2021 Jurors

Mike Plante (BFA, 1994) is a Senior Programmer for Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival, where he has worked since 2001. He started working for The Arizona International Film Festival in 1993 and continued to be a programmer and projectionist at The Screening Room for a decade. He projected films at The Loft Cinema from 1996-1999, helped start The Loft Film Fest, and worked at Casa Video for longer than he can remember. Outside of fest work he makes documentaries, including the short The Polaroid Job (2016, New York Times Op-Doc series), the feature Giuseppe Makes A Movie (2014) and most recently the feature And With Him Came the West, which premiered at the 2019 MoMA Doc Fortnight festival.

Nicholas Snell (BFA, 2014) is a first generation queer hapa writer. In 2018 he was a semi-finalist for Screencraft’s 5th Annual Screenwriting Fellowship. Most recently, he was a semi-finalist in the 2019 Outfest Screenwiting Lab as well as a semi-finalist for the 2019 Disney|ABC Writing Program. Born in Denver, CO, he lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he works as an A/V Coordinator for Lucasfilm.

Katie Walsh is a Los Angeles-based film critic and journalist, reviewing weekly film releases for the Tribune News Service, Los Angeles Times, and The Playlist, while occasionally making appearances on KCRW’s Press Play with Madeline Brand and KPCC’s Film Week.

Her work has also appeared in Playboy, Slate, The Hairpin, indieWIRE, Women and Hollywood, Town & Country, Movieline, Nonfics, and more. Katie is also member of the LA Film Critics Association. She earned her B.A. in Film Studies from Wesleyan University, and her M.A. in Critical Studies from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.