MOMO Independent Film Festival Michigan 2026—Meet the Jury

MOMO Independent Film Festival Michigan 2026 — Meet the Jury

Putting together a jury is a statement. It says something about what you think cinema is, and who should be in the room when decisions get made.

For MOMO's 4th edition, we brought together nine people who approach film from genuinely different directions.

Kaveh Askari is a Professor and Director of Film Studies whose research spans art cinema, media history, and Middle Eastern cinemas — and has served on juries and programming committees for international institutions. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is a film scholar, writer, and associate professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, whose work focuses on American film history, exhibition, and spectatorship. Timothy Donnelly is a poet and Professor of Writing at Columbia University whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review — bringing a literary perspective that most festival juries don't have.

Gustavo Rosa is a writer, director, and producer whose films have screened at Berlinale, Sundance, SXSW, and Santa Barbara. D.K. Odessa is a Fulbright Senior Scholar and multi-award-winning director whose work has appeared on the BBC, Showtime, PBS, and Al Jazeera. Jon Stout, founder of Eaten Alive Productions and a UCLA graduate, works in grounded horror, surreal comedy, and unconventional narrative — exactly the kind of perspective independent film needs at the table.

Olga Artemyeva is a film curator, critic, and programmer based in New York, specializing in horror, debuts, shorts, and experimental cinema. Pune Haeri is a screenwriter, playwright, and translator based in Berlin, working across television, literary translation, and cultural programming. And Eiichi Takahashi — a Japanese filmmaker who trained under director Shinya Tsukamoto — won Best Film at MOMO in 2024 and returns this year as a jury member.

Nine people. Nine different ways of seeing film. That's the jury evaluating your work this year.

Submissions are open. [Submit your film →]