Selected from 95 applicants, four filmmakers will receive $5,000 awards, mentorship, professional development, industry access, and two-year NYWIFT memberships
New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) today announced the four filmmakers selected for the 2026 NYWIFT New York | Puerto Rico Collaborative Media Pipeline, an initiative supporting culturally significant work by filmmakers connected to Puerto Rico.
Selected from a competitive pool of 95 applicants, the 2026 cohort includes two filmmakers based in the New York metropolitan area and two based in Puerto Rico. Each selected filmmaker will receive a $5,000 award for their project, individual mentorship, professional development opportunities, strategic industry introductions, access to NYWIFT programming, and a two-year NYWIFT membership.
The selected filmmakers and projects are:
Inés Mongil Echandi – I Am Lolita Lebrón
I Am Lolita Lebrón explores the life and legacy of Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who led the 1954 armed attack on the U.S. Congress and subsequently spent 25 years in federal prison. Drawing on extensive archival footage, newsreels, and interviews with Lebrón spanning decades, the documentary allows her to tell her own story while examining how colonial power shaped the historical record. Through an intimate and poetic portrait, the film moves beyond the act that defined Lebrón in the public imagination to explore her spirituality, poetry, political convictions, and lifelong commitment to Puerto Rican independence. The film asks who controls history, memory, and representation.
Inés Mongil Echandi studied Cinema at NYU and played a key role in preserving more than 100 films produced by Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education in the 1950s. A DGA member and former Production Manager, she has worked on productions including She’s Gotta Have It, If Beale Street Could Talk, El Cantante, Piñero, Contact, The Pérez Family, and Amistad. She co-directed the award-winning short documentary Clubman 13.3.13 and is currently developing I Am Lolita Lebrón and Los vapores de sor Emilia.
Contessa Gayles – Untitled
Confidential documentary project with details forthcoming.
Contessa Gayles is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose feature documentary-visual album Songs from the Hole (Netflix) premiered at SXSW 2024, winning the Audience Award and an Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction. Her work includes The Debutantes (Peacock) and Founder Girls (BET), and has been supported by Impact Partners, Sundance Institute, and the International Documentary Association. A former CNN producer and director, Gayles is a DOC NYC 40 Under 40 honoree and Concordia fellow.
Sayeeda Moreno – An Ambivalent Daughter
An Ambivalent Daughter follows filmmaker A. Sayeeda Moreno as she confronts the archive of her late mother, Cenén Moreno, an Afro-Puerto Rican artist, poet, writer, and radical community organizer who helped shape New York City’s Lower East Side cultural and political life. An invitation to participate in the Nuyorican Poets Café Founders Archive Project reopens Sayeeda’s painful relationship with her mother and leads her through decades of paintings, poems, letters, recordings, and memories. As she explores her mother’s legacy and their complicated bond, the film examines grief, cultural erasure, motherhood, and political resistance while asking who gets to preserve, shape, and tell history.
Sayeeda Moreno is a filmmaker whose character-driven work explores humanity, resilience, and love, drawing on her upbringing in New York City’s bohemian communities. Her films have screened at SXSW, BAMCinemafest, Brooklyn Film Festival, Tribeca Festival, and other venues, with support from the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, ITVS/PBS, and Tribeca. She earned her MFA from NYU Tisch as a Dean’s Fellow and teaches at Bard College. Her current projects include the coming-of-age lesbian romance Out in the Dunesand memoir-based essay film An Ambivalent Daughter.
Glorimar Marrero Sánchez – Agua Brava (Wild Water)
Agua brava (Wild Water) follows Marisa, a middle-aged surfer, lifeguard, and archivist facing eviction from her longtime Puerta de Tierra apartment as developers transform Puerto Rico’s coastline. After rescuing an elderly tourist from drowning, Marisa becomes haunted by his death and the indifference surrounding it. As she struggles with displacement, family pressure, and the loss of public space, she retreats to her family’s abandoned home in the mountains while documenting the island’s coastal history. But another drowning draws her back to the sea. As her life disappears around her, Marisa enters the water one final time, confronting the forces she can no longer outrun.
