JURY
MOMO Independent Film Festival — 2026 Edition
The MOMO Independent Film Festival jury is composed of critics, filmmakers, and cultural voices whose work challenges form, representation, and dominant narratives in contemporary cinema.
Each juror brings a distinct perspective, shaping a selection process grounded in artistic integrity, critical engagement, and independent spirit.
Kaveh Askari
Professor of Film Studies
D.K. Odessa
Director, Educator &
Fulbright Senior Scholar
Jocelyn
Szczepaniak-Gillece
Film Scholar & Professor
Jon Stout
Filmmaker,
Director & Cinematographer
Kaveh Askari is a professor of Film Studies whose research and teaching focus on cinema and media history in a global context, with particular emphasis on art cinema, media circulation, and Middle Eastern cinemas. He is the author of Making Movies into Art (BFI, 2014) and Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (University of California Press, 2022).
He has served on juries and programming committees for major international film and academic institutions, including the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival, Domitor (the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema), and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
D.K. Odessa is a multi-award-winning commercial director, documentary filmmaker, visual artist, and Fulbright Senior Scholar. His work as a writer, director, and producer has appeared on major international platforms including the BBC, Showtime, PBS, Al Jazeera, and VH1.
He has taught cinema and television arts at Elon University and is currently focused on experimental narrative filmmaking. Based in North Carolina, his practice spans film, education, and visual storytelling.
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is a film scholar and writer whose work focuses on American cinema, film history, and the cultural politics of genre. She is the author of The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture and Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television.
Her writing and criticism have appeared in leading academic and cultural publications, and she has contributed to film programming, retrospectives, and festival contexts that bridge scholarship and contemporary film culture.
Jon Stout is an award-winning filmmaker, director, and cinematographer whose work spans cinema and broadcast media. He is the founder of Eaten Alive Productions and is known for exploring grounded horror, surreal comedy, and unconventional narrative forms.
His films have screened internationally, including From the Office, Apartment 206, OLLYWOO, and Bottles, the latter featured in The Periphery Project anthology on IndieFlix. He is a graduate of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.
Pune Haeri
Screenwriter, Playwright & Translator
Eiichi Takahashi
Filmmaker
Gustavo Rosa
Writer, Director & Producer
Olga Artemyeva
Film Curator, Critic & Programmer
Pune Haeri is a screenwriter, playwright, author, and translator whose work spans television, literary translation, and cultural programming. She is the author of *Women, Giants, and Others* and has worked extensively across media and cultural arts. Her practice bridges storytelling, translation, and contemporary cultural discourse. She has been based in Berlin since 2023.
Eiichi Takahashi is a Japanese filmmaker whose work explores intimate human relationships and social dissonance. After studying architecture and fashion, he trained under director Shinya Tsukamoto and worked as an assistant director on his films. His work has been selected and awarded at international festivals, including winning the Best Film Award at the MOMO Film Festival in 2024.
Gustavo Rosa is a writer, director, and producer whose films have screened at major international festivals including Berlinale, Sundance, SXSW, and Santa Barbara. He holds an MFA in Filmmaking from Columbia University (2016) and teaches filmmaking. His students’ work has been recognized at international festivals and by the Directors Guild of America.
Olga Artemyeva is a film curator, critic, and writer based in New York City. She holds a PhD in Art History and teaches Film Studies. She has extensive experience in international film festival programming, specializing in horror, debuts, shorts, independent and experimental cinema, with a focus on emerging voices.
Timothy Donnelly
Poet & Professor of Writing
Timothy Donnelly is an acclaimed poet and Professor of Writing. His most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous collections include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
His poems have been widely translated and anthologized, appearing in publications such as American Poetry Review, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Poetry London, as well as in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
Donnelly is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Connors Prize, and has received fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, James Merrill House Foundation, Lannan Foundation, T. S. Eliot Foundation, and New York State’s Writers Institute. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.