MG Evangelista and Shuli Huang
Grad Film alumni MG Evangelista and Shuli Huang have been named recipients of the 2025 New Voices Filmmaker Grant.
The grant seeks to support underrepresented voices in the film industry, and provides a $25,000 unrestricted grant to 4 emerging directors.In addition to the $25,000 grant and industry mentorship, fellows will also participate in events and have their work showcased at NewFest’s New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival, one of the largest queer film festivals in the world. Fellows will also have the opportunity to travel as guests of NewFest to other North American film festivals.
MG Evangelista is a Filipino American writer-director. Evangelista’s work spans narrative, commercial, and documentary filmmaking, exploring themes of identity, power and love. In 2024, Evangelista took part in Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab and Fast Track for their debut feature, BURNING WELL. The project and Evangelista have been supported by Tribeca Film Institute, Array, Torino FilmLab and SFFILM Rainin Grant. The feature is inspired by their award-winning short film Fran This Summer, which played in over 30 festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival. Evangelista received their MFA in Writing and Directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and was a 2023 United States Artist Fellow and most recently an AFI DWW+ Directing Participant.
Shuli Huang is a Chinese writer-director and cinematographer based in New York City whose work drifts between fiction and documentary. His short film, Will You Look at Me, premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2022 where it received the Queer Palm Award and went on to win the Short Film Jury Award at Sundance Film Festival 2023. In 2024, his short film, Goodbye First Love, premiered in competition at the Berlinale Shorts and was later presented at New Directors/New Films. As a cinematographer, Shuli’s work includes feature films FAREWELL, MY HOMETOWN (recipient of the New Currents Award, Busan 2021) and BORROWED TIME (IFFR 2024, Busan 2023). Shuli holds a BFA in cinematography from the Beijing Film Academy and an MFA in film directing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Read more at NewFest.