Glorimar Marrero Sánchez is a Puerto Rican filmmaker, screenwriter-director, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores body, memory, territory, colonialism, and displacement. Her debut feature, La Pecera (The Fishbowl), premiered at Sundance in 2023 and became the first Puerto Rican film nominated for a Goya Award for Best Ibero-American Film. Her work has received support from the Tribeca Film Institute, NEA, AmDoc, and IBERMEDIA. She is currently developing her second feature, Agua brava (Wild Water), and lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
“The four projects selected for this cohort represent the breadth, creativity, and urgency of the stories being developed by filmmakers from the Puerto Rican diaspora,” said Cynthia López, CEO of NYWIFT. “NYWIFT is proud to bring together resources, mentorship, professional opportunities, and a community that connects New York and Puerto Rico. Our goal is not simply to help these projects move forward, but to support the filmmakers behind them as they build meaningful and sustainable careers and continue telling stories that reflect the richness and complexity of Puerto Rican life and culture.”
The NYWIFT New York | Puerto Rico Collaborative Media Pipeline supports filmmakers practicing in Puerto Rico who are creating projects related to Puerto Rico or developing and/or shooting projects on the island. As part of the NYWIFT Creative Workforce Initiative, the program supports mid-career industry executives and creatives working both above and below the line.
The initiative fosters a community of filmmakers dedicated to creative work connected to Puerto Rico through grants, screenings, film festival events, mentorship, masterclasses, convenings, and peer events.
Supporting Puerto Rican Stories and Creative Workers
The expansion of the New York | Puerto Rico Collaborative Media Pipeline comes at a time of both growing creative activity and continuing disparities in media representation.
According to the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics, the number of graduates in creative disciplines in Puerto Rico increased by 26.4% between 2021 and 2022, with 1,930 people graduating in 2022 from programs related to art, design, technology, and media, compared with 1,527 graduates in 2021. The growth reflects increasing interest and participation in creative careers on the island, while also underscoring the need for opportunities and professional infrastructure that can help creative workers build sustainable careers.
Representation gaps remain significant across the broader media industry. Data USA reports that Hispanic workers represented only 13.3% of producers and directors in the United States in 2024. Among those Hispanic producers and directors, Puerto Rican workers represented 16.8%.
The NYWIFT program is designed to help address these gaps by providing filmmakers with direct financial support while also connecting them with mentors, industry leaders, professional training, and opportunities in both New York and Puerto Rico.
Juror and NYWIFT Board Member Amenya Makuku said of selected filmmaker A Sayeeda Moreno’s project: “Ms. Moreno laid an incredibly rich and textured tapestry that spoke so beautifully for the legacy and place of Puerto Ricans and women and queer folk in both the history and the history of struggle in and by Americans. It used an archive of deeply personal materials to create connection and advocacy across demographics, and I look forward to how it all comes together.”
A Comprehensive Program of Financial and Professional Support
Each of the four selected projects will receive a $5,000 award, along with individual mentorship and access to a range of professional development and networking opportunities.
Program highlights include community premieres in New York City at an Oscar-qualifying venue and in Puerto Rico at leading cultural and educational institutions; in-person NYWIFT Salon Conversations featuring intimate speaker receptions and dinners; and two cohort and mentor convenings, with one in New York and one in Puerto Rico.
Participants will also receive “Art of the Pitch” masterclasses led by accomplished filmmakers and industry leaders. The first was in August with director and producer Cecilia Aldarondo, a filmmaker from the Puerto Rican diaspora whose award-winning work has been featured by HBO, PBS, Tribeca, and SXSW. Aldarondo’s feature documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart and Landfall premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the PBS series POV. Her third feature, You Were My First Boyfriend, premiered at SXSW in 2023 and was co-produced by HBO. Her newest co-directed film, Dear Ms: A Revolution in Print, premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and is currently streaming on HBO Max.
