Film Alumnus Josalynn Smith '19 Named Inaugural Uprise Grant Fund Recipient

By
Nicole Saldarriaga
August 02, 2021

Sundance Institute has announced the recipients of their inaugural Uprise Grant Fund, which seeks to support BIPOC artists whose work has been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thirty-eight artists of color will benefit from the grant this year, including Film alumnus Josalynn Smith '19

The Uprise Grant has awarded a total of $184,000 in unrestricted funds to its recipients, with individual grant amounts determined by need. Smith will be using their grant money to support a new project about activist and author Pauli Murray's early life. 

"The mission of the Uprise Grant Fund is a direct manifestation of the values of the Outreach & Inclusions Program and Sundance Institute as a whole," said Sundance Institute's Director of Outreach & Inclusion, Karim Ahmad. "Since the pandemic began, among our top priorities has been to move unrestricted resources into those communities of artists that have been so disproportionately harmed, in order to combat the erasure of these powerful voices from our culture." 

Additionally, Sundance Institute will be awarding a total of $240,000 in Arts Organization Grants to 18 BIPOC-led arts organizations in the fields of film, theater or emerging media. 

The Uprise Grant Fund will continue supporting BIPOC storytellers next year. 

Josalynn Smith is a queer Black American filmmaker based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Columbia University’s Film MFA program, their thesis short, Something in the Water (2019), received the Sloan Foundation’s Production Grant. Additionally, Smith is the recipient of the Jesse Thompkins III Screenwriting Award from Columbia and spent time as an artist-in-residence at the Catwalk Institute. Their shorts, and a feature documentary on which they served as a narrator and videographer, have screened at St. Louis International Film Festival, Inside Out Toronto Film Festival, Bentonville Film Festival and others. Smith was a SAGIndie finalist for their feature script Ride or Die at Stowe Story Lab. They were also in residence at SFFILM as a 2019 Sloan Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellow with their feature script Something in the Water. Smith is passionate about Black stories, queer stories, and revisionist history.