Clockwise from top left: Katherine Clary, Hana Elias, Edward Nguyen, Emilio Subía, Daisy Friedman, and Carin Leong.
UFO announces the fellows that will join the latest cycle of the UFO Short Film Lab. The 18-month program supports early-career filmmakers to develop and direct two original shorts, awarding $20,000 ($10,000 per project) to each participant. Additional resources include complimentary rentals of ZEISS’s newest lenses, seminar-style workshop sessions hosted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and one-on-one creative mentorship from the UFO team and invited guests.
UFO received a record 287 applications for three available fellowship slots. The filmmakers selected for Cycle IV, which kicks off next month, are Hana Elias, Katherine Clary, and Edward Nguyen. The former will develop a scripted project with the latter two filmmakers will focus on non-fiction works. Three fellows that were selected last spring, Daisy Friedman, Carin Leong, and Emilio Subía, will continue the Lab through the current cycle to develop and direct new films.
Since the Lab’s launch in 2023, films created through it have gone on to screen at Sundance, SXSW, True/False, Palm Springs ShortFest, and DOC NYC. UFO Fellow Arielle Knight’s “The Boys and the Bees” received the Short Jury Award for Non-Fiction at this year’s Sundance, qualifying the film for consideration for the 2027 Oscars.
Find bios and project descriptions of the fellows and their films below.
Spring 2026 UFO Short Film Lab: Cycle IV
Katherine Clary (she/her)
Katherine Clary is an Arizona-born, New York-based filmmaker and writer. Her practice is driven by philosophical inquiry and an interest in how personal loss opens new ways of seeing the landscapes, institutions, and histories that surround us. She has produced and directed work that has screened at Camden International Film Festival, DOC NYC, Telluride, and Athens International Film + Video Festival. Her first short film, A DESERT IS AN OCEAN, premiered at Woodstock Film Festival in 2023.
Project: A nonfiction short film that unfolds in the Arizona desert, where two vastly different places overlap: a potter’s field where the unclaimed dead are buried and the airfield for the U.S. Air Force’s most advanced fighter pilot training program. By observing the land, the labor that maintains it, and the people who pass through it, the film reveals how grief and state power intersect within the same desert landscape.
Instagram: @katherine__clary
Hana Elias (she/her)
Hana Elias is a filmmaker and journalist working between Palestine and New York. Her work traces landscapes, archives, and inherited memory to explore how storytelling becomes an act of resilience. Her latest short documentary, WHERE THE WIND BLOWS won the 2022 IF/Then x The Redford Center Nature Access Pitch, and went on to screen at festivals including DOC NYC, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and the Arab Film Festival, where it received a jury prize for Best Short Documentary. She has previously been awarded a Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellowship, a BRIC Film and TV Lab residency, and the Best Pitch Award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival for her feature project, IF THESE STONES COULD TALK (in development).
Project: Through the lens of a vintage large-format camera, photographer Adam Rouhana sets up a mobile studio across Palestinian cities. This documentary short film questions the tools of photography, exploring how people engage with their own image and the depths of their imagination. As participants step into the frame, moments of creativity and spontaneity transform brief encounters into a collective portrait of Palestinian life.
Instagram: @hana.elias
Edward Nguyen (he/him)
Edward Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American writer-director based between New York and Austin, Texas. A recent graduate of Yale University, Edward’s work explores the intersection of Vietnamese/diasporic experience and queerness, incorporating kink, folklore, and the surreal. Inspired by Southeast Asian and slow cinema auteurs, his work grapples with national collective memory and trauma, and challenges one-dimensional depictions of queerness and contemporary Vietnam. His first short film MỒ HÔI (SWEAT) premiered at BFI Flare in March 2026.
Project: A scripted surreal, queer drama about a construction worker who enters the heart of the Vietnamese jungle in search of anonymous sexual pleasure, but instead stumbles into a phantasmagoric encounter with himself.
Instagram: @edwardqnguyen