Hill, Seattle. Her day job is working as the Seattle director for Skate Like a Girl, a non-profit dedicated to promoting confidence, leadership, and social justice through skateboarding. Carlee seeks to diversify both the film and skateboarding industries by highlighting not only underrepresented skateboarders, but also the filmmakers, photographers and animators working behind the scenes. In 2025, she held the premiere of her first video, Boy Joy, at 35th North in Capitol Hill, which was a great success. Beyond filmmaking, she has an artistic background in printmaking where she is inspired by natural elements, animals, and the occult.

Award Statement: Thank you to Northwest Film Forum for recognizing the potential of my project! I am honored by the confidence and support, and excited to develop a multidisciplinary film that celebrates non-traditional skateboarders, creative collaboration, and the Pacific Northwest community that makes this work possible.

youtube.com/@swel1bow

instagram.com/swel1bow/

The eldest child of a Filipina immigrant and a first-generation Filipino-American, Shea Formanes is a Seattle-based writer/filmmaker from New York City. A Dean’s Medal nominee from the University of Washington, she writes genre-bending stories of complicated families from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities. They wrote/directed the romantic coming-of-age short film, The Kettle, the sci-fi/drama stage play, Bahay Kubo, and their award-winning debut feature film, I Watched Her Grow. Shea wrote and directed the fantasy drama short film, Diwata, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film Screenplay at the Nevada City Film Festival and Imagine This Women’s International Film Festival. Diwata was shot entirely in the Greater Seattle Area by a local, diverse crew and an all-Filipino cast, and is currently in post-production, set to begin its film festival run in 2026.

Award Statement: I’m beyond honored and overjoyed to be a recipient of the 2025 New Work / Projects Grant from the Collective Power Fund. I want to give my sincere thanks to the Regional Regranting Program by the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for providing this amazing opportunity, and to the Northwest Film Forum for championing independent filmmakers in Washington. Making Diwata has been a wonderful journey, and with the assistance of the Collective Power Fund, we are able to fund post-production and distribution. My goal is to bring this very personal short film, an ode to multigenerational families, Filipino immigrant grandmothers, and the love that comes from loss, to diverse communities everywhere.

sheaformanes.myportfolio.com/

 @sheaformanes

Sofya Belinskaya is a Ukrainian-American visual artist who weaves elements of the body, landscape, and architecture into ephemeral paintings. Looking through the lens of immigrant experience, she examines how displacement, loss, and recollection shape the stories we tell about the places we have left and those transformed over time. Working in watercolor, oil and graphite on paper, her work reimagines personal and social histories to process painful events, while engaging the fragmented nature of memory and impermanence of being.

Sofya is a Seattle-based artist, and she received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 2011. Recent solo shows include ‘it becomes a mountain’ at SOIL Gallery (2025), and ‘Of Bread and Salt’ at Gallery 4Culture (2024) in Seattle, and group shows at Cornish College of the Arts Behnke Gallery, Carnation Gallery, and Mini Mart City Park. She was a 2024 Neddy Artist Award Painting finalist, and her work has received grants from 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Sofya was an artist-in-residence at AqTushetii in Omalo, Georgia 2024, and at Mineral School in Mineral, WA in 2025. Sofya is an artist-member of SOIL Gallery and a teaching artist in painting at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle.

Award statement: The Collective Power Fund will support the development of a new work, ‘it becomes a mountain’. Inspired by the history of the Berkeley Pit – a former open-pit copper mine turned toxic lake in Butte, MT, I am engaging with the site’s complicated history as an entry point for examining environmental loss and our estranged relationships with the natural world. This funding will support travel, research, and experimentation in a new direction for my work.

sofyabelinskaya.com/

instagram.com/pulpandpencil/

Anastasia Babenko is a Ukrainian writer/director based in Seattle, WA. Her debut short film, The Diaper Cake, earned a Vimeo Staff Pick and screened at more than twenty Oscar-qualifying film festivals worldwide, including Clermont-Ferrand IFF, Palm Springs ShortFest, and Short Shorts & Asia. Her latest project, Siren’s Cove, was developed through Talents Sarajevo Script Lab (2023) and MIDPOINT Shorts (2024–2025) and is now in pre-production.

