Film Forum

Galleyway champions diverse voices in poetry, literature, television, film, and theater. Each month, Galleyway spotlights opportunities for writers who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). They also facilitate virtual accountability sessions; and producer Heard/Word, an audio reading series featuring compelling voices in poetry and prose, as well as The Written Word, a video interview series. Founded in 2016, Galleyway’s mission is to amplify marginalized voices and bring accuracy and authenticity to the stories that shape our lives.

Michèle Stephenson – Director and Producer
Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots and experience as a social justice lawyer to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces. She tells emotionally driven personal stories of resistance and identity that center the lived experiences of communities of color in the Americas and the Black diaspora. Grounded in a Black Atlantic lens, Stephenson tells stories that intentionally reimagine and provoke thought about how we engage with and dismantle the internalized impact of systemic oppression. She draws on fiction, immersive and hybrid forms of storytelling to build her worlds and narratives. Her feature documentary, AMERICAN PROMISE, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. Her work STATELESS was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Most recently, Stephenson collaborated as co-director on the magical realist virtual reality trilogy series on racial terror, THE CHANGING SAME, which was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Interactive Media Innovative category and premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival. Along with her writing partners, Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, Stephenson won an NAACP Image Award for Excellence in a Literary Work for their book, Promises Kept. Currently, Stephenson is in post-production on a feature on the death of Freddie Gray, an ESPN story on Black girls’ hand-games, and a program for the CBC on the Black Power movement in Canada. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Artist Fellow, a Creative Capital Artist awardee.

Camille Wanliss is a New York-based writer and the founder of Galleyway, an online platform that spotlights monthly opportunities for writers of color. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 deGroot Foundation Courage to Write Grantee, a 2022 Periplus Fellow and was selected for AWP’s Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program (2021), the NYFA/DCLA City Artist Corp Grant (2021), and among the winners of the 2020 Pigeon Pages Essay Contest. Her work has appeared in Plantin Mag, Raising Mothers, Anomaly, Kweli Journal, Weird Sister, and The Feminist Wire, among others. Additional honors include the Adria Schwartz Award in Women's Fiction, the Small Axe Literary Prize shortlist, and fellowships and residencies from The Anderson Center at Tower View, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and Writing in the Margins. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York.

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