2025 New Voices Filmmaker Grant Recipients

MG Evangelista is a Filipino American writer-director. Evangelista’s work spans narrative, commercial, and documentary filmmaking, exploring themes of identity, power and love. In 2024, Evangelista took part in Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab and Fast Track for their debut feature, BURNING WELL. The project and Evangelista have been supported by Tribeca Film Institute, Array, Torino FilmLab and SFFILM Rainin Grant. The feature is inspired by their award-winning short film Fran This Summer, which played in over 30 festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival. Evangelista received their MFA in Writing and Directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and was a 2023 United States Artist Fellow and most recently an AFI DWW+ Directing Participant.

Shuli Huang is a Chinese writer-director and cinematographer based in New York City whose work drifts between fiction and documentary. His short film, Will You Look at Me, premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2022 where it received the Queer Palm Award and went on to win the Short Film Jury Award at Sundance Film Festival 2023. In 2024, his short film, Goodbye First Love, premiered in competition at the Berlinale Shorts and was later presented at New Directors/New Films. As a cinematographer, Shuli’s work includes feature films FAREWELL, MY HOMETOWN (recipient of the New Currents Award, Busan 2021) and BORROWED TIME (IFFR 2024, Busan 2023). Shuli holds a BFA in cinematography from the Beijing Film Academy and an MFA in film directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

The first time Farah Jabir saw an exorcism, she was 8 years old, and so began a love affair with low budget horror cinema; her gateway drug to indie filmmaking. Now based in NYC, she directs short documentary and narrative films, produces music videos and commercials, and every now and then when the stars align, writes for TV. She is a recent alum of Film Independent’s Producing Lab, Mentorship Matters (Amazon/Sony), The Thousand Miles Project (UCP) and the Asian-American Stories of Resilience programme (PBS/A-Docs). Her credits include commercials and music videos for clients like Nissan, Conde Nast, and Modelo, and screenings at SXSW, NewFest, and Raindance. She is Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Arab; a cross-cultural blend that has shaped her desire to pursue humanistic stories, centering people on the fringes of society and communal filmmaking outside of linguistic, genre, and geographic limitations. Her most recent short, Kasbi, had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival. Her next film, Hantu, will be her first attempt at directing something scary.

Kevin Xian Ming Yu is a non-binary filmmaker from Queens, NY. They were a 2023-2024 UFO Short Film Lab filmmaker and a 2024 Film at Lincoln Center Artist Academy Fellow. They were also selected to participate in the 2024/2025 NewFest/Concord Originals Sound & Scene Cohort. Their latest short film, Yú Cì (Fish Bones), had its world premiere at SXSW 2025 and received a Special Jury Mention at the Provincetown Film Festival. Kevin is committed to telling stories that start empathetic conversations across generations within Asian-American communities and diaspora. Kevin has also worked as a cinematographer on various short form content and two feature films. Their work as a cinematographer has screened at festivals such as Sundance, SXSW, New Orleans Film Festival, and Nashville Film Festival, and has been featured on Short of the Week and the A.V. Club.