Participants will also receive strategic introductions to corporate and nonprofit leaders facilitated by the NYWIFT Board of Directors and CEO Cynthia López.
Selected by Industry Leaders
The four filmmakers were selected through an open application process by a jury of industry leaders representing film, media, arts administration, culture, and advocacy.
The jury included:
Zenaida Mendez, Former NYWIFT Board Member and Chief External Affairs Officer at Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) Media Center. A pioneering leader in community media, public service, and civic advocacy, Mendez began her work in public access television as an MNN community producer in the early 1990s and has maintained a longstanding commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices. She is also the author of Amor y Desamor de la Diáspora (Love & Heartbreak of the Diaspora).
Amenya Makuku is an independent producer and former development exec, whose most recent credits include Co-Executive Producer on Oscar-nominated short Red, White and Blue and Producer on Craig Webster’s debut feature Woman in the Cabinet (in post). She co-produced director Josephine Decker’s Sundance smash Madeline’s Madeline. Previous tenures include Class 5 Films, where Amenya worked on Thanks For Sharing; FilmNation Entertainment, where she worked on Oscar-nominated films Room and Arrival; and 4th Power Films, where she is presently developing a slate with Courtney Lee-Mitchell. 4th Power’s slate includes the projects Marrying Anita (pilot, based on the memoir by Anita Jain); Take My Hand (based on the bestselling novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez), and original projects Sea of Moscow (feature) by Playwrights Realm Fellow David Zax (Destiny Lilly, CD/CSA attached) and Green Hill (TV) by The Writers Lab and WGAE Fellow Zuri Rice. Amenya is also producing the project Rati by award winning writer-director Thato Mwosa (recipient Brother Thomas Fellowship). She is the Film/TV advisor for theatre-incubator The Playwright’s Realm. She additionally mentors for The Writers Lab. She sits on the Board of Directors for New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT).
Diana Ramos-Gutiérrez is a cultural agent, journalist, photographer, and audiovisual producer who has considered Vieques, Puerto Rico, her home for the past decade. Her work focuses on memory and human rights. She collaborates with independent media outlets across Latin America, the United States, and Puerto Rico. She has been involved in various communications and archival projects, including Radio Vieques and the Vieques Historical Archive. She is the director of the Vieques Film and Human Rights Festival.
Neyda Martinez, NYWIFT Board Member, Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Media Management in the School of Media Studies, and Co-Director of the university-wide Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative. Her fellowships include the 2023 to 2024 Sundance x Adobe “Woman to Watch,” the Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research, and the Sundance Documentary Producing Lab.
Frances Medina, Chief of Strategic Partnerships at 9 Milliones. With more than 10 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups as a communications and development consultant, Medina works to connect people with the issues they care about through storytelling, technology, and digital platforms.
Building on a Growing Connection Between New York and Puerto Rico
NYWIFT originally launched the New York | Puerto Rico Collaborative Media Pipeline in 2022 with early support for two films scheduled for completion in 2027: Coquito by Bienvenida Matías and El Pueblo vs. Austeridad / The People vs. Austerity by Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran.
The 2026 expansion builds upon that early work with a more extensive program of grants, industry events, mentorship, professional development, screenings, film festival programming, and opportunities for connection between filmmakers and industry leaders in New York and Puerto Rico.
The program recognizes that supporting filmmakers requires more than funding individual projects. By bringing together financial support, mentorship, professional education, peer community, and industry access, NYWIFT aims to help creative workers at different stages of their careers develop the skills, relationships, and opportunities needed to sustain their work over time.
For more information about the NYWIFT New York | Puerto Rico Collaborative Media Pipeline, visit the NYWIFT website at https://www.nywift.org/ny-pr-pipeline/.
The NYWIFT New York | Puerto Rico Collaborative Media Pipeline Initiative is supported by Mellon Foundation.
