Alliance Of Women Directors Set 2025 Fellowship Participants

Rosy Cordero
·6-min read

EXCLUSIVE: The Alliance of Women Directors has set its Rising Director Fellowship class of 2025: Mora Carew, Robin Cloud, Lisa Cole, Saray Bravo Guidetti, Dana Nachman, Jenn Shaw, and Allex Tarr.

AWD’s mission advocates to increase opportunities for women and nonbinary directors working in the screened content industry through robust advocacy, craft development programs, and mentorship.

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The year-long intensive fosters directors who have achieved substantial success in the short-form space and are attached to direct their first narrative feature film. The program supports these directors through educational and networking opportunities, mentorship, and the opportunity to create a Proof of Concept for their feature projects. The journey concludes with an Industry Screening of the shorts.

Each candidate underwent rigorous vetting and was chosen from a pool of 18 finalists who were interviewed by AWD Icon Members Mary Lou Belli, Kelly Park, Rachel Ramist, Aida Rodriguez, Rosemary Rodriguez, and Bethany Rooney, Advisory Board Members Jonathan Frank, Karen Horne, and Jeanne Mau, as well as AWD Founder and Chair Jennifer Warren.

“We are thrilled to welcome this exceptional new class of directors for the 2025 Rising Director Fellowship,” says Kylie Eaton, Co-Chair of the Board of Directors, and head of the RDF program.

“These talented individuals bring a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and voices that are essential to the future of storytelling. We are proud to support their journeys and provide them with the tools and community to amplify their unique contributions to an industry that deeply needs inclusivity and innovation at this moment in time,” she added.

Learn more about each Rising Director and their projects below.

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Mora Carew is a Nigerian-American writer, director, and producer whose fantasy/drama short film 2 Eye Drops from Normal won the Programmers’ Award for Short Narrative at the Oscar-qualifying Pan African Film Festival and was subsequently licensed by AMC Networks. Her sci-fi/fantasy short Paint premiered at the 2024 Berlin Sci-Fi Filmfest and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Wyoming International Film Festival. She is an alumna of the Upright Citizens Brigade and a 4x recipient of their Diversity Scholarship. Carew participated in the Alliance of Women Directors ‘Directing the Actor’ Lab, and her debut romantasy feature Nadia Zarkovna, about a present-day podcast host who falls in love with an early 1900s soldier living through the Spanish Flu, was selected for the 2025 AWD Rising Directors Fellowship.

Robin Cloud is an artist, director, writer, and comedian whose films have been screened at festivals including BFI, Tribeca, TIFF, and Outfest. Last year, Cloud was a Blacklist x WIF Feature Residency Writer, where she developed her feature film About Face, which follows a young Black lesbian who, after getting kicked out of an elite boarding school, finds freedom and herself in the small-town Ball culture of Hartford, Connecticut. Additional credits include This Old House for 20th Digital Studio and her docu-series, Passing: A Family in Black & White, produced by Topic Studios. Warner Bros. selected Cloud as one of six filmmakers who reimagined classic films. Her next short, the comedic musical Calamity Jane will premiere on Max later this year. As the founder of Cloud Creative Media, she leads a production company dedicated to creating compelling scripted and documentary films and series.

Lisa Cole is a writer and director whose work is shaped by living with 201 host families across 12 countries. Her 2024 Oscar-Shortlisted short film, Bienvenidos a Los Angeles, was inspired by a true immigration story and screened at over 70 festivals. The project won the Diversity in Cannes Short Film Showcase, sponsored by Viola Davis. Cole specializes in adapting true stories exploring gender, neglect, and redemption. Current projects include Diamond Girls, a feature film with Selena Gomez and producer Laura Bickford, and Filthy, a Sundance Development Lab Finalist. Filthy is based on Cole’s evangelical Arkansas upbringing, a 13-year-old girl’s sexual awakening collides with her born-again mother’s purity demands, sparking a rebellious journey that exposes family secrets and challenges the religious institutions controlling young women’s bodies.

Saray Bravo Guidetti is a writer, director, and producer whose primary objective is to infuse authenticity and emotional depth while enhancing the narrative with impactful messages. In 2023, she directed an episode of The Blacklist (Sony/NBCU) and recently produced U.S. and Mexico stories for a Spanish docu-series about climate solutions. Other projects include the doc American DREAMers, Entanglement, a web series pilot and the short film Lady Justice. As a producer, her credits include the CW’s Supergirl, Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives, the film Home Delivery, and the Max documentary film Love, Lizzo. Her selected project to realize as part of the AWD fellowship is Us and the Road, which follows an affluent Bolivian rally race-car driver who falls in love with his mechanic’s activist daughter who secretly races cars; the two lovers defy their families and society to be together and ultimately become racing partners.

Dana Nachman is a filmmaker focusing on fiction and documentary projects and owns the Sweet World Films production company. Nachman specializes in pulling out the emotion in any story. The former journalist premiered her first film Witch Hunt at the Toronto Film Festival, which was exec produced and narrated by Sean Penn and was purchased by MSNBC Films. She has won Best Female Director awards at the Cleveland International Film Festival and Seattle International Film Festival. IFC Films purchased her 2020 doc, Dear Santa, which was later adapted to series at ABC and Pick of the Litter (2018), which currently streams on Netflix and was adapted to series at Disney+. Her AWD film is Writing For Timothee, which follows Sidney Knight, a reclusive screenwriter who accidentally sends out her guilty-pleasure rom-com script—and suddenly finds herself making a movie with her lifelong crush, Timothee Chalamet.

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Jenn Shaw is a DGA award-winning director and executive producer specializing in genre stories that champion the underdog, celebrate quirks, and showcase unique cultural experiences. She received a Black Reel Award for her ESPN film $15 Kicks, executive produced by Spike Lee. Over the last few years, she’s directed projects like Charlie and the Hunt starring Lauren Ridloff and, the 2024 NAACP Image Award-nominated Gaps, executive produced by Queen Latifah as part of the Queen Collective initiative. Her selected project for AWD is the film Lollies, which follows a small-town gymnast ousted from her team who must navigate the intense world of Southern competitive cheerleading to get her last shot at victory.

Allex Tarr is a director whose journey began at BuzzFeed, where she worked her way up to Senior Branded Creative Director. She led the team that developed and launched multiple channels, including the popular recipe channel, Tasty. She wrote, produced, and directed the short film, The Ritz, a romance-period piece set in her small town in Oklahoma in 1950. The film was accepted into many festivals including the Academy Award-qualifying LA Shorts. Tarr will next direct her first feature film, Exit Strategy with the support of the Alliance of Women Directors’ Rising Directors Fellowship in 2025. It follows the aspiring film director, Dillon, who is completely in control – so much so that she directs the movie as we (the audience) watch it. But when her longtime boyfriend, Beau, wavers on their foolproof plan to get out of Oklahoma, Dillon learns that life isn’t a movie; no matter how hard she tries, she cannot control it.


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