The Disney Athena List Development grant is given to a writer/director of a project that is a winner or finalist of the Athena List. The winner receives a $10,000 grant that will assist them in the development of their feature-length script.
Preference will be given to candidates from traditionally underrepresented communities in film. Examples of underrepresented communities include but are not limited to people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, people with disabilities, older women filmmakers, filmmakers in their second or third career, and others.
Inaugural Disney Athena List Development Grantee (2023)
Laylayon by Nic Yulo
When a pragmatic retired nurse is forced to relocate her American-born family to her ancestral home in a cursed village buried deep within the Philippine jungle, she discovers that she must face the ghosts of her past or risk losing her children forever.’
Nic Yulo is an author-illustrator and writer-director based in NYC. Her work has received an Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Award, a Breaking Barriers Grant for Female Directors, an Adobe Design Achievement Award, a Chinonye Chukwu Emerging Writer Award, and been featured at the Sloan Film Summit presented by Film Independent. A Columbia University M.F.A Film Program graduate and a NYWIFT Scholarship Awardee, she has been twice-selected to attend the Athena Film Festival Writers Lab, named a 2021 SFFILM Rainin Grant Finalist, a Finalist for SeriesFest’s Women Writing Competition in partnership with Kyra Sedgwick’s Big Swing Productions, and a Top 15 semi-finalist for SeriesFest’s Women Directing Mentorship in partnership with Shondaland. I
n 2021, Nic was inducted, as a game writer, into the BAFTA Newcomers Program. She is also a BAFTA Vance Byrd Mentor and a juror for the 2022 BAFTA Games Awards. Nic is a writer for Ubisoft’s AAA game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and its Splinter Cell, Terminator, Rainbow Six Siege, and later episodes. Nic is a current winner of Athena Film Festival’s 2023 Athena List and the Inaugural Disney Development Grant for her Philippine Gothic horror feature Laylayon. Nic’s author-illustrator debut, Patch of Sky, sold in a four-house auction and was published by Dial Books for Young Readers. Her second book, Out of the Blue, will be released in the summer of 2023, also by DBFYR, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
The Disney Athena List Development Grant is sponsored by
