Introducing our 2020 Armed With a Camera Fellows

In its eighteenth season, the Armed With a Camera (AWC) Fellowship for Emerging Media Artists nurtures the next generation of Asian Pacific American artists to capture their world, surroundings and outlook on life. Visual Communications will be cultivating a new generation of Asian Pacific American artists committed to preserving the legacy and vision of our communities.

Visual Communications works with the Fellows for six months to provide training, mentoring, networking opportunities, access to facilities and equipment, and a cash stipend to create five-minute short films. Their completed films will premiere at the 2020 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, which will run from April 30 - May 8, 2020.

Highly qualified narrative AWC films will be eligible for the Festival's Golden Reel Award. Recipients of the Golden Reel Award for Narrative/Animation Short Film will be eligible for consideration in the Animated Short Film/Live Action Short Film category of the ACADEMY AWARDS® without the standard theatrical run, provided the film otherwise complies with the Academy® rules.

Meet our new 2019-2020 AWC Fellows below!

Nirav Bhakta

Nirav Bhakta is an award winning Director/Actor/Writer. While growing up as an undocumented immigrant in motels, Nirav utilized the restraints of his environment and geographical boundaries to create with what he had. Nirav's background extends from architecture to the North Indian classical dance form of Kathak. Due to the lack of authentic roles and experiences as an actor, Nirav began creating zero budget short films focusing on the immigrant experience, including a portrait documentary short revolving around an immigrant sex worker who was human trafficked by a drug cartel. In 2019, Nirav and his co-director Gayatri Bajpai were announced as the winners of the HBO APA Visionaries Short Film Competition for their film HALWA, which is now streaming on HBO.

Sandra Carbonell-Kiamtia

Sandra Carbonell-Kiamtia is a documentary filmmaker with a strong background in video journalism and post-production editing. She has a passion for encouraging compassion using film and bringing the arts back into public education. She is excited about the rise of streaming services, while nostalgic for when movies were best consumed in a theatre. Her favorite TV show is AVATAR THE LAST AIRBENDER, and her favorite documentary is ISLAND OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS. Sandra graduated from UCLA with a BA in Film, TV and Digital Media and a minor in Asian American Studies. Since then, she's been working as an editor on a PBS docu-series.

Kristy Choi

Kristy Choi is a Korean American director and producer whose work has been featured on PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, and more. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and completed a DAAD Post-Graduate Fellowship at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She was a 2019 Southern Exposure Film Fellow at Alabama Rivers Alliance and a 2019 North Star Fellow at the Points North Institute. Her work explores themes of power, womanhood, and (un)belonging. In addition to independent filmmaking, Kristy works as a video producer for National Nurses United, traveling the country to document nurse-led advocacy on the frontlines of healthcare injustice.

Katherine Chou

Katherine Chou is a Taiwanese American writer and director. A graduate of Sciences Po Paris, her work is driven by questions of identity and personhood inspired by her itinerant life experience around the world. Having worked as a post-production assistant on a series of features at HBO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox, she continues to hone her craft by producing original fiction work and digital content, as well as collaborating on narrative and episodic indie projects. Most recently, she produced a Chinese-language short in Taiwan and was a participant of Bucheon International Film Festival’s Fantastic Film School in South Korea. She is currently an Associate Producer at Artists at Play in Los Angeles.

Serena Hodges

Serena Violet Hodges is a filmmaker who fell in love with cinematography through verite-style shooting. Serena is based in Los Angeles with deep roots in the Midwest and holds a B.A. from DePaul University in Documentary Production. She has worked on projects ranging from language in India to queer activism. Most recently, she had the honor of working on a 5 part documentary series, ASIAN AMERICANS, which will air on PBS in May 2020. Serena believes in the process of filmmaking as an opportunity to build community and the power and responsibility of the camera as a means to tap into our collective imaginations.

NamQuyen (Q) Le

NamQuyen ‘Q’ Le is an emerging filmmaker and public health practitioner based in Southern California. A descendent of Vietnamese refugees, she pursued her respective Bachelor and Master degrees in Public Health at UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University. Q approaches filmmaking by merging narrative/non-narrative and live-action/animation to further push an interdisciplinary cinematic and public health approach in ethically, accurately, and empathetically framing different perspectives. Her animated documentary film I NEVER PICKED COTTON, recently won BEST COLLEGE FILM at the 2019 Chicago Southland International Film Festival. She currently works at USC as a research and project coordinator at the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

King Lu

King Lu is a Chinese American filmmaker from Atlanta, Georgia and the son of two Chinese immigrants. After studying philosophy and economics at Duke University, he attended the Columbia University Film MFA program in screenwriting/directing. His films have played at festivals around the United States and one won Best Short Film at the Golden Door International Film Festival. His screenplay FROM JUNE TO JULY, an inter-generational epic about community and love, is currently a finalist for the 2020 Humanitas College Drama Fellowship. He is an alumnus of the Telluride Student Symposium, and his mission is to tell unique Asian American stories that resonate with audiences of all backgrounds.

Justin Ricafort

Justin Ricafort is a Filipino American multimedia artist, filmmaker, and writer. He earned his B.A. in Visual Arts and a minor in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. He was awarded runner-up at UCSD’s Adam D. Kamil Media Awards for his suburban memoir FISHBOWL. In addition to working for the San Diego Asian Film Festival and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, he has worked behind the scenes on several major productions including two upcoming miniseries, an independent feature, and the grand opening of Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland. His other ventures include designing THE EVERYONE SHARES ONE BUTT GAME board game and rapping under the alias Sleepy J, all attempts to disrupt and reorient expectations for Asian Americans.

Bryan Sih

Bryan Sih is a multimedia artist and activist who started his career as an educator, working alongside youth to make personal films and music videos using art therapy and community art models. He also worked as a director in ads creation at Youtube. Over time, he transitioned to directing music videos, branded content, documentaries, and narratives. His personal work revolves around themes of immigration, masculinity, and Otherness in the style of “slow cinema." He is in post-production for a narrative film exploring passivity in romantic relationships, and a short documentary about an asylum seeker. He also volunteers with Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED) to organize against gentrification.

So Young Shelly Yo

So Young Shelly Yo is a Korean American filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She is a recent graduate of the MFA film program at Columbia University, where her thesis film MOONWALK WITH ME was awarded faculty honors. Her short films have screened and received accolades at film festivals around the world including the Austin Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, SCAD, and the Sarasota Film Festival. Shelly is an awardee of SFFILM's Sloan Science in Cinema Fellowship for her feature ALL THE STARS SHE BEARS, a finalist for the HBO APA Visionaries competition, winner of Best Student Film at the Deadcenter Film Festival, and the recipient of AT&T's InspirASIAN Film Award. Shelly is currently working as a Researcher for an AppleTV series and developing her first feature.