The Team
Richa Rudola is an award-winning filmmaker from India whose thought-provoking work asks relevant questions about identity, consciousness, and the afterlife.
Her films Taaza Khoon (Fresh Blood) and The Seal screened at 45+ film festivals around the world, won 10+ awards, and can be viewed on Amazon Prime, Alaska Airlines, Future Of Film Is Female, and ShortsTV. Richa’s TV pilot screenplay One Rose won the 2020 Nashville Film Festival for Best Hour Drama. Her scripts have placed in competitive screenwriting labs such as HollyShorts, Stowe Narrative Lab, ScreenCraft, and Shore Scripts.
Her latest film Cow Heavy And Floral, inspired by her own motherhood journey, will have its world premiere at Tasveer Film Festival in October 2024. Request a screening of the film here.
With a multifaceted background in consulting and risk management, Richa combines analytical power with emotional storytelling to create thought-provoking cinema with a heart. As an artist she has been supported by The Future Of Film Is Female, New York Stage & Film, Tasveer, and Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute. She has served in leadership roles to film organizations such as Pano (formerly NYC Women Filmmakers) and Filmshop.
She is dedicated to helping people open up to new perspectives, devoted to authenticity, driven by intellectual curiosity, and has it out for bad time management.
She is drawn to stories of courage, even more as the mother of a toddler.
Naomi McDougall Jones is a 15-time award-winning filmmaker, storyteller, and changemaker.
She has written, acted in, and produced two award-winning feature films. The first, Imagine I’m Beautiful (2014), collected 12 awards on the film festival circuit. Her second feature, Bite Me (2019), was released via a paradigm-shifting 3 month, 51 screening, 40 city Joyful Vampire Tour of America. She is currently at work on her next two feature films: Hammond Castle, an adult fairytale for which she received the honor of being the first artist in residence at the final home of Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley, Idaho, and The Control Room, a psycho-sexual thriller co-written with Christian Coulson.
Naomi is an advocate and thought leader for bringing gender parity to cinema. Her writing on this has appeared in The Atlantic, Ms. Magazine, and Salon.com, and she gave a virally sensational TEDTalk, What it’s Like to Be a Woman in Hollywood, which has now been viewed over 1 million times and can be seen on TED.com. Naomi’s first book, The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, debuted as a #1 Amazon bestseller and received an electric critical response, with The Christian Science Monitor calling it, “...an outpouring of passion that will change the ways in which movies are seen,” and is now available wherever books are sold. Naomi has been a guest speaker at NYU, Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and her book is on the curriculum at colleges and universities around the globe.
Naomi is currently at work on her second book, American Selkie. She is a Founder of The 51 Fund, a private equity fund dedicated to financing films by women. Their films Cusp and Shayda both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won a Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award respectively.
Lela Meadow-Conner is an Independent Exhibition Consultant, a Creative Producer and the founder of mamafilm, which curates and produces bold, socially-conscious entertainment through a maternal gaze. She’s also the co-founder of rePROFilm - a series that connects storytellers and advocates who celebrate bodily autonomy, and The Popcorn List - an annual survey of highly-enjoyed independent films without distribution. She has more than 20 years of experience in film exhibition, including as a co-founder of the Tallgrass Film Festival, as Executive Director of Film Festival Alliance, currently as Board Chair of Art House Convergence. Recent producing credits include the feature documentary Chasing Chasing Amy (Tribeca, 2023 and in theaters Nov. 1, 2024) and the 2023 Academy-qualifying/Vimeo Staff Pick narrative short Run Amok, and other projects in development include documentary, narrative and audio stories.
Sarah Moshman is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and TEDx speaker whose work has been featured on Netflix, PBS, Upworthy, Marie Claire, CNN, and Good Morning America. Sarah has directed and produced 3 feature-length documentaries: The Empowerment Project: Ordinary Women Doing Extraordinary Things (2014), Losing Sight of Shore (2017) and NEVERTHELESS (2020). Sarah has ventured into the narrative world with a short about the 1st mother in space entitled UNBOUND starring Lauren Lapkus that was awarded First Place at NASA's Cinespace Competition and is on the festival circuit with a new short she wrote and directed entitled A Mother is Born. Sarah is dedicated to telling stories that uplift, inform and inspire as well as showcase strong and complex female role models on screen.
Sarah has a 6 year old daughter and a 3 year old son who have molded her into the person she is today.