Sundance Institute announced the 16 jurors who will grant awards for artistic and cinematic excellence at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival that will run Jan. 18-28 in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, along with a selection of films available online across the country from Jan. 25-28.
This year marks the 40th edition of the festival, bringing together audiences in Utah and beyond to celebrate Sundance’s rich history of supporting engaging new stories and groundbreaking independent artists.
Sundance also announced the five jury members who will present the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.
The 16-member jury is composed of a diverse range of critical voices across film, art and culture, and in honor of the festival’s 40th edition, all are festival alumni, who are returning not only to serve on the jury but also to partake in celebratory programming that will range from talks and panels, to a special 40th edition trivia night and party for artist alumni.
“For our 40th Festival, the jury members this year are all artists who have had films at prior Festivals,” said Kim Yutani, director of programming. “They know what it is to introduce new work to the Sundance community and we are so pleased to be able to welcome them back to Sundance to take in the films our programming team has curated. We can’t wait to see what resonates with them.”
The jury will announce the awards for feature films — across five competition sections — at an intimate award ceremony held at The Ray Theatre in Park City on Friday, Jan. 26, and the short film jury winners will be announced at the Shorts Awards & Party presented by Argo and WeShort on Tuesday, Jan. 23.
Films in competition categories awarded by the jury will be screened in person and via the online festival platform from Jan. 27-28.
Both online and in-person Award Winners Packages, which include eight tickets for award-winner screenings, are on sale through Jan. 5. Single film ticket sales begin at 10 a.m. on Jan. 11.
“The Sundance Film Festival is known for discovering and platforming visionary emerging artists,” said Eugene Hernandez, Festival Director. “We cannot do this without our jury, who so thoughtfully help us recognize and amplify the next generation of independent storytellers. We are thrilled to announce the talented, accomplished artists who comprise this year’s jury.”
The 2024 Sundance Film Festival jury includes: Debra Granik, Adrian Tomine and Lena Waithe for U.S. Dramatic Competition; Shane Boris, Nicole Newnham and Rudy Valdez for U.S. Documentary Competition; Jennifer Kent, Mira Nair and Rui Poças for World Cinema Dramatic Competition; Mandy Chang, Monica Hellström and Shaunak Sen for World Cinema Documentary Competition; Christina Oh, Danny Pudi and Charlotte Regan for Short Film Program Competition; and Zal Batmanglij for the NEXT competition section.
Following are the 2024 Sundance Film Festival Jury members and their respective sections:
U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION JURY
Debra Granik is the director and co-writer of Winter’s Bone, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
She also directed “Down To The Bone,” “Stray Dog” and “Leave No Trace.” Her new six-part limited series documentary, “Conbody VS Everybody,” spanning eight years, follows the experiences of people reentering New York City after incarceration.
Adrian Tomine is the writer-illustrator of the graphic novels “Shortcomings,” “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist” and “Killing and Dying.”
Since 1999, his illustrations have appeared on the cover and in the pages of The New Yorker. Tomine wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of “Shortcomings,” which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and three other of his stories were the basis for the 2022 film “Paris, 13th District.”
Lena Waithe is an Emmy-winning writer, producer, actor and founder of Hillman Grad, a media company providing opportunities for marginalized storytellers to access the industry.
Known for “Master of None,” “The Chi” and “Queen & Slim,” Waithe’s latest credits include the Emmy-nominated “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” “A Thousand and One,” “Kokomo City” and the Tony-nominated “Ain’t No Mo’.”
U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION JURY
Shane Boris is an Academy Award-winning and two-time Academy Award-nominated producer and writer, working on films that push the boundaries of conventional form in order to tell timeless stories.
His films have premiered at festivals like Sundance and Venice, screened in museums including the Louvre and MoMA, and have won BAFTA and Peabody Awards.
Recent films include “Hollywoodgate,” “King Coal,” “Navalny,” “Fire of Love,” “Stray,” “The Edge of Democracy” and “The Seer and the Unseen.”
