On Monday, January 27, 4-6 pm MT at the Impact Lounge (Presented by Caspian), Prospector Square in Park City, join Firelight Media and MacArthur Foundation at Sundance Film Festival for a panel discussion and reception featuring doc industry leaders.

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Accessibility Notice: Please write to events@firelightmedia.org with any accessibility needs so that we may share them with the venue.‍

At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Firelight Media, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, will host a panel discussion and reception with documentary industry leaders whose work interrogates and influences issues related to U.S. democracy.

Following an unprecedentedly contentious presidential election cycle in 2024, and one week after the 2025 U.S. Presidential Inauguration, join documentary industry luminaries for an urgent discussion about the state of our democracy. With renewed challenges to the rights of immigrants, funding for public media, freedom of speech, and programs dedicated to supporting LGBTQIA+ people and people of color – among other emergent issues – what role can documentary funders, commissioners, distributors, and filmmakers play in ensuring that the most vulnerable among us are given the tools, access, and platforms they need to ensure their voices are included in these national dialogues? And what role can the documentary industry play in using narrative change strategies to defend democratic principles that many U.S. citizens have taken for granted?

Panelists include Marcia Smith, filmmaker & co-founder of Firelight Media, a nonprofit organization that supports documentary filmmakers of color and celebrates 25 years in 2025; Vinnie Malhotra, president of Higher Ground, the production company co-founded by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama to lift up diverse voices in the entertainment industry; Geeta Gandbhir, director of The Perfect Neighbor (Sundance 2025) and co-founder of Beyond Inclusion, a BIPOC-led collective of nonfiction executives and filmmakers; and Carrie Lozano, president and CEO of ITVS, public media’s leading incubator and presenter of independent film. The event will be moderated by Firelight Media Documentary Lab alum Cristina Ibarra, director of Infiltrators (Sundance 2019), 2021 MacArthur Fellow, and Co-Founder of Borderlands Studio, which challenges conventional narratives about the borderlands, and introduced by introduced by Kathy Im, director of Journalism & Media, MacArthur Foundation.

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Participant Bios:

Marcia Smith is president and co-founder of Firelight Media, which produces documentary films, provides artistic and financial support to emerging filmmakers of color, and builds impact campaigns to connect documentaries to audiences and social justice advocates. Under her leadership, Firelight Media was honored with a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. Smith recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from DOC NYC and an Anthem Award for Nonprofit Leadership. Firelight Media’s flagship Documentary Lab program has supported more than 80 emerging filmmakers over the past decade, who have premiered at festivals such as Sundance, and gone on to earn numerous festival, Peabody, and Emmy awards. She has written several films alongside documentarian Stanley Nelson including: Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities; Through the Fire: The Legacy of Barack Obama; Freedom Riders; Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple; Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind; and The Murder of Emmett Till. Marcia received a Primetime Emmy nomination and won the Writers’ Guild Award for best nonfiction writing for her work on The Murder of Emmett Till, and was honored with a 2016 Muse Award from New York Women in Film & Television, as well as the 2019 Luminary Award from BlackStar Film Festival. Marcia will also serve as the writer for Firelight’s upcoming 4-hour documentary series, Creating The New World, on the transatlantic slave trade. Marcia is a member of AMPAS, currently sits on the Peabody Board of Directors - East Coast, and is a member of the Board for Martha's Vineyard Film Society.

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Vinnie Malhotra is president of Higher Ground Productions, the production company from President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Prior to this role, Malhotra oversaw documentary, unscripted, and scripted programming based on real-life events for Showtime Networks; projects included the Roger Ailes limited series The Loudest Voice, W. Kamau Bell’s We Need to Talk About Cosby and the upcoming spy drama Ghosts of Beirut. Prior to Showtime, Malhotra led development and acquisitions for CNN original series like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

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Carrie Lozano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist and media executive. She is currently President and CEO of ITVS. Prior to ITVS, she was director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film and Artist Programs, launched and directed the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund, and was a documentary executive at Al Jazeera America and senior producer of the Emmy, Peabody and Headliner Award-winning investigative series Fault Lines. In addition to serving on ProPublica’s board of directors, Lozano serves on the advisory boards of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and PBS Frontline, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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Geeta Gandbhir's latest documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, premieres at Sundance Film Festival 2025. She started her career in narrative film under Spike Lee and Sam Pollard, after working for eleven years in scripted film, she branched into documentary film. As director she recently released the series Born in Synanon for Paramount, and her short film How We Get Free for HBO has been shortlisted for an Academy Award™. She also recently directed and show-ran a 4 part series for HBO titled Black and Missing which won a 2022 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Series, and a Cinema Eye Honors for Best Series. She also recently directed a film called Apart with Rudy Valdez for HBOMax which won a 2022 Emmy Award. Her 2020 short film with Topic Studios Call Center Blues was shortlisted for a 2021 Academy Award™, and she directed an episode of the five-part series of The Asian Americans for PBS, which won the 2021 Peabody Award. In 2016 her feature documentary, Prison Dogs, which she co-directed with Perri Peltz, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and her film A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers which premiered at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival and later aired on PBS as part of the series Women, War and Peace. She also co-directed and co-produced the series A Conversation on Race with The New York Times Op-Docs, which won an Online Journalism Award for Online Commentary, an AFI Documentary Film Festival Audience Award for Best Short and garnered a MacArthur Grant. She was also a co-producer on the HBO film The Sentence, directed by Rudy Valdez which won a 2019 Primetime Emmy. As Editor, her films won two Emmy Awards, 4 Peabody Awards, and one Academy Award™.

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Cristina Ibarra (Moderator) is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and award-winning filmmaker whose storytelling is rooted in her Tex-Mex, Spanglish, border-crossing identity. Her films, including The Infiltrators, Las Marthas, and Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela, blend documentary and scripted forms to explore themes of cultural identity, race, and migration. Recognized by Sundance, HotDocs, PBS, and other prestigious platforms, Ibarra is committed to creating a distinct border cinema. She is the Co-Founding Director of Borderlands Studios and an Associate Professor at ASU’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School.

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Kathy Im (Introductory Remarks) oversees the MacArthur Foundation’s Journalism and Media program, which supports the foremost institutions of public service journalism, documentary storytelling, and participatory civic media. During her tenure, MacArthur has contributed to numerous impactful and award-winning investigative reports and documentary films. She also led the Journalism and Media program’s work to center racial equity and dramatically increase the number of grants awarded to organizations led by and serving communities of color. Between 2023-2024, Kathy led the Foundation’s exploration and development of a local news funder collaborative, which culminated in the launch of Press Forward and the creation of a new Big Bet program in Local News at MacArthur.

Kathy is a recognized leader in philanthropy and media and the author of several editorials and essays about press freedom, media diversity, and the connection between media and democracy. She is currently the Chair of the Advisory Board for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, a member of the Harris Council of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Studies, a Board Member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a member of the European Journalism Funders Forum Steering Committee, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Media Forward Fund for the DACH countries. She was previously a Board Member of Media Impact Funders, the Center for Asian American Media, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy.

Kathy earned her Master’s in Public Policy from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago and her Bachelor’s in Government Studies from Smith College.