Applying to the Sundance Institute Native Lab
About this Insider Session
In our Insider Sessions, Sundance Institute staff answer your questions and guide you through the process of applying to our labs, programs, grant opportunities, and the Sundance Film Festival.
For this Insider Session, join Indigenous Program Director, Adam Piron, and Native Lab Fellows, Isabella Madrigal and Jared Lank to learn more about applying to the Sundance Native Lab.
The Indigenous Program has built and sustained an Indigenous film circle, which now spans over four generations. The cycle of work begins by scouting for and identifying Indigenous artists, bringing them through the mechanisms of support at Sundance Institute to get their work made and shown, then bringing the filmmakers and their work back to native lands. The Native Lab has been a vital part of supporting Indigenous filmmakers since 2004. The lab focuses on the specific development of storytellers from Native and Indigenous backgrounds, encompassing feature film and episodic work. During the Lab, Fellows will hone their storytelling and technical skills in a hands-on and supportive environment, including one-on-one feedback sessions with advisors and roundtable discussions. With Fellows working across both feature and episodic formats, they will also explore and discuss indigenizing their creative practices in regard to writing their scripts.
The Native Lab provides direct support to emerging filmmakers and episodic creators from the U.S.-based Native American, Native Hawaiian, Alaskan Native, and Canada-based Indigenous Canadian (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) communities. Fellowship for Indigenous Canadian film artists made possible with support from the Indigenous Screen Office. Please note that you are required to submit a narrative feature or episodic pilot script.
APPLICATION DATES
Native Lab
- Opens December 2 2025; STANDARDIZED OPEN TIME: 1:00PM PACIFIC / 2:00PM MOUNTAIN / 4:00PM EASTERN
- Closes December 22, 2025; STANDARDIZED CLOSE TIME: 3:30PM PACIFIC / 4:30PM MOUNTAIN / 6:30PM EASTERN
About the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program
The Sundance Institute Indigenous Program champions and provides deep support of Indigenous-created stories on a global scale. From labs and fellowships to screenings and gatherings around the world, the program’s offerings are designed in response to the specific needs of Native and Indigenous storytellers. Through our work, we emulate our core values of decolonizing the screen and uplifting the voices of Indigenous artists, recognizing that telling their stories comes with great responsibility and obligation towards Indigenous peoples, communities and their sovereignty.
Find out more about the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program here.
Insider SessionTeam
Isabella Madrigal
Fellow, 2025 Native Lab
Isabella Dionne Madrigal (Cahuilla/Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is a writer, director, and actor. She is a 2025 Sundance Native Lab Fellow and co-leads the Luke Madrigal Indigenous Storytelling Nonprofit. A graduate of Harvard College, she is a recipient of the Yale Young Native Playwrights Contest, the Center for Native American Youth’s Champion for Change Award, and the First Peoples Fund’s Native Performing Arts Fellowship. Her play MENIL AND HER HEART was recently included on Native Theater Project’s list of 15 recommended #MMIR plays. Her work often centers ancestral wisdom, healing, and Indigenous futurisms.
Jared Lank
Fellow, 2025 Native Lab
Jared Lank is a Mi’kmaq filmmaker from Maine. His existential works explore themes of cultural erasure, myth, and resilience. In 2024 his debut short film, BAY OF HERONS, was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, and he was featured in Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. He is currently a 2025 Sundance Institute Native Lab Fellow writing his first feature film, FORERUNNER.
Adam Piron
Director, Indigenous Program, Sundance Institute
Adam Piron is a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and a Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) descendant. He currently acts as the Director of Sundance Institute's Indigenous Program where he helps oversee the organization's investment in Indigenous filmmakers globally. He also serves as a short film programmer for the Sundance Film Festival.
He is also a co-founder of COUSIN: a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of the moving image. He was previously the Film Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He received his BA in Film Production from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.
Piron currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Seen, a journal produced by BlackStar examining the visual culture of communities of color, featuring interviews, reviews, and essays about Black, Brown, and Indigenous visual culture. He concurrently serves on the Indigenous Advisory Board for TIFF. He has also been on advisory panels for Canyon Cinema, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Princess Grace Awards and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
Erica Elson
Moderator | Digital Course & Event Producer, Sundance Collab
Erica Elson is a Producer, Writer and Educator based in the mountains outside Los Angeles. Her short film, WING NIGHT, premiered at Method Fest in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of the book THE AWKWARD HUMAN SURVIVAL GUIDE and co-hosted a podcast by the same name on the 5by5 network for five years. Elson's articles have been published by HuffPost, Lifehacker, and Reader's Digest. Prior to working in education, she worked in television development and writers’ rooms such as VH1’s HINDSIGHT, where she had the chance to write for the spinoff web series PLANET SEBASTIAN.
Elson joined the Sundance Collab team in October 2021 and produces courses, Master Classes, and events in the areas of screenwriting, television writing, directing, producing, and documentary filmmaking. She has moderated conversations with Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, and Susannah Grant, among others.
Prior to Sundance, Elson was the Thesis Production Supervisor at the American Film Institute for five years. She oversaw several award-winning graduate thesis films, notably the 2021 BAFTA student film winner APART, TOGETHER and the 2023 Sundance Film Festival short WE WERE MEANT TO. While at AFI, Elson developed a passion for sustainable production and created the Green Film School Alliance, which includes forty schools on four continents. She holds a BA in Communication and Film Studies from Concordia University and an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute.