Introducing the Jurors for the Sustainable Artist Fellowship

We’re back—and reimagining what support looks like for our community. As we relaunch this beloved program in a new form, we’re honored to have a jury of brilliant BGDM members shaping this next chapter. Meet the jurors who will be selecting this year’s micro-grant fellows—filmmakers and storytellers who center impact, resistance, and care in their work.

Ruun Nuur is an independent cinematic practitioner with a diasporic gaze hyper-focused on Black and Muslim peoples.

She is the co-founder of NO EVIL EYE CINEMA, a radical nomadic microcinema, a Features Programmer at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and most recently, Documentary Programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Nuur is an organizational leader whose work resides at the intersection of cinema, research, and accessible programming, with a mission to ignite the moving image and its audiences to deeply consider and connect.

She is the Creative Producer of They Won’t Call It Murder (Field of Vision, 2022), a poetic exploration of police violence in Columbus, Ohio. The film was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick and screened at BAMcinemaFest, Camden International Film Festival, AFI Fest, DOCNYC, and more.

As a curator and educator, Nuur has designed accessible, alternative film education programs across the U.S. and virtually. While in college, she founded SVLLY(wood), a feminist print film magazine described by Interview Magazine as "the vanguard of a new age of underground cinephilia."

She has served on juries for Indie Memphis, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and spoken at the Doha Film Institute, True/False, and the New York Film Festival. Her essays and interviews appear in Film Comment, DAZED, i-D, Hyperallergic, and more. Nuur is a 2022–24 Wexner Center Artist-in-Residence and a 2022 Tejumola Olaniyan Creative Writers-in-Residence Fellow.

Yoruba Richen is a Peabody award-winning documentary filmmaker who was awarded the Trailblazer award by Black Public Media. Her most recent film American Coup: Wilmington 1898, premiered on PBS’s American Experience in November and was nominated for a Peabody Award. Her film The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a Gracie Award and was honored by the Television Academy. Other work includes the Emmy-nominated films American Reckoning, How It Feels to Be Free; The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show and Green Book: Guide to Freedom. Her film, The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award. She recently co-directed The Fall of Diddy for HBO Max and ID Yoruba is the Founding Director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Nivedita Das is a producer, impact strategist, and nonprofit leader currently serving as Co-Executive Director of Brown Girls Doc Mafia. Her work is rooted in participatory practices that challenge systemic inequities, center care, foster sustainable livelihoods, and create meaningful creative and professional opportunities for BIPOC communities.

Prior to this role, Nivedita founded the award-winning independent production house The Monsoon Diaries and led CatManDew Co-labs, an incubator for South Asian digital artists based in Nepal, as Executive Director. She has designed and led social change and advocacy programs across the education, youth, tech, arts and cultural heritage sectors, working with global organizations such as USAID, the Academy for Educational Development, FHI 360, Qatar Foundation, and Qatar Museums.

She is a member of the Asian American Documentary Association and has been recognized as a 2018 Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival Scholar, a 2020 Docs In Progress Fellow, a 2023 MacArthur Foundation Journalism and Media Leader with Rockwood Leadership Institute, and a 2024 DOC NYC Documentary New Leader.

As a producer, her work includes the award-winning documentaries Boys in the Boat and La Grieta. She was also a co-recipient of the Gotham (IFP)/HBO New True Stories grant and has served as a juror at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Nivedita currently divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Pune, India.