Award statement: Thank you Northwest Film Forum and the Warhol Foundation for helping bring Siren’s Cove into the world. My short film engages with many ideas, but at its heart is agency. As a Ukrainian director, reclaiming agency is crucial to me artistically, socially, and personally. I’m grateful to be able to make and share this work.

anastasiababenko.com/

instagram.com/anastas.babenko/

Malia Peoples is a Kanaka Maoli and Hakka-American interdisciplinary artist and educator based on Coast Salish lands. Raised between Washington and Hawaii, her work bridges these two worlds, reflecting on identity, belonging, and cultural preservation. Her practice centers on Kapa, Indigenous Hawaiian barkcloth, and community-based artmaking that supports cultural connection and storytelling among Hawaiians in the diaspora. Her work has been supported by the First Peoples Fund, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Cities of Seattle and Bellevue. She is a member of the yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective.

Award Statement: The Collective Power Fund allows me to bring Kapa, Indigenous Hawaiian barkcloth, out from museum collections and into the hands of Seattle’s Rainier Valley community. Sharing this practice encourages the reclamation of our stories and honors our longstanding ties to the Coast Salish. This grant breathes new life into the fabric-making tradition and gives me hope that it will thrive for all generations.

itsmalia.com

instagram.com/otherpeoplespolyester

I was born in Coast Salish Territory and raised by my Matao family practicing collective fishing, funerary rituals, and gathering. At age three, I started dancing in our cultural dance group. My movement skills made me into a nine-year old choreographer and a target of homophobic ridicule. In Seattle, I found kin amongst the overlap of community organizing and hip hop. Challenged to tell my people’s story, I made my first journey to Låguas, my homeland where I trained as an oral historian and ceremony practitioner.

Doing cultural revitalization in the diaspora brought me closer to Squi qui, a Swinomish elder, who taught me to seek the ancient teachings within my ancestral knowing. My creative life became a way to contribute to restoring ináfa’maolek (equity/justice for all living beings).

Nia-Amina Minor is a movement artist, choreographer, curator, and educator originally from Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the body and what it carries using physical and archival research to converse with memory. She has received regional and national commissions for her choreographic work and has a working background as a performer and dramaturg. Nia-Amina is co-founder of Black Collectivity, a collaborative project that curates and creates movement-based experiences that celebrate memory and culture. In 2021, she was listed as Dance Magazine’s 25 Artists to Watch, and one of Seattle Magazine’s Most Influential People in 2025. She was also a 2023-2024 participant of the The Black Embodiments Studio Arts Writing Incubator. Nia-Amina holds a MFA from UC Irvine and a BA from Stanford University.  She is currently a faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University and is the Curating Artist in Residence at Velocity Dance Theater.

Headshot Photo Credit Devin Muñoz

Asia Tail is an artist and community organizer based in Seattle, Washington. Asia attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2014. Her studio practice includes painting, collage, beadwork, and other media.

Asia is the executive director of yəhaẃ Indigenous Creatives Collective, an intertribal arts nonprofit rematriating 1.5 acres of land in South Seattle. She also works as a freelance consultant with cross-sector organizations to channel resources into Indigenous communities. She was the recipient of the first Vadon Foundation Native Artist Fellowship in 2019, and was named one of Seattle’s Most Influential People by Seattle Magazine the same year. In 2022, she was selected to serve on the City of Seattle’s inaugural Indigenous Advisory Council. In 2023, she participated in Harvard Business School’s Young American Leaders Program. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, born and raised on Coast Salish territories.

asiatail.com/

Soo Hong is a nomadic artist based in Seattle, whose transient life across Seoul, London, Milan, Shanghai, and cities in the U.S. informs her sensitivity to fleeting moments and connections found in otherness. Blending media and paint, her work explores shifting emotions within realities that feel both alien and intimate. She holds an MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UK) and a BA from Hongik University (Korea). Soo has received grants from D&AD (UK), GAP (Seattle), and the Bellevue Arts Program, was a finalist for the Neddy Award (Seattle), and has exhibited films at festivals including EmergeandSee (UK), RESFEST (Korea), and Local Sightings (Seattle). She has been commissioned by Nike, Puma, MTV, Miller, Hello Kitty, Meta, and Google.

soo-hong.com

instagram: @soohongartist

Lila Thomas (she/they) is a Seattle-based visual artist and educator from Southern Louisiana, their work is rooted in community, Black & queer joy, rest, and the deep, unspoken understanding that comes from gathering together. Lila’s work captures moments of intimacy, connection, and ease—offering a counter-narrative to the historical erasure of Black and queer identities in Western art. She earned her BFA in Drawing/Painting at Nicholls State University and is currently a teaching artist at the Frye Art Museum and also teaches Figurative Painting and Drawing at Gage Academy of Art, Cornish College of the Arts.

Lila’s work has been featured in Seattle Art Fair, Actualize Gallery, King Street Station, Hometeam Gallery, Hologram Gallery, Koplin Del Rio, Geheim Gallery, Forest for the Trees, Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, Inscape Arts, Manifest Gallery, North Seattle College Art Gallery, Behnke Family Gallery, Gage Academy of Art, Lilith Pole Studios, and Inside Studios.

Award Statement: I’m deeply grateful to receive support from the Collective Power Fund with Northwest Film Forum. This grant provides vital stability for my practice, allowing me to crate and ship my work more easily from my hometown to Seattle and beyond, while continuing to create with greater access to materials and care.

lilathomas.com

instagram: @soylush

Alexandra Kumala works as an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Through moving image, sound, and text-based practices, she works and plays with nontraditional forms that excavate silences, explore the language of absence, and discover ways to articulate the many stories that are otherwise untranslatable and inexpressible. Drawing on her multicultural heritage and a life lived across continents, she uses symbolism, metaphor and allegory to examine shifting borders, language and power dynamics. Alexandra is a graduate of the University of Washington–Seattle with a degree in pre-medicine and global health. For years, her work has interrogated the lingering echoes and remnants of historical, structural and sociopolitical violence. With the Collective Power Fund, she will traverse new terrain confronting generational cycles of silence and secrecy.

alexandrakumala.com

Sadaf Sadri makes work that explores worldbuilding that prompts reflection on gender, ideology, power, and relationality using digital technologies. Sadaf is currently a Ph.D. student at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington. They are the founder and co-curator of the SPAM New Media Festival, a platform for experimental practices in art and technology in Seattle, where they currently live.

D.A. Navoti is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. The author and curator of essays, stories, and multimedia exhibitions, his artistic work spans three landscapes — written, musical, and visual — a hybrid form maximizing Indigenous futures.

Ricky Reyes is a Tacoma-born, researcher, creative, oral historian and museum administration. Trained in digital humanities, coding, and data management at the University of Chicago (M.A. in Digital Studies of Language, History, and Culture), public administration at Seattle University, and in oral history through Seattle’s Black Spatial Histories Institute, Ricky’s previous research and art explore using storytelling and creative expression as a vehicle for change. Ricky’s work experience includes community outreach and program management at and in partnership with arts organizations such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Tacoma Division of Community and Economic Development (Arts & Cultural Vitality), the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Smart Museum of Art.

Arabella is an installation and video artist exploring themes and dreams of their Filipino immigrant experience, culture, and collective liberation. They have too many CRT TVs and are a collector of analog video gear. They are on the advisory board of Short Run, a member of the artist collective House of Kilig, and can be found collaborating with artists in the Seattle/Tacoma area.