The Athena Film Festival Partners with The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation To Support Stories About Women and STEM
The Athena Film Festival is proud to partner with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to bolster the pipeline of women filmmakers working on women in science-themed projects. Through grants, Lab fellowships, and panel discussions this partnership illustrates the importance of women working in STEM, and women filmmakers working on STEM projects. Over the next three years, the Athena Film Festival and the Sloan Foundation will work together on the following:
STEM Showcase
The Alfred P. Sloan STEM Showcase will include a screening of one documentary or narrative film that tells a story about women and science. In addition to the screening, there will be a post-screening panel, masterclass or workshop about women and STEM topics.
Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships
This fellowship supports selected writers working on feature-length and episodic scripts that focus on women in STEM who will or have participated in the Athena Film Festival Writers Lab. Through the fellowship, writers are paired with mentors who will provide both creative support and STEM support over a period of 6-months.
Alfred P. Sloan Athena List Development Grant
The Sloan Foundation will fund a $20,000 development grant to one Athena List winner or finalist that is working on a woman in a science-themed project. To widen exposure for these award-winning scripts, Athena will sponsor a reading of the winning script either at the festival or at one of the labs.
For more information on these grants and projects, please email athenafilmfestival@gmail.com.
About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a New York based, philanthropic, not-for-profit institution that makes grants in three areas: research in science, technology, and economics; quality and diversity of scientific institutions; and public engagement with science. Sloan’s program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, directed by Doron Weber, supports books, radio, film, television, theater, and new media to reach a wide, non-specialized audience and to bridge the two cultures of science and the humanities.
Sloan’s Film Program encourages filmmakers to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers in the popular imagination. Over the past two decades, Sloan has partnered with some of the top film schools in the country—including AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, NYU, UCLA, and USC plus public film schools—and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production, along with an annual best-of-the best Student Grand Jury Prize. The Foundation also supports screenplay development programs with the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, SFFILM, Film Independent, the Black List, the Athena Film Festival, and the North Fork TV Festival, and has helped develop over 30 feature films including Tesla, Radium Girls, Adventures of a Mathematician, One Man Dies a Million Times, The Sound of Silence, To Dust, Operator, The Imitation Game, and The Man Who Knew Infinity. The Foundation has supported feature documentaries such as Picture a Scientist, Coded Bias, Father of the Cyborgs, In Silico, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, The Bit Player, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Particle Fever, and Jacques Perrin’s Oceans. It has also given early recognition to stand out films such as Son of Monarchs, Ammonite, The Aeronauts, Searching, The Martian, and Hidden Figures.
For more information about the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, visit sloan.org or follow the Foundation on Twitter and Facebook at @SloanPublic.
