Moonplay Cinema is an artist-run project that promotes and celebrates auteur-driven experimental, documentary, and narrative filmmakers. We are committed to supporting underserved and underrepresented filmmakers who work across various genres and mediums and we use community-organizing strategies to create opportunities to exhibit artwork, hold workshops, and produce content.
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Leadership
Jes Reyes - Director/Founder
Jes Reyes (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, artist organizer, and art facilitator practicing mixed media art, textiles, video, and more. Her artwork is rooted in play, vulnerability, experimentation, collaboration, and the blending of disciplines. She has exhibited and screened her artwork throughout the Twin Cities and is the founder of the Altered Esthetics Film Festival and Moonplay Cinema. An extension of Jes's art practice is to bring artists and people together, building larger and stronger creative, compassionate, supportive, and responsive communities. Jes identifies as queer, feminist, and punk. She is passionate about equitable arts access and offering support to other creatives. Jes received a Master of Liberal Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her Bachelor of Art is in Film & Electronic Arts and Women’s Studies from California State University, Long Beach.

Sabrina Ford - Project Coordinator
Sabrina Ford (she/her/hers) is a visual artist and independent curator born and raised in the Twin Cities. With a strong gravitation towards experimental filmmaking and carrying a research-based practice, the main intersections within her work at the moment are centered around black existentialism, new media, and dream analysis. Her curatorial practice is rooted in representation and providing spaces for artists to feel supported. Focusing particularly on black film in a personal and intimate context. (I.e: Diary, experimental, suggestive, documentary) Her goal is to create environments for others that are reflective of the people who occupy them, to create networks where none reside, and to support other makers who see similar issues in their communities.

Graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA, she is the co-founder of the local experimental filmmaking collective, Onyx22 and the Producer of its Black cinema-focused public access show in St. Paul, Dream Chambers, receiving both a VAF and MRAC for the project. She is also a current resident artist at Public Functionary.

Advisory Committee
Moonplay Cinema's Advisory Committee is a community of artists, curators, and film programmers offering Moonplay Cinema advice, feedback, unique skills, and general support. Current members include:

Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo is a Chilean-born documentary filmmaker, artist, and teacher based in Northfield, Minnesota. Known for placing community members at the center of the creative process, she uses a range of approaches and production methodologies to engage them as active participants and co-creators of meaning. Locally rooted yet globally minded, her work examines notions of belonging and the immigrant experience while exploring the traces of historical trauma on people and places. Cecilia is an inaugural recipient of the 2020 McKnight Fellowship for Community-Engaged Artists and has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), the Jerome Foundation, and the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council. She teaches in the Cinema and Media Studies department at Carleton College. Visit her websites at http://thewanderinghouse.com/ and artelamilpa.com/about/.

Simone LeClaire (she/her) is a woman filmmaker and a white queer person who has lived her life across vastly different Minnesotan cultures, feeling simultaneously odd and at home in all of them. In her pleasure-based, feminist, and anticapitalist filmmaking practice, Simone is guided by how film might facilitate healing, and how to keep creative processes healthy, truthful, and abundant. Her work most often centers on femme characters and relationships, and is highly curious about internal processes, quiet revelations, and self-reconciliation. Simone also repeatedly draws on imagery of the natural world to create peacefulness with her work. Her films tend to actively integrate both her own autobiography and the impacts of genuine, transformative collaboration, with finished films reflecting the presence of both.

