JURORS

Born and raised in Athens, she graduated from the department of Audiovisual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She  completed her post-graduate degree in Information and Communication Technologies  for Education at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. She currently works  as production manager in animation films and advertisement. She also teaches Visual  Media in Educational Practice at AKTO College’s MA Art & Education and heads  experiential workshops in stop-motion animation and audiovisual media for adults,  educators and special groups (disabled, adult detoxification and dexterity groups, adult  groups in prisons). In the past few years, she has been coordinating educational  programs, while also working in animation production. 

A native New Yorker, she moved to Athens in 2003. After attending NYU film school, she worked as a sound editor on the Maysles brothers’ Emmy award winner “Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic”, Sundance contender “Ozawa” and Deborah Dickson’s “Francis Steloff: Memoirs of a Bookseller”. She worked on Anita Thacher’s experimental films “Loose Corner”, “One Art” and “To the Top”, all of which screened at the New York Film Festival. In 1989 she directed her first feature documentary “A Quality of Light”. In 1994 she became the deputy director of the Hellenic Foundation in NYC, where she started the NYC Greek Film Festival and curated a monthly program for the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. She was an adjunct professor of film at Queens College from 1993-2002. Her second feature, “Who’s on First?” (2006), aired in the US, Greece, Finland and South Korea. Her third feature, “Mana” (2015), went viral during the 2018 wildfires in Greece, helping the nuns featured in it rebuild their orphanage. She founded production company Exile Films in Athens in 2007, initially producing doc series for national Greek broadcaster ERT before expanding to other realms. She is on the Board of Directors of the Greek Cinematheque since 2011, and has been operating non-profit Exile Room, focusing on social outreach through documentary, since 2009. She recently completed “Queen of the Deuce” which premiered at DocNYC Film Festival.

Michalis Mathioudakis was born in 1987 in Athens. He studied Physics in the University of Crete and Cinema in the University of Greenwich. He works in the film industry since 2016. Three of his scripts have been funded by the Greek Film Centre and ERT Broadcasting Television. He is the founder of the production house Abajour Films. He works as a screenwriter, director and producer. He loves Greek cinema