Nicole Newnham is an Academy Award-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary producer and director, five-time Sundance Film Festival alum, and six-time Emmy nominee.
She directed the critically acclaimed 2023 film “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” and also co-directed and produced the 2021 Academy Award-nominated, Sundance Audience Award-winning documentary “Crip Camp” with Jim LeBrecht. Her other acclaimed documentaries include the Emmy-nominated films, “The Revolutionary Optimists,” “Sentenced Home” and “The Rape of Europa.”
Rudy Valdez is a two-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. His directorial debut, “The Sentence” (HBO, 2018), premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, winning the U.S. Documentary Audience award, and going on to win the primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.
His most recent projects include “We Are: The Brooklyn Saints” (Netflix, 2021), “Breakaway” (ESPN, 2021), “Reopening Night” (HBO, 2022), “Carlos” (Sony Picture Classics, 2023) and the upcoming six-part series, “Choir” (Disney+ 2024).
WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION JURY
Jennifer Kent graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (alums include Cate Blanchett and Mel Gibson) and has worked extensively as an actor in Australia.
Her first film, “The Babadook,” premiered at Sundance in 2014 and received over 100 nominations and awards internationally.
Kent’s second film, “The Nightingale,” won the Jury Prize and the Marcello Mastroianni award at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. Recently, she wrote and directed an episode of “Cabinet of Curiosities” for Netflix, and her third feature, “Alice + Freda Forever,” is slated to shoot in 2024.
Mira Nair is an Academy Award-nominated director best known for her visually dense films that pulsate with life: “Salaam Bombay!” (1988), “Monsoon Wedding” (2001), “The Namesake “(2006), “Mississippi Masala” (1991) and “A Suitable Boy” (2020).
Her most recent endeavor was “Monsoon Wedding: The Musical,” which opened in New York City in spring 2023 and is bound for Broadway. And her next film will be “AMRI,” an experimental portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil.
An activist by nature, Nair founded the Salaam Baalak Trust in 1988 and the Maisha Film Lab in 2004. In 2012, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor.
Rui Poças is a Portuguese award-winning cinematographer who earned an international reputation for his breathtaking images and fluid storytelling in a versatile range of genres. Poças’ work is behind several groundbreaking films such as “O Fantasma” and “The Ornithologist” by Joao Pedro Rodrigues, “Tabu” by Miguel Gomes, “Zama” by Lucrecia Martel, “The Good Manners” by Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, and “Frankie” by Ira Sachs. He is also teaching and mentoring at several international film universities and film labs.
WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION JURY
Mandy Chang is the creative director of Fremantle’s premium documentary strand, Undeniable. Previously an award-winning documentary producer-director, Chang was commissioning editor at ABC TV and head of BBC Storyville — the BBC’s legendary international documentary strand.
At Storyville, she created a slate of much-talked-about documentaries, among them “Collective,” “Welcome to Chechnya,” “The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea” and “Writing with Fire,” while extending Storyville’s breadth and diversity and guiding new talent into the field.
Monica Hellström is a three-time Academy Award-nominee for producing “Flee,” nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature in 2022, and “A House Made of Splinters,” which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature in 2023.
She’s a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was selected for Producer on “The Move” (Cannes 2020). She started her company Ström Pictures in May 2022 and before that had been a producer at Final Cut for Real for 12 years.
Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and scholar from Delhi. His film All That Breathes earned Academy Award, BAFTA and Directors Guild of America nominations and won over 25 awards, including the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Eye at Cannes.
His first documentary, “Cities of Sleep,” was shown at various festivals and won six international awards. Sen is the recipient of grants from Sundance, Catapult, Tribeca and IDFA.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM COMPETITION JURY
Christina Oh is an Academy Award-nominated producer, who worked on Bong Joon Ho’s Okja and Joe Talbot’s feature film debut, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.”
Most recently, she produced “Minari,” written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to receive six Academy Award nominations, and one of the film’s cast members, Youn Yuh-jung, won Korea’s first-ever Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Oh’s past television credits include “LEGO Masters” and “Paper Girls.”