With editing a central part of her filmmaking practice, Simone is the director/editor of seven narrative shorts, which have received awards and screened at over fifty film festivals around the country; currently in post-production of her debut feature, Sunflower Man, a documentary about transience, flowers, and a man living with schizoaffective disorder; and collaboratively developing her first narrative feature, a heart-centered exploration of Minnesotan landscape, racialized identity, and female friendship. She currently makes her home in Minneapolis. directedbysimone.com

Sharon Mansur is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator and community mover and shaker based in Winona, MN, Dakota land. Her performances, visual installations and screendance projects have been shared nationally and internationally. She facilitates The Cedar Tree Project, presenting Arab/SWANA centered contemporary art and artists, and SHIFT~ performance salons, supporting new experimental collaborations among Winona area creatives. www.mansurdance.com, www.cedartreeproject.com

Beth Peloff is a video maker whose work encompasses animation, documentary, and the intermingling of the two. In her animation work, she focuses on 2D stop motion and computer-assisted animation using materials such as sand, buttons, and watercolor-painted paper cutouts. Her films have screened throughout the United States, including at the Athens Film and Video Festival, the Walker Art
Center, and the Cadence Video Poetry Festival in Seattle, WA, where her film won an award for best collaboration. She was the recipient of a 2017 Jerome Foundation Film and Video grant.

Through her video production company Green Jeans Media, she produces videos and animations for nonprofit clients. She also teaches animation and video editing at community-based organizations. She lives in Louisville, KY with her husband and two cats. greenjeansmedia.com/about/index.html

Atlas O Phoenix is a highly acclaimed director, writer, producer, and editor known for creating impactful and dynamic films that explore humanity’s shadowy and uplifting aspects through fictional narratives or documentaries. Furthermore, they have also showcased their talents as an actor and performer in esteemed productions such as Dykes Do Drag (2017-2020) and The Naked I series (2018/2020).

Currently, Atlas is involved in producing a compelling feature-length documentary film and accompanying web series titled Beautiful Boi. This project chronicles their transition journey and delves into the profound impact it has had on their mental well-being over nearly four decades. Stemming from a significant connection with their first love and the subsequent heart-wrenching loss of that beautiful friendship, this narrative aims to inspire and uplift audiences. Despite the challenges faced, Atlas has found strength and fulfillment in pursuing love for the past three years, and their resilience shines through in this upcoming project. www.beautifulboi.com/
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Natalia Rocafuerte is a graphic artist and video editor rendering dreams through graphics, installations, films, and print. Rocafuerte’s recent installation film “Dream of Emma and Tony” was featured and won best “Michigan Filmmaker” at the 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Rocafuerte was also featured in Remezcla for "Top 40 Latinx Texas Artists to Know in 2020". www.nataliarocafuerte.net
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Andrea Shaker (she/her/hers) lives on Dakota and Annishaabe lands. She grew up in a small town in Connecticut on Quiripi lands. She savored her Sito’s stories, along with Sito’s dihan and eggs and lebneh wa na’na’. After earning her BA from Georgetown University and MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she moved to Minnesota, where she is a professor of art at the College of St. Benedict + St. John’s University. She currently lives with her family in Minnesota.

Shaker’s creative work is interdisciplinary, spanning photography, moving image, experimental film, and written and spoken word. As an Arab American, she explores the spaces in-between home, homeland and migration. Through moving & still image, objects and word her creative practice addresses how these spaces, and the movement of the body within these spaces, are imagined and experienced through the physiology of intergenerational memory. andreashaker.com

Xiaolu Wang (she/they) is an emerging documentary filmmaker and a translator from the Hui Muslim Autonomous Region of China, whose practice is based in the mapping of interiority, with the use of video, poetry, memory, translations, and a decolonial lens. Their work have been screened at local venues and international film festivals in countries like Lebanon, Mexico, China, and Argentina. They contributed translations to journals including 单读, onlimbo, and Cinephila.

When they are not studying films, Xiaolu helps out at a friend's donation-based food pop-up, "The Shui Project", or reads the Tao Te Ching. They are a recipient of the 2019 Jerome Film and Media Grant, a fellow of DocX Archive Lab 2021 organized by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and their work has been generously supported by Metropolitan Regional Arts Council of Minnesota, Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, Jerome Foundation, Women Make Movies, and UnionDocs. www.hellox140lu.com/

Moonplay Cinema is a fiscally sponsored project of Springboard for the Arts. Our generous funders include independent donors and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and the Minnesota State Arts Board.