Indigenous’s New Initiative to Mentor Female Writers & Directors

LOS ANGELES: Indigenous Media is launching an incubator program called Made By Women, which will see an acclaimed group of women serve as mentors for a new group of female writers and directors.

Indigenous Media is working with Women In Film Los Angeles, the Producers Guild of America’s Women’s Impact Network, the Women’s Project Lab, the Alliance of Women Directors, the Kilroys and the Lillys to identify candidates for Made By Women, which is focused on producing scripted programming led by women. Each organization will choose three candidates, and Indigenous will narrow down this list of candidates and assign them to such mentors as Lesli Linka Glatter (Homeland), Mimi Leder (The Leftovers), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), Betty Thomas (Private Parts) and Sarah Treem (The Affair). Based on writing samples, each mentor will select a final candidate and will guide them through the process of creating a pilot script for their series. Indigenous will then finance a short based on the pilot script, with the potential to produce and fund a full-length version.

Indigenous Media co-founders Jon Avnet, Rodrigo Garcia and Jake Avnet will also serve as mentors as well as producers. This is the company’s second incubator program, with the first designed to discover and mentor emerging filmmakers.

Avnet commented: “We are fortunate to have five incredibly talented women to launch Made By Women, our female-centric incubator. Their skills and mentoring will be invaluable in assisting young storytellers to have their visions realized. Women are an appalling minority when it comes to serving as directors and showrunners. We hope this initiative will, in some small but concrete way, begin to rectify this situation.”

Garcia stated: “Women’s voices are incredibly valuable in the storytelling process, as evidenced by the work of our mentors. We have collaborated with many of them in the past and are honored they have joined forces with us for this project.”

“We are trying to serve a different group of emerging artists with each incubator, but the premise behind each is the same,” added Avnet. “We want to match established talent with those on the rise to develop new content for new distribution platforms.”