In late 2023, she partnered with Academy Award-nominated Steven Yeun to head his production company, Celadon Pictures.
Danny Pudi is an actor, writer and director currently starring in AppleTV+’s “Mythic Quest.” Pudi’s breakout role was on “Community,” which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Critic’s Choice Awards.
Other notable credits include “Somebody I Used to Know” (Amazon), “The Tiger Hunter” (Netflix), “Strange Planet” (Apple TV+) and Netflix’s upcoming “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
Pudi recently directed an episode of “Mythic Quest” and his ESPN 30 for 30 short, “Untucked,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Charlotte Regan is a British film director. She started her career directing rap music videos and short films. Her first short, “Standby,” nominated for a BAFTA, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was part of Sundance Ignite.
In 2023, her debut feature film, “Scrapper,” won the Grand Jury Prize for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.
NEXT JUROR
Zal Batmanglij is a writer, director, and showrunner. He made his debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with the micro-budget “Sound of My Voice,” co-written by and starring Brit Marling, which was picked up by Searchlight Pictures.
The two went on to collaborate on “The East,” about climate activists and starring Marling, Elliot Page and Alexander Skarsgård, and to create “The OA,” a long-form odyssey about near-death experiences that debuted on Netflix during the streamer’s pioneering phase.
Batmanglij and Marling’s most recent collaboration, FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” is a reimagining of the whodunit genre starring Emma Corrin, Marling, Harris Dickinson and Clive Owen.
ALFRED P. SLOAN FEATURE FILM PRIZE JURY
The jury for the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize deliberated ahead of the Festival and awarded the prize to “Love Me,” directed by Sam and Andy Zuchero.
The jury, which includes both film and science professionals, presents the award to an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.
This jury includes: Dr. Mandë Holford, Dr. Nia Imara, Matt Johnson, Theresa Park and Courtney Stephens.
Dr. Mandë Holford is marine chemical biologist at Hunter College and The CUNY Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine.
Her mollusks-to-medicine research uses venoms and venomous marine animals to study rapidly evolving genes and cellular communication in pain and cancer. She co-founded Killer Snails, LLC, a learning games company, and her honors include a Distinguished Investigator Award from Allen Institute, an E.E. Just Fellow by the Marine Biological Laboratory and a Sustainability Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.
Dr. Nia Imara is an astrophysicist and artist whose body of work reflects her love for vibrant color, people and their stories.
Imara is a professor of astronomy at U.C. Santa Cruz, where she explores how stars are born in the Milky Way and galaxies throughout the universe. Imara is the founding director of Onaketa, a nonprofit that provides free STEM tutoring and other educational resources for BIPOC children.
Matt Johnson was born in Toronto and directed “The Dirties” (2013), “Operation Avalanche” (2016) and “BlackBerry” (2023).
He is also co-creator of the cult comedy series “Nirvanna the Band the Show” (2017-2019), and as an actor he has appeared in “Anne at 1,300 Feet” (2020) and “Matt and Mara” (2023).
Johnson also teaches in the film department at York University alongside his producing partner, Matthew Miller.
Theresa Park is the founder and president of Per Capita Productions, developing TV shows at Apple and Amazon Studios, as well as feature films with A24, Universal and other producing partners.
Park was a producer on the feature films “The Best of Me,” “The Longest Ride,” “Bones and All” and “After Yang,” which had its U.S. debut at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.
Courtney Stephens is a writer/director of nonfiction and experimental films, and is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship to India.
“The American Sector,” her documentary about fragments of the Berlin Wall, was named one of the best films of 2021 in The New Yorker. Her essay film, “Terra Femme,” comprised of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick.
In addition to these jurors, Sundance Film Festival audiences attending in person will also have a role in voting for the 2024 Audience Awards.
Their votes will be open to films in the U.S. Competition, World Competition and NEXT categories. Attendees are also able to vote for the Festival Favorite, which is selected across all in-person eligible feature film screenings. For information, visit sundance.org/?s=jury.
